In Praise of Dan O’Herlihy in Halloween III: Season of the Witch

“I do love a good joke. And this is the best ever. A joke on the children.” –Conal Cochran

Season of the Witch’s status as the red-headed stepchild of the Halloween franchise is well established. Arriving one year after Halloween II, which wrapped up the Michael Myers/Laurie Strode saga to the satisfaction of producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill, 1982’s Halloween III was to be the start of an anthology of standalone horror films set around the holiday. Disappointing box office spelled the end of those plans, but the cult that has since grown up around the film is doing Samhain’s work by drawing attention to the best performance in any Halloween movie: Dan O’Herlihy’s turn as malevolent mask-maker Conal Cochran.

Some might bristle at the comparison, but Conal Cochran is very much the Harry Lime of Halloween III. True, he hasn’t been declared dead, as Lime is in The Third Man, but Cochran is talked about a great deal before making his dramatic entrance at the film’s midpoint. (This is what Orson Welles, with whom O’Herlihy worked on his 1948 screen adaptation of Macbeth, referred to as the “star part.”) Some of that talk is by a Santa Mira resident who, unprompted, calls Cochran “a great man” and “a true genius.” In fact, the first mention of the wealthy Irishman who bought up the town after World War II and turned it into the world’s largest manufacturer of Halloween masks comes while protagonists Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) and Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin) are driving there to investigate her father’s mysterious death and find out what it has to do with Cochran’s Silver Shamrock Novelties.

The definition of a company town, Santa Mira has been remade in Cochran’s image. All of the businesses are Irish-themed and the factory workers brought over from the Emerald Isle. This doesn’t sit well with some of the locals, including an angry drunk who tells Dan it’s “the last Halloween” for Silver Shamrock and that he’s heard rumors of “some pretty wild shit going on in there.” Cochran has the town under surveillance, though, so it isn’t long before the drunk is permanently silenced by his goons. As for Dan, he gets an inkling of just how strange things are later that night when the vendor in the motel room next door has a mishap with a Silver Shamrock mask that brings Cochran out into the open to un-ruffle some feathers. No matter how much he plays up his Irish accent, though, it’s hard to believe his claim that it was “just a small accident,” especially when he adds they have “the most marvelous facility” at his factory “for emergency treatment.”

The next day, Dan and Ellie are invited along on a guided tour of the Silver Shamrock factory, during which the jocular Cochran is praised as “the all-time genius of the practical joke.” It’s only after a snooping Ellie is kidnapped and Dan fails to evade Cochran’s robotic bodyguards that the mask slips. Dan leads them on a long enough chase, though, that Cochran is able to note “it will be morning soon, Halloween morning,” wryly adding, “It’ll be a very busy day for me.”

As Halloween III enters the home stretch, writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace includes a wonderful moment where Cochran emerges from the factory and pauses to take a deep breath of morning air. He’ll need it, too, since Wallace and uncredited screenwriter Nigel Kneale give O’Herlihy a ream of exposition to deliver as Cochran explains his plan in detail, starting with the theft nine months earlier of a five-ton piece of Stonehenge. “We had a time getting it here,” Cochran says, a twinkle in his eye. “You wouldn’t believe how we did it.” The same goes for the two-minute tracking shot cinematographer Dean Cundey pulls off while Cochran shows Dan around his control center, ending with the demonstration of what he has in store for American’s unsuspecting children.

Jovial as he’s been up to that point, Cochran dispassionately watching while one of his masks causes the gruesome deaths of a boy and his parents is a harbinger of Dan’s potential fate when he’s tied to a chair and sat in front of a television due to receive the same deadly signal. The bare, starkly lit room accentuates Cochran’s sinister nature, which O’Herlihy invests with all the gravity he can muster, recalling how “the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children” during the last great festival of Samhain 3,000 years ago. (This is his equivalent of Harry Lime’s Ferris wheel speech.) His puckish sense of humor hasn’t deserted him, though, for he uses his parting shot to wish a skull-masked Dan a happy Halloween.

As his moment of triumph draws near, Cochran crows about the projected ratings (“a 43 share”) and urges his caller’s “little ones” to watch the big giveaway. Cochran’s most endearing moment, though, comes as Dan figures out how to use his technology to defeat him. When Cochran looks up into the rafters and silently applauds his nemesis – a moment O’Herlihy underplays beautifully – it’s a sign of respect, tinged with the knowledge that he still has a trick or two up his sleeve. O’Herlihy, meanwhile, had another great villain role ahead of him as “The Old Man” in RoboCop and RoboCop II, but Conal Cochran stands as his most delightfully devious creation.