It was Romero\u2019s second follow-up to Night of the Living Dead<\/em>, following the misbegotten 1971 romantic comedy There\u2019s Always Vanilla<\/em>, and it was another attempt to expand his stylistic reach. Though dealing in elements of the occult, and featuring a handful of genuinely frightening sequences, Witch<\/em> is much more of a psychological drama than a horror picture. But the box Romero had already been placed in, coupled with a comically inaccurate initial release and ad campaign, rendered the film dead on arrival, and it has only recently begun its public rehabilitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jan White stars as Joan Mitchell, mother of a 19-year-old daughter (Joedda McCalin) and wife of businessman Jack (Bill Thunhurst). We first meet her in a dream, a broad-daylight walk in the woods that descends into an assemblage of nightmare imagery: sharp branches cut her face, an abandoned baby cries for attention, an adult woman clad in white sits on a child\u2019s swing, a telephone rings relentlessly. The audio is off-putting (sound effects run backwards), and Romero \u2013 who shot and edited the film himself \u2013 uses unsteady wide-angle lenses to discombobulate the viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dream ends with Jack swatting his wife with a newspaper, putting her on a leash, taking her out of the car, and leading her into a kennel (\u201cI\u2019ll be gone about a week\u201d). As symbolism, this isn\u2019t subtle, but it lays out the aims of the picture quickly and plainly. It\u2019s a film about women\u2019s liberation, about that key moment in the 1970s when women were asking if there was, perhaps, more to life than keeping the home and caring for the children. Some women were asking louder than others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A critic friend recently called Season of the Witch<\/em> \u201cThe Ice Storm<\/em> with witches,\u201d and I can\u2019t think of a more accurate assessment. It\u2019s firmly steeped in the mood and aesthetics of the domestic \u201870s: navel-gazing conversations, heavy boozing, generation-gap contemplation, and tarot card readings, all while decked out in some truly incredible patterned dresses and pantsuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But those are just the surfaces. Joan can\u2019t get out of her own head, cursed as she is by visions of herself as old or dead, miserable as she is made by her dissatisfaction with herself \u2013 with her body, her marriage, her life. She visits a therapist (true to the period, he puffs thoughtfully on an ornate pipe), confessing, \u201cI\u2019m worried about what\u2019s happening to me\u201d before breaking down crying. Is it any wonder she turns to witchcraft?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The w-word first appears at one of those may-as-well-be-a-key parties, as the various \u201cGoodfellas\u201d-style housewives laugh and joke (an absent friend \u201cmust be out dancing at the moon\u201d). But it plants an idea in Joan\u2019s head, sewn by the convenient appearance of a book titled \u201cTO BE A WITCH: A PRIMER,\u201d which she finds in her home late one night while overhearing her daughter having enthusiastic sex with a classmate. The nightmares get worse; Joan keeps imagining herself being stalked in her home, attacked, assaulted. Her husband is unsympathetic; \u201cWhat the hell are you doing??\u201d he demands, when her clawing and screaming awakens him. So she starts reading the book, and that\u2019s when things really get interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Romero\u2019s original conception of the picture was small and personal; he shot it with a low budget ($100,000, less than even Night of the Living Dead<\/em>) as an independent production, originally running a leisurely 130 minutes. Unfortunately, the only buyer was exploitation producer Jack H. Harris, who slashed it down to 89 minutes and released it under the leering title Hungry Wives<\/em> \u2013 a title it still bears on the Criterion Channel, so don\u2019t be confused. The accompanying posters and ads <\/a>were wildly inaccurate, promoting the picture as winking softcore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Romero was set up to fail; there\u2019s little onscreen sex or violence, which means that viewers drawn either by the ad campaign or his hit debut film were going to be disappointed. Even the New York Times\u2019 <\/em>Vincent Canby complained<\/a> that it \u201chas the seedy look of a porn film but without any pornographic action. Everything in it, from the actors to the props, looks borrowed and badly used.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That \u201cbadly used\u201d quality is, of course, part of the picture\u2019s greatness \u2013 and perhaps why it required the passage of decades for full appreciation. It feels precisely of its moment, not just for the fab \u2018fits, big hair, and gaudy interior design, but because it\u2019s grappling with gender roles and an uneasily shifting society. Joan becomes a witch primarily as a means with which to take control of her life, embracing the power of the divine feminine, and though the word \u201cfeminism\u201d (and the ideas therein) isn\u2019t explicitly used in Romero\u2019s screenplay, it\u2019s clear that he\u2019s using witchcraft as a stand-in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That same subtext is running through several of these \u201870s horror films, from both male and female creators, and it\u2019s important to place those works in the proper historical context: the Equal Rights Amendment was approved by the House in 1971 and the Senate in 1972, when it began rolling out to state legislatures for approval. Sexual equality was (it seemed) about to become the law of the land, and some of these films (including this one) have the unmistakable whiff of fear, that female independence equals the end of subservience. \u201cThey all win in the end, they get it all from us, they get everything,\u201d muses the off-screen voice at the film\u2019s end, as the dead body lays on the yard. Romero\u2019s original title is telling: Jack\u2019s Wife<\/em>, the person she is (and, it seems, all she is) when the story begins. By its end, she is much, much more. “Season of the Witch” is available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video and is streaming on The Criterion Channel.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/season2-1024x747.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/season3-1024x743.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n