Editorials
‘Season of the Witch’ & ‘All the Colors of the Dark’ – A Witchy Double Feature for Spooky Season
Joan and Jane are two women trapped in their lives. Joan is trapped in a cold, dead marriage, and Jane is trapped by the trauma of losing a child. Both traverse their own journeys to self-actualization and liberation through the exploration of the occult. Season of the Witch and All the Colors of the Dark, released within one year of each other, take the audience into the underbelly of the weird and the witchy, probing into the pressures set upon women by their lovers and society, as a whole. Each film is equally profound, yet their epic conclusions lie on opposite extremes.
In George A. Romero’s 1973 psycho-drama Season of the Witch, Joan (Jan White) has grown listless and miserable with her perfect suburban life. Her husband Jack (Bill Thunhurst) no longer satisfies her, neither does the housework. She’s merely going through the motions when we meet her. And she’s having the most terrifying and bizarre nightmares, manifestations of her deep-seated anxieties. Through the film, Joan turns to witchcraft to find freedom from her life, from her husband, and even from herself.
In the opening dream sequence, she’s wandering through a forest with Jack, who appears disgusted and then unconcerned with her. He first lets the branches smack his wife and tear into her skin, and then he snaps on a dog harness and locks her in a cage. It’s all a metaphor, naturally, of how she views her real life. She’s suffocated, and Jack fully believes “we’re doing okay,” as he tells her one night in bed. He nuzzles closer to her breasts, and Joan’s expression is lifeless. Her tired eyes and drooping mouth suggest a life of abandoned dreams, dissatisfying sex, and a husband totally consumed by his ego to see reality. Joan needs a way out.
A friend in town named Marion (Virginia Greenwald) claims to be a witch and invites Joan over one night for a tarot reading. She describes her beliefs as “a religion, really” before regaling how her mother was a witch, as well, and from whom she learned everything she knows and understands about the practice. It never startles Joan, only titilates and intrigues her. It seems witchcraft is exactly the avenue through which she may be able to unlock the conundrum of life. Soon after, Joan compiles all the necessary tools, from smudge sticks to a silver dagger and a chalice, for her own altar and begins tinkering with various spells and incantations. When Donovan’s undeniably catchy “Season of the Witch” kicks into gear, she undergoes a complete personal transformation. Once an exhausted housewife, Joan emerges as a self-possessed woman who knows exactly what she wants and how to get it.
‘Season of the Witch’
When she performs a ritual for sex一or rather to entice her daughter Nikki’s (Joedda McClain) much older boyfriend and professor Gregg (Raymond Laine) into her orbit一Joan gets a first-hand glimpse into the power of witchcraft. “I made this happen,” she tells Gregg after the two hook up in Joan’s living room. Gregg is unbelieving; in fact, he scoffs at the notion that such strange practices had any bearing on what occurs in life. But he entertains her ideas anyway.
All the while, Joan continues having the most peculiar dreams. The latest recurring nightmare involves a man in a hairy mask breaking into her home and attacking her. Jack shrugs them off, of course, leaving his wife exasperated and feeling as though she’s going insane. However, there’s much deeper meaning to the dreams. They’re symbolic of the cracks and chips forming around the edges of their marriage. The fear Joan feels in real life has now invaded her every moment, whether she’s awake or not. She can’t escape it. She can only dive further into witchcraft to free herself and discover a world in which she’s appreciated, acknowledged, and accepted.
It’s only a matter of time before she asks Marion to join the coven. Marion warns that using witchcraft foolishly will result in one being eaten alive from the inside. Joan takes her warning to heart and painstakingly remains vigilant over her spell casting, choosing only to reclaim her own power and unearth the woman she was destined to become.
Season of the Witch centers the story around the importance of womanhood and how a coven symbolizes female companionship, suggesting that women supporting one another is the best defense against the patriarchy. Perhaps, Joan’s nightmare of the masked stalker has always been about toxic masculinity and entitlement, and the idea women have been subservient to men for centuries. In the climax of the film, things don’t particularly end well for Jack, who returns home late one night and tries to break into the house. Unlike her dream, Joan takes charge of the narrative, grabs a shotgun, and blows a hole through his chest. It’s a perfect ending to underscore Joan’s entire character arc in the film. In fighting back, she was finally and truly free from her life.
‘All the Colors of the Dark’
Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (1972) utilizes very similar conventions, but focuses on a young woman recovering her life after an unimaginable tragedy. After suffering a miscarriage caused by a car crash, Jane (Edwige Fenech) falls into a pit of despair and can’t seem to shake away the darkness. And who could blame her. That sort of misery is a unique experience. Jane is also still recovering from witnessing her mother’s murder when she was a child. All her trauma knots up inside of her and manifests in recurring nightmares of being stabbed to death. Nothing can possibly save her.
Her sister Barbara (Susan Scott) suggests she seek out treatment from a psychiatrist named Dr. Burton (George Rigaud), but Jane’s boyfriend Richard (George Hilton) considers him “a quack” and urges her not to go. Jane takes her sister’s advice instead. ““Your worst enemy is loneliness,” Burton tells Jane during their session. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well and Jane is even more downcast than usual. With no other options, Jane then attends a Black Mass at the recommendation of her neighbor Mary (Marina Malfatti). Jane has misgivings, but she’s willing to keep an open mind. Located on a sweeping estate, the coven’s castle looms large and overwhelming, hinting at something far more malevolent inside its corridors.
When she enters the hallowed space, she witnesses a dog being slaughtered for a ritual, and she’s forced to drink its blood from a chalice. The ceremony abruptly becomes hyper-sexualized, erupting into a massive orgy with limbs and faces popping into and out of frame. As bizarre as it seems, Jane appears tantalized by her experience and continues to partake in the coven’s practices. It appears she has finally uncovered something that makes her feel alive again, and she works through her trauma in the process. All lingering doubts are washed away in a sea of sweaty bodies and heightened orgasms 一 at least for the time being.
Her sexual salvation comes with a heavy price tag, however. During a sacrament, Mary ends up dead, killed as a lamb on an altar. It’s an exchange, one for another, that terrifies Jane most, and she flees in shock and horror. What she’s witnessed can’t possibly be reality, so she heads to Mary’s apartment to confirm that the events were just a delusion born out of desperation. But someone else now resides in the apartment, and they claim Mary has never lived there.
While contending with losing a grip on reality, Jane has been seeing a mysterious wild-eyed man following her. She asserts it’s the same man who’s been killing her in her dreams. It’s initially unclear whether he’s just an illusion, wrought from two life-changing traumatic events, or a real murderer out for her blood. Or perhaps he’s part of the coven and needs yet another sacrifice. In a confrontation, the man reveals to Jane that her mother once committed to the coven and was murdered because she wanted out. It’s not exactly the answer she hoped for, but it does clear up one of the most brutal moments from her life, possibly allowing her to finally find closure and heal.
Later, Richard learns Barbara has been leading the coven the entire time in the hope of taking up her mother’s legacy. The revelation rattles Jane to her core. Betrayal from her own sister couldn’t have been further from her mind. Upon killing Barbara, Richard is confronted by other cult members and nearly murdered himself. He manages to throw one of them off a building and seemingly to his death.
‘All the Colors of the Dark’
In many ways, the nightmare comes to a triumphant end. Not only has the cult been brutally disbanded, but Jane’s psychological turmoil finds healthy catharsis. Her need to seek out healing elsewhere is no longer necessary. Through her sexual liberation, she breaks free from her shackles, putting both her miscarriage and mother’s murder to rest, and discovers renewed strength in her husband. In the film’s final moments, she embraces Richard on the rooftop. While she’s uncovered parts of herself long suppressed, there are still elements of her being that terrify her. Jane then expresses reservations that still linger in her brain: “I’m scared of not being myself anymore.”
That fear circles like a vulture around Joan and Jane. It preys on their minds and their entrapment. Two women lose themselves and rediscover their sexual prowess and strength to reclaim their lives. There are two very different outcomes, of course, but their journeys are quite similar, touching upon the idea that pain can also be brandished as a double-edged dagger. In both instances, men play significant, yet secondary, roles. An oppressor in one; a disinterested lover in the other. Together, they make quite a witchy double feature this spooky season. You won’t regret it.
Double Trouble is a recurring column that pairs up two horror films, past or present, based on theme, style, or story.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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