Season of the Witch (1973)

 Sort of following up on my Romero and Pittsburgh film scene, I watched another lesser known George Romero film from 1973 (same year as The Amusement Park), starring Jan White as a bored, disillusioned, lonely housewife, unfulfilled and unsatisfied with where life is because her husband is always away on business and daughter is off to school. The suburban wives gather together as a social circle, chat and giggle, with Jan clearly longing for something more. When one of her friends brings up a witch among them, Jan eventually is introduced to a practicing witch. Ann Muffly is one of Jan's friends feeling very vulnerable and insecure due to her age, responsible for introducing Jan to the witch. This witch tells Muffly about specific feelings, laying out insecurities she had while Jan listens on. What makes Jan's performance quite a knockout is you see the wheels turning, the curiosity, the frustrations, the yearning for more than what her husband (and friends) were offering. On top of that, Jan's daughter (Joedda McClain) brings home a college teacher she met (and has been sleeping with), played by Raymond Laine. Raymond is cocky, brash, blunt, manipulative, cunning, and confident "ladies man". Jan is attracted to him, really turned on when returning home after dropping off a drunken, broken Muffly home, while hearing her daughter and Laine having sex in the daughter's bedroom. That sets in motion Jan and Laine's affair, brief and over the course of a few visits, but eventually she ends it while he remarks it's "her loss". The lowest Laine gets is when he convinces Muffly that she's getting high from a rolled up cigarette, pretending it is marijuana, right in her face and encouraging her to believe a lie, proving a point to a disapproving Jan that he could cause someone to feel something that shouldn't through psychology. Watching Muffly being worked over like that by Laine isn't fun and games; he's a fucking asshole, so obviously he got kicks out of it. That Jan just had to hook up with him...that might get the conversation going. 

The film features Jan looking into the mirror, looking deep into her face at any "age marks", haunted by dreams of her husband "leaving her behind", with tree branches smacking her repeatedly (leaving marks), eventually hit in the chops with a paper and put into a cage like a dog. Also, Jan sees an older vision of herself, far more aged, stone-faced, miserable. So the sexual tension with a much younger man, left underwhelmed and very disappointed with her current sex life with her distant husband; so the young man willing to have sex with her, it eventually boosts her self-esteem, while she begins to suffer nightmares about a makes man in black (Bill Hinzman, the first zombie featured in Romero's 1968 classic) pursing her throughout her house.

Romero mentioned in an interview for Anchor Bay that he didn't have a lot of money and time, so he just worked with what he had through Latent Image in Pittsburgh, with the crew occupying a regular home with the owners remaining quite open and friendly to them. Those memorable close up shots in the dark of Night of the Living Dead (1968) really emerge in Season of the Witch as well, especially when Jan is pursued by the masked Hinzman inside the house. The quick edits, with all that movement, the terror of Jan, the silhouetting of the intruder, the urgency to find a place to hide or escape; this was Romero at his very best, even when the resources were not there to achieve the heights he desired as a filmmaker.

The shotgun blast by Jan towards who she thought was the intruder resulting in a tragedy that actually benefits her is that big twist leaving us to chew on the meat of how all her witchcraft, regardless of whether or not it was supposed to be real -- Romero, in that interview, says he just believes it was all in her head, that he doesn't believe in that religious stuff -- seemed to change her life. The results of the shotgun blast, considering how much worse it could have been for her, instead seems to indicate Jan's life will improve, leaving her to decide on a life with other witches, joining their cult, embracing the lifestyle. This is a film that was made with little to no money, with a cast of unknowns, and never distributed out there before a large audience. I had watched as many Romero films as I could as a teenager into adulthood, but Season of the Witch was obviously elusive. Unearthed films involving Romero surely are catnip to a horror fan like me. So when I watched it, I liked how unique it was. I'm not a housewife or a woman stuck in a marriage that yields a lot of misery, disappointment, and regret. But I think the film really gets that across to us. Performances and the use of dream logic to communicate all of that in Jan's life, Romero opened up his resume to included what he felt was a feminist film. It is now available on Shudder and other places. I'm glad it can be seen now, and I am sure plenty of women feel her situation, perhaps even understand her plight. And perhaps they joy in her "release", even if it was achieved through a nightmare believed to be real and outside the house, not realizing that the person isn't an intruder but your husband!