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SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero’s Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero’s Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic

Since the release of his classic, Night of the Living Dead in 1968, George A. Romero‘s catapult to horror auteur status was inevitable. The impact of the film is impossible to understate – there are no zombie movies as we know them without Night of the Living Dead. In July, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City ran a series to this effect called “Films of the Dead: Romero & Co.”, which began with several films from Romero‘s zombie cycle and followed with many of the modern zombie films he indelibly influenced. 

Many of Romero‘s other early, low budget films have been critically re-examined in light of the vast contributions he made to the horror genre. He has been called a “master of political horror” and for good reason: Night of the Living Dead has long been interpreted as an allegory for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s; Dawn of the Dead is an obvious commentary on American consumerism; Amusement Park is expressly about elder abuse. And yet, his second horror film, Season of the Witch (1973) – another film brimming with social commentary, this time exploring the state of feminism at the beginning of the ’70s and inspired by his research into real-world, contemporary witchcraft – has not been given the same level of praise. Neglecting this film is a detriment to a full understanding of his career and, I’d argue, the role feminism and witchcraft played in the horror films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

Season of the Witch is the story of a bored housewife and recent empty nester who, contending with the desexualization and social isolation middle age represented for women at the time, becomes drawn to witchcraft as a fulfilling alternative. It’s also a really fun, weird movie. It’s a psychedelic film named for (and featuring) Donovan’s classic 60’s anthem “Season of the Witch” whose queasy black comedy, day-glo colors, fish eye lenses, and jarring jumps across time bear little resemblance to Living Dead’s crisp black and white cinematography and linear bottle film structure. 

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

While genre fans who enjoy Romero‘s gore over his social commentary may find the film less appealing than his contemporaneous The Crazies, Season of the Witch demonstrates a range of stylistic abilities Romero would later use in his cult classic Martin (1977); it also reflects a powerful masculine ambivalence about “women’s roles,” Women’s Lib, and the power that femininity outside heteropatriarchal control holds over the popular imagination.  

Is God Dead?

To really understand why Season of the Witch is relevant, some cultural context on the feminism and counterculture of the era is helpful––as well as fascinating on its own terms. 

Religion at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s was a hot button issue to say the least: it was a period in US history when the question “Is God Dead?” screamed from an April 1966 cover of Time (that would soon be featured in Rosemary’s Baby) and alternative forms of religion filled a void left by an increasingly secularized culture. Less than four months later, Donovan released “Season of the Witch” (“so many different people to be… sure is strange”).

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

This religious ambivalence was reflected across the pop-countercultural spectrum. From the Beatles to the Manson Family, New Age spirituality was enmeshed in the counterculture by the mid-late 1960s.  It combined cherry-picked elements of Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and texts like the I Ching and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with forms of Medieval Western esotericism from Wicca (a religion focusing on nature worship, spellcraft, and often Goddess worship) to astrology and tarot. As the decade waned, Wicca in particular held a strong appeal for women and continued to grow due to its emphasis on femininity as a primary source of divinity and power. 

In the 1960s, neopaganism and Second-wave feminism existed in tandem from the beginning. Astrologer Samael Aun Weor declared the 1960s to be “the Age of Aquarius” (an astrological period defined by peace, harmony, human agency, and enlightenment), in February 1962, within a year of the publication of Betty Freidan‘s seminal The Feminine Mystique – and the same year one of the first branches of Wicca was introduced to the United States. By February 1973 when Roe v. Wade codified the fundamental right to abortion into law, most had already declared the Aquarian age to be over. Still, even as the hippie movement died its slow death over the course of the early-mid 1970s, New Age spirituality held a prominent place in the culture. The cultural associations between feminism and witchcraft were firmly established and still on the rise. 

The “Me” Decade

Exactly one decade after Time asked its readers if God was dead, Tom Wolfe argued that the hippie movement of the previous era had become more spiritually devout in his seminal New York Magazine piece, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”: “By the early 1970s” he says… The hippies had suddenly made religion look hip. Very few people went into the hippie life with religious intentions, but many came out of it absolutely righteous.” 

In the early 1970s, new forms of New Age religion were growing and gaining recognition. Wicca in particular maintained a hold on the popular imagination in close connection with the idea that women possess innate divine power as maternal life-givers and nurturers. Dianic Wicca, founded in the US in 1971, excluded male practitioners entirely in a strong rebuttal to Christian traditions’ historical ban on female clergy. In 1972, less than six months before the release of Season of the Witch, two new denominations of Wicca were established in the United States, and the Church and School of Wicca became the first federally recognized Wiccan religion. At the same time, Satanism, as promoted by self-described warlocks like Anton LaVey, was cementing a more traditional understanding of “black magic” in the popular consciousness.

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

Wolfe’s essay more broadly also suggests that in the postwar era, more Americans than ever before could afford to participate in new levels of self-improvement/introspection – or, in his words, “considerable narcissism.” He mentions the rising divorce rate of the time as one of the factors hailing in, “the greatest age of individualism in American history!” 

Increased nontraditional spiritual expression and a rise in individualism, then, provide the perfect context for the types of witchcraft self-help books that pervaded the shelves of commercial and the crop of underground, occult bookstores that sprang up over the previous decade alike: titles like The Modern Witch’s Spellbook (1971) (that promised “Improved Daily Living”) and Teaching Yourself White Magic and How to Try it Out (1973) did battle with books like Witchcraft U.S.A (1972) (“Witchcraft lives in America today… what can they do to you?”) and America Bewitched: The Rise of Black Magic and Spiritism (1974). Anyone from practicing witches to teenagers to curious housewives had access to occult literature on an unprecedented scale. 

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

At the same time, Stephen King published his classic novel of teenage witchcraft and Christian zealotry, Carrie (1974), a story he expressly acknowledges was a product of his anxiety around the power of the feminist movement in America. William Peter Blatty‘s The Exorcist (1971), David Seltzer‘s The Omen (1976), and Ira Levin‘s Rosemary’s Baby explicitly examine many of the same questions of faith, femininity, and feminism. The witches in these stories all have one thing in common: power men aren’t able to control. What’s more feminist than that?

From this vantage point, then, the story of Romero‘s Season of the Witch becomes less a curiosity piece or pitstop on the path of the director’s career and (like Night of the Living Dead before it) more a fascinating look at the zeitgeist of one of the most tumultuous periods of cultural transition in recent memory. 

“Is that how it is today?”

When Season of the Witch begins, middle-aged Joan Mitchell (Jan White) finds herself trailing helplessly along a wooded path behind a man in a suit who ignores her as he reads the newspaper. He lets branches whip her across the face as he pushes ahead without a second glance. She starts awake for a moment–– only to find herself in another dream: this time, her husband slaps her with his paper and buckles a leash to the red studded dog collar she suddenly wears around her neck. He leads her to a dog kennel, watches her get locked away, and departs for a business trip. In her next dream, the kennel becomes her house, stocked with “television with special programming designed to give you ideas should you run out of ideas… pills and things… oh, and don’t forget to pay the bills.” When she catches her reflection in her bedroom mirror, she’s become an elderly woman. 

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

The central tension of Season of the Witch isn’t really witchcraft. It’s the particularly ambivalent indignities of aging for women in the latter half of the 20th century. Joan finds herself alone in her suburban home more and more once her only daughter has gone to college; her husband, Jack (Bill Thunhurst), is no longer sexually interested in her and travels constantly for work; her friends talk about little more than the bridge and the latest classes at the country club as they go through the exact same experiences she is. Joan is at loose ends, watching her daughter enjoy her sexually liberated youth and her older friends fall to pieces: her closest friend, Shirley (Ann Muffly) is humiliated when a younger man tricks her into thinking she’s smoked marijuana and acting foolish to prove that people will experience what they believe to be happening whether it’s true or not. Popping pills to pass the time and speaking seldom, Joan is trapped in her own home without a role to fulfill. 

The scenario could be taken directly from The Feminine Mystique. Not long into the movie, Joan, driven by her curiosity, goes to meet the one local witch in town (in a delightful plot contrivance, her friends mention the woman with derision at a party out of the blue). This new woman’s argument in favor of witchcraft reads like a passage from Betty Friedan, too–– “I honestly think” the elegant older woman tells a nervous Joan, “that every woman underneath her prejudices knows that there is something out there that we haven’t got the power to define.” In other words, to quote The Feminine Mystique: “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'” 

“Being afraid is necessary to believing [in witchcraft],” the witch tells Joan later after she’s used her newfound magic to seduce Gregg (Raymond Laine) a man her daughter has been seeing. “But don’t use it lightly… knowing you’ve abused it can destroy you. With fear at least.” Soon after beginning her journey into witchcraft, Joan’s nightmares of domestic purgatory become visions of violent invasion by the devil. Her house, once her prison, becomes her failed sanctuary as a man in a demon mask breaks inside and prepares to rape her. Joan’s guilt at transgressing the norms of her social milieu and her family’s Catholic faith (she performs her first spell on Ash Wednesday) is transferred onto her newfound source of agency and power. Her guilt at her own need for sexual gratification warps into the violent destruction of her bodily autonomy. 

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

At the film’s climax, Joan summons “one of the lords” of her Craft through a sexual ritual with Gregg, causing a skeletally patterned black and white cat to appear unbeknownst to her. Gregg dismisses her “way of showing faith” and mocks her for summoning the Devil. Once Gregg leaves, overcome with paranoia from her nightmares, she shoots her husband through the door when he returns home unexpectedly. His death is crosscut with her initiation into her coven, which features her kneeling on all fours, neck tied with a red rope fashioned into a collar reminiscent of the one her husband held in her dreams.

“Goddamn women,” one of the cops at the scene of the murder exclaims, “they get everything in the end. They get it all from us.” Soon after, Joan returns to her social circle looking markedly younger and more confident in herself. When her flustered friends comment on it, she replies “I’m a witch,” with a straight face and a faint glimmer in her eye. Nevertheless, she’s still introduced to newcomers as “Jack’s wife.”  

Ultimately, the film’s stance on witchcraft is open to several interpretations. Romero’s emphasis on autosuggestion and fear paired with the stylistic parallels he draws between sexist American paternalism, Catholic guilt, and witchcraft (i.e. the witches’ red rope replacing the husband’s red dog collar) could suggest that the film’s tragedy lies in Joan’s inability to take responsibility over her own circumstances and her reliance on external systems of control. He’s said something to that effect: “The fact is that every forward motion in the film is caused by [Joan] …yet she needs to be able to say, “The Devil made me do it!” Which at once is the plight of womanhood, or any minority, and the genocide – it’s very hard to perceive yourself as the cause of something that might make it better.” That being said, the fact that her final ritual does seem to summon the skeletal cat leaves open the possibility that her magic was real. 

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

Regardless of what Romero himself says, the film as a text begs a different, more subversively feminist interpretation. While he argues that the moral of the story is Joan’s self-doubt and reliance on witchcraft ultimately preventing her full liberation, it’s also easy to read Joan’s link to witchcraft allowing her to break free from the sexist, ageist dominant system of power represented by her husband in favor of a more liberating one: witchcraft. Jack is tied to the violent demonic intruder from her dreams–– a person she believes to be the devil – several times: early on, after waking from a nightmare seemingly alone, she is terrified when a man’s arms appear from below the bed. She screams and Jack, finishing the sit-up he’d been doing on the floor, asks her what’s wrong. Later, she claws at him during one of her rape dreams and he pushes her off, dismissively telling her to “drink some hot milk and go to bed.” Finally, he comes home without warning in the middle of the night, approaching her door the way the dream intruder has before. The domestic violence he commits in her dreams bleeds into her waking life when he slaps her across the face and threatens to “kick some ass” at a moment of tension. The demon in her dreams is linked to bulls, a masculine (notably horned) symbol of violence and aggression.

Meanwhile, the “Lord” she attempts to summon is consistently tied animal and children rather than men: a statue of a child presides over her spells, and, in the final ritual, a cat (a traditionally feminine, non-threatening signifier) appears. She never refers to this deity as the devil, though Gregg does, indicating a masculine fear of her Craft that has nothing to do with the practice itself or her relationship to it, centered in femininity.

In this context, Joan accidentally shooting her husband is a symbolic exorcism of the masculine forces oppressing her that are in fact visually linked to the Devil. It truly is an answer to her plea for help from the ritual she’s just performed, or a subconscious bid for autonomy rather than a regrettable tragedy caused by fear, confusion, and a lack of agency and direction. Here, witchcraft has saved her from the demon of misogynist, paternalism, and control.

SEASON OF THE WITCH: Looking Back On George Romero's Psychedelic Feminist Should-Be Classic
source: Jack H. Harris Enterprises

Either interpretation airs the same anxiety on the part of the dominant culture: women’s bids for autonomy will, in the words of the cops at the film’s climax, “take everything” from men. As such, they are to be feared. The men dismissing witchcraft in the film allows male viewers to view feminists as histrionic and flakey, incapable of effective acts of personal agency. Demonizing witchcraft proves that feminism is destabilizing to masculine authority. At the same time, the fact that the film as a text resists an easy dismissal of Joan’s powers undergirds the same message – feminism is a genuine threat to heteropatriarchy. In both contexts, calling Joan “Jack’s wife” even after her husband’s death at her hands rings hollow not just because she killed him, but because ultimately that moniker never accurately encapsulated who Joan was as a woman. 

Conclusion:

There are several reasons Season of the Witch isn’t treated with the same reverence as Night of the Living Dead. The production faced serious financial problems and ultimately Romero was forced to shoot the film for less than half the original budget. Because of these budget problems, the film was initially re-cut and marketed by softcore film distributors as Hungry Wives! Before being released in its original format several years later. 

That being said, the film’s politics aren’t as accessible as Night of the Living Dead’s, either. The story’s ambivalent politics make it less of an instant classic because here, there’s an edge of anxiety around the very idea of feminist liberation. Yes, the film’s commentary against ageism is explicit and direct, however, Romero‘s stance on the extent to which women should be allowed to have power is less clear. His assertions that the film is a cautionary tale feel dissonant with the movie itself – making it, in my opinion, even more compelling. The film resists a single interpretation and as such reflects the messiness of feminism’s place in the “Me Decade.” 

Ultimately, films like The Craft (1996), The Love Witch (2016), and even The Witch (2016) wouldn’t be the same without Romero‘s should-be classic, Season of the Witch.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments! 


Watch Season of the Witch

 

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