Season of the Witch
HORROR-THON 2020 • POD PEOPLE
5/10
DIRECTOR: George A. Romero
RELEASED: 1972
STARRING: Jan White, Raymond Laine, Ann Muffly
RUNTIME: 2 hours, 10 minutes
WATCH ON: Tubi
SCARE LEVEL: Low
VIBE LEVEL: Very ‘70s, very uncomfortable dinner party. Watch it if you like your witches with a side of divorce energy.
George A. Romero, between Night of the Living Dead and every zombie movie that came after. There are no zombies. There is a very bored suburban wife, a tarot deck, and a lot of ‘70s wood paneling.
Joan is a housewife in suburban Pittsburgh. Her husband, Jack, is controlling and travels constantly, and her daughter is off at college and wants nothing to do with her. Joan’s days are cocktail parties with the same people, and she keeps having nightmares.
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Then she meets a local woman who’s rumored to be a witch. Joan gets curious, buys some supplies, and starts casting spells. They seem to work, and her confidence grows. She also has an affair with a much younger man.
One night Jack comes home early, and Joan, jumpy from her nightmares, shoots him. Maybe it’s an accident. The movie never tells you. She’s cleared, joins the local coven, and at the very end, someone at a party introduces her as Jack’s wife.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
The title is misleading. It’s not really a horror movie. It’s a slow, strange drama about a woman realizing her whole life is built around a man, and witchcraft is the way out. Think of it as less of the Exorcist and more The Feminine Mystique.
That also explains why it flopped. The distributor retitled it Hungry Wives and marketed it as softcore, which it very much is not. The original working title, Jack’s Wife, tells you so much more. The movie’s whole point is that Joan refuses to be only that.
It’s rough around the edges. The acting wobbles, it drags in the middle, and the cut we have today was reassembled because the original negative is lost. The dream sequences are the strongest part, and you can see the horror director Romero would become.
Fun fact for your next dinner party
This film is the only title in Romero’s filmography that he wished to remake. Insufficient funding during the shoot produced a result that left him unhappy with the final product.