Retrospective: Season of the Witch (1972)

After creating America's finest horror film to date, George A. Romero tried to avoid typecasting like the radioactive plague. He made There's Always Vanilla, a fascinating half-romcom/half-exploitation movie about the impossibility of surviving in the nuclear family. He then moved onto the feminist anti-exploitation picture Season of the Witch (also known as Hungry Wives and Jack's Wife, depending on who held the cards that day), The Crazies, an interesting but fatally flawed look at a government-unleashed virus in the Watergate/Church Committee era, and The Amusement Park, a hilariously bad church-commissioned little disaster about elder abuse.

Season of the Witch is easily the most interesting of the bunch. It's pleasantly recalcitrant to categorization, with its aesthetics falling somewhere between on the spectrum between John Cassavetes and John Berger. It's got touches of exploitation picture and Bergman. It is horror, I suppose, in that it contains supernatural elements, and insofar as watching a woman trying to survive being a housewife in early 1970s America is horrifying. Romero couldn't stop himself from making social horror. Night of the Living Dead depicts an America woefully unprepared for a global catastrophe. Season of the Witch shows us why America is so unready for the world it's created.

The protagonist Joan (Jan White) is torn between epochs, suffering from her husband's (Bill Thunhurst) abuse and neglect while watching her daughter (Joedda McClain) reap the benefits of Women's Lib. She looks for any egress she can find, ultimately choosing to consort with the numinous in dabbling with witchcraft. Season of the Witch opts not to idealize Joan or her pursuit of freedom, and certainly not to paint Women's Lib as the way out for someone with her mind set. Every path Joan explores is flawed and messy — even the pleasures she explores are tainted by the coercion of men. The film is janky but thrilling — an honest, emotionally raw, and intellectually curious portrait of being a woman in 1970s America. One of Romero's underrated gems.