Spoiler alert: There aren’t actually any witches in The Witching Season. There is a season though, so…. no harm no foul, I guess?
It’s rare to find a big-budget horror film in general, but, particularly with horror anthologies, there seem to be less resources to go around. When you consider a horror anthology that originated as a web series, you are dealing with a very limited budget. What you tend to end up with in anthologies are a series of short films, ostensibly tied together in some superficial manner (often through lines added in post-production, e.g. a voice on the radio giving a news report on the plot of a previous story). When it works well, you end up with something like Tales of Halloween, which has some variety and panache despite its constraints. At the low end is the dire Halloween Tales, which is hopelessly inept and unable to transcend its microscopic budget. It is probably fair to slot The Witching Season square in the middle of these two efforts. It has neither the name directors or the FX budget of the former film, but each story at least has a point and some semblance of talent on display. Lest I set expectations too high, however, let me be clear: These are bare bones, rudimentary takes on horror concepts. They are almost sketches rather than short films.
The first story is as basic and derivative as can be, down to a hockey-mask wearing stalker, until a last minute twist that is actually pretty clever and makes the preceding several minutes retroactively worthwhile. It isn’t scary, but it’s probably the single element from the whole movie that I will remember by the time next year’s marathon comes around. The fourth story is the most ambitious, both in structure and themes, and I give the director a lot of credit for pushing the envelope. It isn’t perfectly executed, and its meta-textual elements (the short is basically about a horror writer with writer’s block) approach student film levels of pretension, but the effort is appreciated. I say that primarily because the rest of the segments fail to try anything novel with their basic horror premises. That’s the real shame here, and with a lot of these lower-budget types of movies. The one resource that is theoretically unlimited is creativity, yet many are content to produce a sub-par rehash of an idea we’ve seen before, rather than go for something original that at least has a chance at being the best example of the kind of thing that it is.
I’ve gone on record before as being a fan of the horror anthology, and there are undoubtedly great ones out there. There are a whole lot more like this, though. The best thing The Witching Season has going for it is probably its score (by someone called “Slasher Dave”, natch) and an opening credits sequence laden with cheap Halloween decorations. It makes the movie (which is really just five “episodes” of a web series) a solid background accoutrement for the season, but it isn’t the type of thing that rewards close attention.
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