Psyop Cinema
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Brett's Halloween III Notes
🕑 Added 2023-11-01 14:14:33 +0000 UTCHalloween 3 (1982)
Background
Moustapha Akkad executive produced the first eight films in the series. His background gives some indication of his possible intelligence connections.
Al Akkad was born on July 1, 1930, in Aleppo in the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon.[3] He received his high school degree from the Aleppo American College. His father, then a customs officer, gave him $200 and a copy of the Quran before he left for the United States to study film direction and production at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Akkad spent a further three years studying for a Master's degree at the University of Southern California (USC), where he met the director Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah became Akkad's mentor in Hollywood and hired him as a consultant for a film about the Algerian War that never made it to the big screen, but he continued to encourage him until he found a job as a producer at CBS.
Akkad died in a series of bombings carried out by jihadists in Jordan against “three hotels…frequented by foreign diplomats”—more evidence that Akkad moved in diplomatic-intelligence circles.
Distribution rights for the film were owned by Dino De Laurentiis, a powerful producer from Italy with alleged mob financial ties. Laurentiis demanded that more “gore and violence” (quoting Mental Floss article) be added to Nigel Kneale’s original script. If someone is a candidate for deliberately sowing shock and degeneracy in our culture here, it’s probably Laurentiis.
John Carpenter and producer Deborah Hill thought that, after the first sequel, the Halloween movies might morph into an anthology series. The critical and relative commercial failure of this movie (it made $14.4 million on a $4.6 million budget) put paid to that idea.
Writer-producer of the first Halloween film Debra Hill took “much of the inspiration behind the plot…from Celtic traditions of Halloween such as the festival of Samhain. Although Samhain is not mentioned in the plot of the first film, Hill asserts that:
... the idea was that you couldn't kill evil, and that was how we came about the story. We went back to the old idea of Samhain, that Halloween was the night where all the souls are let out to wreak havoc on the living, and then came up with the story about the most evil kid who ever lived. And when John came up with this fable of a town with a dark secret of someone who once lived there, and now that evil has come back, that's what made Halloweenwork.”
According to Wallace, Hill furnished the basic concept behind the story, namely, “witchcraft meets the computer age.”
Joe Dante (who is very sus) had originally signed on to direct, and he invited Nigel Keale—a BBC screenwriter who has been described as the man who “invented popular TV,” or at least “the future of lowest-common-denominator TV” (Mark Gatiss, The Guardian, 11/1/2006)—to write the script. “Kneale agreed, on the proviso that it would be a totally new concept unrelated to the first two films, which he had not seen and he did not like what he had heard about them.”
“Kneale had a positive relationship with the director assigned to the film, Tommy Lee Wallace, but when one of the film's backers, Dino De Laurentiis, insisted upon the inclusion of more graphic violence and a rewrite of the script from Wallace, Kneale became displeased with the results and had his name removed from the film.”
Executive producer Joseph Wolf, who also executive produced Halloween II, has been involved in some sus productions, including executive producing Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The Nightmare on Elm Street series, as I amply demonstrated over the course of two Monarch episodes, reveals the Method of the cinematic psychic assault that it is carrying out; and Wolf has been involved with other “deadly media” movies, including Fade to Black (1980), about a film buff who goes on a killing spree, and The Seduction (1982), about a TV anchorwoman who is stalked by an obsessive fan.
This was the directorial debut of Tommy Lee Wallace, who also received the full screenwriting credit, although Kneale and Carpenter did a lot of uncredited work. Wallace and Carpenter were reportedly friends dating back to their childhoods in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Wallace edited and served as production designer on Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) as well as the original Halloween movie (his only two editor and production designer credits, although he was the art director on Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, released in 1976). He seems to have gotten into the movie business while attending USC film school in the 70s, when he worked on Carpenter’s debut Dark Star (1974).
Wallace has spent his entire career in the B-movie world, specializing in B horror. Not a shock then that Wallace was friends with sus producer Donald P. Borchers, receiving a screenwriting credit on the Monarch film Far from Home, starring Drew Barrymore. Borchers said he came up with the story concept for Far from Home after reading a newspaper article about a 10-year-old boy in Florida who watched too much television and killed his mother, thinking she would be reanimated like the Road Runner in Looney Tunes. And here again, we have Wallace involved with a production inspired by the conceit that TV or cinema kills through its psychological effects. This was a popular motif in B movies of the era, including Ted Nicolau’s TerrorVision (1986) and Bad Channels (1990), as well as Jeff Lieberman’s Remote Control (1988), not to mention the king of them all, Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).
As a director, Wallace has been involved in other psyopy productions, including a few episodes of Max Headroom, an episode of the DoD-supported show Tour of Duty from the 80s, and the TV miniseries It (1990).
Although the music was composed by Carpenter, who did the original Halloween music, along with Alan Howarth, the signature hypnotic jingle”), including “all voices and instrumentation,” was done by Wallace. The idea for the TV commercial came either from Carpenter or Wallace (Wallace can’t remember), but not Kneale. Wallace took the first part of the jingle from a piano tune called “Spinning Song” by Albert Elmenreich.Tthe second part of is a variation on “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”
Wallace implies that the movie is critiquing corporate and government surveillance and control with its paranoid depictions of Silver Shamrock Novelties. He says that he felt the subject of mass child sacrifice was “fair game” and that he was acting as a “responsible” artist here. Cf. his involvement with the TV miniseries It (1990).
Actress Stacey Nelkin says that “Woody Allen's film Manhattan (1979) was based on her romantic relationship with the director, whom she met when she was 16 on the set of Annie Hall.” Nelkin did TV work in the 70s, and in the late 70s and early 80s appeared in a number of films promoting the sexual revolution as the next stage of the 60s cultural revolution, including:
Like Mom, Like Me (TV movie, 1978)
“A middle-aged mom adjusts to the realities of being divorced, which include managing her sex life and facing the possibility that her teenage daughter might be doing the same.”
Serial (1980)
“It's the end of the 1970s. Hippies are assimilating, women are raising their consciousness, and men are becoming confused and ineffectual. Don't expect to be able to keep track of all the names, or who's sleeping with whom. This movie very skillfully conveys the hopeless muddle through which the many characters move as they try to find themselves.
Get Crazy (1983), which has the same director as Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) and was produced by Bruce McNall, who later bought the Los Angeles Kings NHL team and still later was imprisoned for eight years for bank fraud.
Mega-promoter Colin Beverly plans to sabotage the New Year's 1983 concert of small-time operator Max Wolfe. Wolfe's assistants Neil Allen and Willie Loman find romance while trying to save the drugs, violence, and rock and roll from Beverly's schemes.
Nelkin retired from acting and has for some time been working as a substance abuse counsellor and relationship guru, and she’s married to a big PR guy.
The subtitle was supposedly lifted from George Romero’s Season of the Witch, released in 1974 as Hungry Wives. Interestingly, the original title of Martin Scorsese’s screenplay for Mean Streets, released in 1973, was “Season of the Witch,” and the phrase is used in the movie. It’s the name of a Donavan song. Clearly, this phrase had legs in the entertainment industry. Wallace explains that the phrase was “in the air” at the time, and he mentions Donavan’s song. He says he doesn’t know when it “dropped in” and that he may have introduced it.
Movie
The Revelation of the Method
The main plot conceit of the film—that a TV signal involving flashes of lights and hypnotic noises (in conjunction with computer chips) can cause massive human destruction—in itself qualifies it as a psyop movie. And then the very first frames of the movie, through the main credit sequence, subject the viewer to the very flashing lights, trance-inducing sounds, and other audio-visual stimulation that, in the movie, is being weaponized to murder countless children in a neopagan human sacrifice ritual—a ritual which is supposed to give the sacrificer “control over the environment.” In other words, we have deliberate Revelation of the Method, or perhaps pseudo-Revelation of the Method: the filmmakers are depicting a mass occult sacrifice that they are performing or pretending to perform on the audience themselves, showing the audience what’s being done to them.
As I indicate, I don’t think the filmmakers were literally trying to carry out a mass child sacrifice ritual. So, to understand what the Revelation of the Method really reveals here, we have to think a bit about what the ritual could be a metaphor for. Given the creative milieu (the world of B horror in the early 80s), I think one of the meanings has to do with the horror genre itself: the pseudo-“Method” of the movie (the audio-visual techniques) would then be a metaphor for the arsenal of psychological warfare techniques used in the genre as a whole,[1]and the human sacrifice goal represents the ambition of the horror “auteur” to destroy the souls of the audience. In real life, the effects are more subtle and take a longer time; film, as it always does, speeds up or telescopes the process to create a symbolic-metaphorical representation of it.
Hence, the motif of the attack on the eye from the camera, from the screen (e.g., Anguish Peeping Tom, etc.), which occurs in this film, as when the Cochran’s robotic henchman pulls the eyes out of the toyshop owner in the hospital. He then immediately kills himself, which immediately suggests omega programming in a mind-controlled Monarch slave.
In any case, there is no question as to the filmmakers’ deliberate self-reflexivity. For example, we see the original Halloween film multiple times, from a TV ad and then later in a scene toward the end where Challis is being forced to watch it leading up to the “Big Giveaway” at the end, when he is to die along with the children since he’s wearing one of the Silver Shamrock masks. Some obvious Revelation of the Method there: horror films kill, or horror films lead to people being killed, including horror films in the series you’re watching as you watch this film. Decoded, this means that horror films break down the psyche by degrees, leading it toward psychic death, or they are breaking down the psyches of the population at large to prepare it for a Satanic culling, as graphically imagined by director Danny Boyle, in the form of a giant Grim Reaper, in his “Isles of Wonder” spectacle for the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics.
This self-reflexivity carries over from the first two films. In Halloween, for example, Carpenter shows scenes on TV from The Thing from Another Planet (among other films), which he remade in 1982.
Was a Michael Myers’s mask subliminally flashed during the commercial in one scene? Is there a wink there that getting kids to “wear masks” inspired by horror movies is an attempt to turn them into psychopaths (which represents a kind of psychic death)? As we discuss with the Collins Bros., these films are subtly or not so subtly glorifying the psychopathic psychosexual maniac as a god.
More self-reflexivity, feedback loop:
Masks actually offered for sale to promote the movie. So marketing masks to kids so they can pretend to be human sacrifice victims, just like in the movie. Presumably they anticipated that some kids might come to see the movie a second time, wearing a mask, as if it might kill them during the climax of the movie (omega, mass suicide programming).
The town is named Santa Mira as an homage to the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was also used in E.T. the same year (1982). Debra Hill called Halloween III a “pod picture, not a knife picture.”
Actually, the pod theme is crossed with themes of cyborgian replacement, with all the implied thematic baggage of both, under Ken Ammi’s master rubric of occultism, technology, and evolution.
From an October 16, 1982, New York Times article:
''Every society in every time has had its masks that suited the mood of the society,'' said Mr. Post [Don Post, of Don Post studios, who manufactured the masks, as well as the Michael Myers mask from the first film], ''from the masked ball to clowns to makeup. People want to act out a feeling inside themselves -angry, sad, happy, old. It may be a sad commentary on present-day America that horror masks are the best sellers.''
The Ritual
Regarding the plot device of a superrich guy using psyop cryptotech to revive Samhain child sacrifices in order to gain more control “over the environment,” may I coin the concept of “superclass religious pathology”?
Here is Cochran’s big speech, where he explains his motive (as all movie psychopaths do) to the hero:
I do love a good joke. And this is the best ever. A joke on the children. But there's a better reason.
You don't really know much about Halloween. You thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy. It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal. And the dead might be looking into sit by our fires of turf.
Halloween. The festival of Samhain. The last great one took place 3,000 years ago and the hills ran red…with the blood of animals and children. Sacrifices. They were part of our world, our craft. Witchcraft. To us, it was a way of controlling our environment. It's not so different now. It's time again.
In the end, we don't decide these things, you know. The planets do. They're in alignment. And it's time again. The world's going to change tonight, Doctor. I'm glad you'll be able to watch it.
The term “craft” here, said to be “witchcraft,” hearkens to Freemasonry, as does the title of The Craft.
Human sacrifice as a form of social control, keeping subjects in a state of shock and awe, as well as a way to control the environment by changing it at a metaphysical level (for example, by appeasing or bribing demons posing as gods).
The shop owner from San Francisco staying at the motel is reading Carlos Castenada. I think the meaning here is that Castenada, like Cochran, is attempting an “archaic revival.” So we have a kind of “dark side of Aquarius” cue here, which in keeping with the whole notion that the horror and B movies cultures, which arose out of the 60s, were continuing on an esoteric occult-Satanism that was always hidden just under the surface of the hippie era (The Rolling Stones, Kenneth Anger, etc.). In this connection, The Wicker Man (1973) may have influenced this film. And note that Hollywood in this era consistently associated paganism with evil, even as neopaganism flourished in California.
The trickster archetype comes into play here. Caesar identified the chief god of the Celts to be “Mercury,” and Cochrane says of his motive: “I do love a good joke; and this is the best joke ever: a joke on the children.”
Halloween is on Sunday, so “black sabbath”—implicit Satanism. From imdb:
When Cochran orders one of his humanoids to roll the Silver Shamrock commercial for the Kupfer family while they are being held in Test Room A, he presses the numbers 666.
In the opening sequence, right before the jack-o-lantern starts repeatedly flashing at the end, its triangle (pyramid) nose is drawn in. Cf. the all-seeing-eye designon the fortune teller toy in Cochran’s factory.
Social Solvent
Lead is divorced and has a bad relationship with his ex-wife, such that he can’t persuade her to take the masks away from the children on Halloween before the Big Giveaway. At the same time, normal, healthy family life is portrayed as lame, stupid, and slightly awful, in the form of the salesman and his wife and son. The salesman is depicted as a stereotypical 1950s “traveling salesman” dad, empty and corny and deep down a little mean—a character right out of Niagra (1953).
As usual, a horror movie deliberately conditioning kids to despise the prospect of normal, decent family life while showing them the (in this case deadly) social brokenness that results from that rejection. As in the Nightmare on Elm Street films and many other horror movies, the filmmakers are telling their audiences, through their own occult language, that the audience is being subjected to psychological warfare aimed at their psychological destruction, and that the audience’s consent to their own destruction both licenses and causes this destruction to occur. Consider my notes on mass omega programming from NMOES Monarch episodes.
Misc.
The ending is incomplete in the movie: we don’t know if the third network pulls the ad or not. But in the novelization, it plays and many children die screaming.
Note that the shop owner’s dying words—“They’re going to kill us”—echo almost subliminally into the subsequent title screen (“October 24”).
[1] On that score, note that the mother of the corny family gets tipsy and hysterical from the effect of the TV, so although it only kills people wearing the masks, the implication is that it has a broader psychoactive effect.
