Every Halloween, Reverse Shot presents a week’s worth of perfect holiday recommendations. Read past incarnations in our series “A Few Great Pumpkins.”

First Night:
The Bad Seed

Looking around in 2025, one might be forgiven for feeling utterly helpless in the face of evil. But what if that evil—unrepentant and irremediable—were localized in one small unit, easily overcome and physically weak? A child, a little girl in blonde pigtails, perhaps. Would that make it simpler to eradicate? And what if it were your child, and only you knew the truth about her? Framing the basic premise of 1956’s The Bad Seed as a series of questions feels apt, as it’s the kind of film that seems to talk directly to the viewer: what would you do?

This horror peculiarity fits squarely into the mold of fifties women’s melodramas (the men are ineffectual or absent entirely) even while it invents an entirely new subgenre with gruesome glee: the evil kid movie. Four years before Village of the Damned made it easy on the viewer by framing its monstrous humanoid tots as the vanquishable spawn of supernatural beings, versatile Hollywood workhorse Mervyn LeRoy’s very strange The Bad Seed locates its tiny menace in American suburban nowheresville, and what’s worse is that little Rhoda Penmark is not the result of extra-terrestrial impregnation. Unflaggingly polite and well-spoken, she’s a sociopath who’s all too human, easily manipulating those around her into getting what she wants, and becoming murderous with rage when she doesn’t. The film, based on a hit 1954 Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson, which was in turn based on a novel by William March, a poor, troubled soul who struggled with his sexuality and who died mere months before the play premiered, asks basic—and eternally troubling and unresolved—questions about nature versus nurture. This evergreen horror topic reared its head again in this year’s prestige streaming polemic Adolescence. But even that solemn inquiry into the harmful effects of rampant technology and incel culture on our youth, in trying to find answers as to why an angel-faced 13-year-old would coldly murder his schoolmate, leaves room for us to see him as a frightening, rotten aberration as much as a victim of his time.

The Bad Seed forgoes self-seriousness, but it’s certainly in the business of diagnosis. The rise of mainstream psychoanalysis in the forties led to wider armchair psychologizing in the fifties, and Anderson’s play revels in having its characters identify and categorize the functional sociopathy of its pipsqueak fiend. Rhoda’s suffering mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), grows suspicious that Rhoda (11-year-old Patty McCormack) was responsible for the brutal death of little Claude Daigle, who drowned at the school picnic and was found with bruises on his knuckles. And while their busybody upstairs neighbor Monica (Evelyn Varden) claims with no small amount of self-satisfaction that she’s “a student of psychoanalysis” and is fascinated by historical murderers, her love and admiration for little Rhoda’s politesse blinds her to the child’s wickedness.

The only other person who sees the potential for evil behind those bright eyes and freshly scrubbed apple-cheeks is the apartment building’s toad-like handyman Leroy (Henry Jones), who has the “mind of an eight-year-old boy,” is treated with condescension by everyone, and sleeps in the cellar. Perhaps as a way of getting back at the privileged middle-class snobs he caters to, he teases and taunts the child, accusing her of maleficence. The tragic Mrs. Daigle, Claude’s grieving, alcoholic mother, played by Eileen Heckartcalls Christine a “superior person,” evidently resentful of the Penmarks’ status and money. The question of what makes a human “superior” or “inferior” haunts Christine as well: while trying to uncover the origins of her daughter’s nature, asking whether evil is learned or inherent, a product of environment or heredity, she discovers an awful truth about her own birth mother. Is violence inherited? Can it skip generations?

This is dark, silly, but also genuinely nasty stuff, and, while keeping its horrific violence off-screen, The Bad Seed gets under the skin in ways unlike any other movie. Its bright, even lighting and performance blocking—which have led many over the years to label it with the dreaded “stagebound”—actually serve to make it all the more disturbing and stultifying, a portrait of American anonymity concealing a festering dread. (Don’t miss the paintings on the apartment’s walls, featuring unsettling, silhouetted figures and ominous houses, all obscurity and shadow.) It might have been the “stagiest” mainstream American horror movie since Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), which was hampered by early sound recording limitations, but The Bad Seed’s “staginess” is central to its power because the things that are spoken of so frankly by its characters, in long, tortured monologues and harrowing two-handers, are otherwise unrepresentable. And the staid aesthetic is matched beat for beat by the demonic theater-kid energy of McCormack, who had originally performed the role on Broadway at age nine—an even more shocking age for a character who, over the course of the film, commits such off-screen atrocities as beatings, drownings, and burning a man alive.

One might wonder how such material could have ever passed muster with the entrenched Production Code. It barely did, but, as with so many films following the 1954 retirement of the Production Code Administration’s hard-liner Joseph I. Breen, the bad stuff got through after no small amount of finagling. When Warner Bros. first brought the property to the PCA, Breen’s successor Geoffrey Shurlock told the studio it was in violation of the Code, Section 12 of the Special Regulations on Crime: “Pictures dealing with criminal activities, in which minors participate, or to which minors are related, shall not be approved if they incite demoralizing imitation on the part of youth,” and furthermore, “The identification of youngsters with Rhoda, the eight-year-old, will be very complete. They will understand her effective killing of three persons who stood in her way, while at the same time, since Rhoda is a poised and charming child, they will completely miss her psychotic and tragic nature.” It was considered out of bounds even for Billy Wilder, who wanted to do it and asked Shurlock for a report on the film.

Fair spoiler warning here for this 70-year-old film, but it’s difficult to talk about The Bad Seed without gesturing to its oddball conclusion. Ultimately, LeRoy’s version at Warner Bros. was allowed to move forward on the condition that the ending would be altered. In the play, Christine decides to kill Rhoda with sleeping pills then off herself by gunshot; the final, terrible twist shows that Rhoda survived, will now live solely with her adoring but clueless dad, and all knowledge of her atrocities died along with her mother. In the film, Christine somehow survives her attempted suicide, and Rhoda, after recovering from the overdose, is given a Code-approved comeuppance: the God-like retribution of a lightning bolt. Hilariously, because of the Code, a major studio film was encouraged to bump off a kid in extravagant fashion.

To abruptly shift gears away from this shocking over-correction, the film then cuts to a playful “curtain call” of the entire cast. “As for you!” Kelly tsk-tsks, wagging her finger at McCormack before putting her over her lap and spanking her. It’s a presumed relief for the audience to remember these are all just happy, smiling actors playing parts. But it’s also futile: we’ve been exposed to evil, and you can’t stuff evil back in the box. —Michael Koresky

Second Night:
Halloween III: Season of the Witch

It begins on an empty road, in the dark vacuity of a California night, on the gray periphery of the city, where parking lots are wrapped with chain-link fences and the husks of unwanted cars are stacked. Synth notes scurry anxiously before a scared man comes running down the street into frame, lanky limbs flailing. On his trail is a car with blinding headlights, full of men garbed in vague professional attire and stoic in demeanor, searching, prowling, dangerously bland, determined.

The man is attacked, improbably escapes, collapses at a gas station in gothic lashes of rain moments after intoning “They're coming.” He has a mask clutched tensely in his fingers. An empathetic mechanic brings him to the hospital. Our unlikely hero, Dan Challis (frequent John Carpenter collaborator Tom Atkins), a doctor and deadbeat dad with an ex-wife and drinking problem, is called to the hospital to attend to the mysterious man; there, with profound terror, the man summons what little energy he has left and offers his final cryptic words: “They'll kill us all.”

One of the menacing men in vague professional attire arrives, and, with black-gloved fingers, crushes the poor guy’s skull, the mask still clenched in his quavering hand, which soon goes limp. The assassin departs, menacing in his undeterred, languorous gait, down fluorescent halls to his car. Challis pursues but is too late: the man sets himself on fire, leaving behind an inferno of gnarled plastic remnants, smoldering machine parts, and a burning enigma.

The dead man's daughter (Stacey Nelkin) shows up, and she and Challis collaborate to figure out what's going on. What they discover is weirder than anyone—the characters, the viewers—could possibly imagine.

Carpenter and Debra Hill never wanted their seminal Halloween to spawn sequels in the first place; they immediately recognized the trend they had unwittingly engendered and understood that Halloween's influence would quickly devolve into infantile stupidity and splatter. They only worked on the first sequel, bored as they crushed cans of beer while pecking away at their typewriters, because the producers were going to make the film whether they were involved or not. So, they came up with another idea: turn the Halloween franchise into an anthology of standalone films centered around that spookiest of holidays. It was a daring idea that jettisoned the standard conception of sequels, the diminishing echoes, ignoring what mainstream moviegoers wanted, which was—still is—more Michael Myers. Fading echoes on an icon.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch was written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, who performed a panoply of roles for Carpenter’s early films: as sound effects editor and art director on Assault on Precinct 13; production designer and co-editor of Halloween and The Fog; and, for a few shots in the first Halloween, he played The Shape, whose iconic mask he also repurposed, thriftily, from the Shatner mask. Wallace turned down the directorial job for Halloween II, feeling that he wasn't ready, but when Carpenter offered him the third film, he agreed to write and direct. (He would also later direct Vampires: Los Muertos, a very good low-budget sequel to Carpenter's Vampires, starring Jon Bon Jovi.)

In Wallace's film, an iniquitous Irishman named Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy) wants to pull the best Halloween prank ever. He runs a very successful company, Silver Shamrock, which makes gags and gizmos for the young and young at heart. But their new big-seller, which will certify their legacy, consists of a trio of grotesque/cute masks for kids: a skull with gaping lightless eyes, a crooked jack-o’-lantern, and a witch, green and ugly. Each is bejeweled with a logo-stamped button on the back which, we learn soon enough, contains magical splinters of Stonehenge, or something. It is all very silly, of course, yet the delirious kind of smart only genre cinema can be.

The masks are the must-have costumes of the year, like Jason and Freddy would be later in the decade, and the film shrewdly plays with the influence of the famous Michael Myers disguise on the holiday. The masks are advertised on every channel on every television with a mesmeric commercial featuring a catchy jingle (reminiscent of “London Bridge Is Falling Down”) and a pulsating, affable orange pumpkin. The ads promise a big giveaway on Halloween night, when all those kids who have convinced their parents to buy them the masks will gleefully gather around their TV sets in suburban living rooms across the country. The song and throbbing pumpkin will trigger nasty death, the baleful masks turning the kids’ encased heads into writhing swarms of bugs and venomous snakes. It’s a much more creative kill than a knife in the gut.

Why is Cochran doing this? For a laugh. Ha ha. His dastardly scheme, he tells us, harks back to the olden days of eldritch yore, when people took Halloween seriously, before kiddies in costumes and candy commercialized it. It's an evil made for the movies—ridiculous, violent, rich with macabre metaphor, visually resplendent.

If Halloween answers the audience’s pesky question, “Why is Michael Myers killing babysitters?” with a resounding, dogged, ambiguity, then Season of the Witch answers its own “Why?” the opposite way: with a deranged and explicit explanation that, in its sinisterness, its profound strangeness, the tarry black sense of amusement it inspires, is truly unexpected. When Challis figures out the scheme and tries—and fails—to stop it, Cochran catches him, wraps a mask around his face, and straps him to a chair. With equanimity and conviction, Cochran delivers a deranged showstopper of a monologue on the spiritual beauty and historical importance of killing children on All Hallows’ Eve. He departs, leaving Challis there to watch television. On the tube plays the original Halloween, censored for public broadcast and cropped to fit; he must witness the film, awaiting that fatal pumpkin. Carpenter’s mostly bloodless film was a galvanizing influence on the slasher genre, a cultural phenomenon with apparently eternal life, as the TV commercial for the film says, while Season of the Witch most certainly is not. Here, Carpenter's classic is a portent of doom, and the scene is perhaps a gag about the pearl-clutching claims from priggish moms and dads that violence in film directly creates violence in real life.

Season of the Witch is a bold and bizarre film, spiritually faithful to Carpenter’s anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist anger, with its depiction of maniacal mass production and the insidious seepage of greed into every facet of life—every life. It also shows an aesthetic kinship to Carpenter, with Dean Cundey shooting it in glorious Super 35, and Carpenter himself scoring, some of his best work. The key to the film’s singularly goofy greatness is that Wallace, an apt pupil, has a singular vision (and for a neophyte auteur!), and refuses to give in to listless reverence. Yet the film failed spectacularly, earning the ire of fans who wanted more of the same and grossing much less than the two previous films, while critics scoffed. Thus, Carpenter and Hill abandoned the series, and Michael Myers, that lumbering lunatic, with his Shatner face and big knife, returned to stab kids again, and again, and again. It makes you think of Challis bellowing into oblivion at the end: “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” —Greg Cwik

Third Night:
The Black Tower

No matter which direction you choose to run, it’ll always be in front of you, staring back over fences and treetops and terrace houses. It sounds like a riddle of the Sphinx—and you might be eaten alive depending on how you respond. This is some cinematic witchcraft from British experimental filmmaker John Smith: The Black Tower (1987), in which the laws of physical reality are no match for the racing imagination.

“I first noticed it in spring last year,” the narrator (Smith, in his distinctive lilt) recalls at the start of the film. We hear his voice—calm, at a cool remove—over a black screen. Or so we think. The narrator goes on to detail his memories of a strange black tower, improbably materializing all over London. We glimpse it beyond a busy highway, jutting up above stone walls, lurking behind a church. With each new vantage on the tower, Smith reels the viewer in closer. This building is not just everywhere; it is in pursuit, hungry. And if we accept that, then maybe, when we gaze upon these intervals of black screen, we’re seeing things from the narrator’s point of view. Maybe we’re inside the tower with him.

In reality, this eerie edifice was just a water tower, a specter over the grounds of Langthorne Hospital in East London. It was demolished just a few years after The Black Tower premiered, which serves up an extra helping of hauntology. But its functional purpose does nothing to explain why it looked so ominous: a jet-black Monopoly house perched atop a brick chimney, it resembles a cutout in the cheerful blue sky, as if James Turrell etched a portal to the void. Smith could see this tower from the window of his apartment at the time, and was captivated by its non-reflective paint, which revealed no dimensionality or detail; the film was a way for him to explore that uncanny effect. As Smith captures the tower from different angles and distances, the film stalks a wide circle around a fixed point, amassing a pointillist photo album of the area. The film ends with a new narrator (Anna Hatt) catching sight of the tower for the first time.

It’s hard to resist the spell Smith casts. As we speak, I have several browser tabs open to triangulate where the tower once stood and fill in the gaps in its history, but in the early 2000s, the photographer Ian Walker took this even further. Armed with a map and context clues from the film, he trudged out to the neighborhood surrounding Langthorne Hospital and attempted to draw up a shot diagram. In his photographs, we see how the area has changed since Smith filmed there: sections of the old hospital have been torn down, high-rises have been razed. Many structures and fences present in Smith’s compositions remain, but not the tower. In the wake of Smith’s film, Walker’s photographs instill an uncanny impression that the tower is not gone, but invisible—as if these buildings of the past are still present.

There’s a link between housing and haunting in Smith’s filmmaking. At one point in The Black Tower, Smith shows us the mid-’80s demolition of tower blocks at the Hackney Marshes: he flickers between two images of the landscape before and after the demolition, making the building appear and disappear in a flash, and then, jarringly, there is motion, the building crumbling into the ground in a sudden blast. These apartments were built in the ’50s as part of an idealistic public-housing initiative but fell into disrepair due to governmental neglect. The footage ruptures the procession of angles on the tower, and leads us to question the permanence of buildings anchored in solid ground; if they can be torn down, maybe it’s not so outlandish that they can also follow us. But how? A later film of Smith’s, Blight (1996), seeks to embalm the lives and memories of the East London residents whose homes were thoughtlessly bulldozed to make way for the M11 Link Road. As Smith loops images of builders knocking down walls, he makes this story of destruction less linear. Snippets of interviews with residents, chopped and remixed into poetic fragments by Eyes Wide Shut composer Jocelyn Pook, seem to hex the demolition work from beyond, smuggling the spirit of the place out of the rubble.

Many of the formal devices in Blight are familiar from The Black Tower, like color fields that gradually reveal themselves to be objects, and synesthetic associations between images and sounds. But the tell-tale heart of this film is its pulse-quickening voiceover: the impossible seems so tempting, so oddly logical. You could question the artifice of the editing, but it’s more fun to trust the voice, to doubt your sanity. Smith released his first film in 1975, just after the initial materialist wave that inaugurated the London Film-Makers’ Co-op—he took a course with Peter Gidal at the Royal College of Art—but felt a step apart for his interest in the seductive potential of narrative, finding structural film fairly dry otherwise. “For me, the films that are most interesting are the ones that in some way invent their own language,” Smith told The White Review.

Perhaps because it is so direct, plainspoken, and economical, the language of The Black Tower convinces us not just to suspend our disbelief but also to let it take us somewhere. And the film leaves that direction open; some have read the encroaching tower as a metaphor for depression, while Smith maintains the script is pure sci-fi pastiche (both, of course, can be true). The horror can come from anywhere. You’re running, and the tower keeps flashing in front of you, a new angle manifesting with each blink. There’s a sliver of blue sky in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, but it’s getting smaller by the second. I first noticed it in spring of last year. —Chloe Lizotte