What if Season of the Witch Wasn’t Halloween 3? Have a Look at Fan-Made Trailer for Halloween: Harvest of Souls
Steve Barton
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Here’s something for your post-Halloween hangover. Imagine, it’s 1985 and instead of Season of the Witch the filmmakers behind the budding Halloween series decided to stick with The Shape and deliver a third installment featuring Michael Myers.
We’ve got the trailer!
Actor Lane Hughes (You’re Next, V/H/S, A Horrible Way to Die) teamed with director Jay Burleson to create a retro trailer envisioning what Halloween: Harvest of Souls would have looked like. Kudos to the gang for coming up with something that actually looks like a 20-year old VHS trailer. They’ve even got a cool tale explaining the history of their Halloween 3 to go along with it. Read the backstory and take a peek at the video.
Halloween: Harvest of Souls Backstory
After the failure of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the rights to the Halloween franchise were lost in the shuffle of a merger, and a sequel to Halloween II was quickly rushed into production by a new team of producers. The new installment, Halloween: Harvest of Souls, was viewed as a direct sequel to the second film and would be a true Halloween III with Michael Myers.
The film was made on a shoestring budget, even less than Carpenter’s original, and did not feature a return by Jamie Lee Curtis. The character of Loomis returns, still played by Donald Pleasence, but in a limited capacity. To keep pace with the height of the ’80s slasher craze, Harvest of Souls featured extreme nudity and gore, and had yet to receive better than an X-rating before it was canned.
Original series producer Moustapha Akkad tied the rights up with a long legal battle, which he ultimately won, and Harvest of Souls was shelved altogether in favor of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, which was released in 1988, three years after Souls was filmed. Until recently, Harvest of Souls was nothing more than an urban legend, the original film print long lost, the knowledge of its very existence scarce. A lone VHS tape, found in an abandoned storage locker, containing the X-rated cut of the film and a very tame ‘PG’ trailer, recently surfaced and that brings us to the here and now. The release of the aforementioned trailer and proof that this urban legend is real.
Halloween: Harvest of Souls (1985) VHS trailer from Jay Burleson on Vimeo.
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