Season of the Witch: Romero's Suburban Witchcraft

George Romero shot this film in 1972 and called it Jack’s Wife. The distributor released it as Hungry Wives, cut it down by a substantial margin, and sold it to audiences expecting a sex picture. It has since circulated as Season of the Witch, after the Donovan song, under which name it has spent fifty years being described as Romero’s worst film by people who watched a mangled print at two in the morning.

It is his most sympathetic film, and one of the strangest things any American horror director made in the decade. It is also, structurally, a failure, and the two facts are related.

The wife in the title

Joan Mitchell (Jan White) is thirty-nine, married to a businessman named Jack who travels and slaps her, mother to a college-age daughter who has stopped needing her, resident of a Pittsburgh suburb with a golf club and a therapist and nothing whatsoever to do between nine and five.

Romero’s opening sequence is the best thing in the film and it announces a director nobody knew he was. Joan follows Jack through a wood in a dream. He strides ahead, checking his watch, letting branches whip back into her face. She trails behind in a housecoat. The dream continues into a kennel, a leash, a mirror with a shattered face — and the imagery is so nakedly Freudian that the film risks parody, except that Romero keeps cutting back to Joan’s face waking up in a nice bedroom in a nice house with nothing to do.

He returns to those dreams throughout, and they are where the picture lives. A masked intruder at the door. A leather-gloved hand. The wife alone in a large house at night listening to a noise that may be nothing, which is the horror of the suburban afternoon rendered exactly.

What the marketing could never accommodate is that Jack’s Wife is a film about boredom. Joan’s problem is that she has been retired from her own life at thirty-nine and told this was the prize. Her friends drink at lunch. Her therapist is useless. Her daughter is embarrassed by her. Romero, whose reputation was built on a farmhouse siege, sat down in 1972 and made a domestic drama about a woman with nothing left to be, and then let a witch walk into it.

The coven as a job offer

Marion Hamilton (Virginia Greenwald) is the local witch, and Romero’s treatment of her is the film’s cleverest move. She is not sinister. She holds readings in a comfortable house, she is calm and articulate and matter-of-fact, and she offers what amounts to a professional development course. There is a shop where you buy the equipment. There is a book to read. There is a procedure.

So Joan takes up witchcraft the way a suburban woman of 1972 might take up pottery or est or transcendental meditation — and Romero plays it entirely straight. The rituals are shot in the kitchen and the bedroom, with a chalk circle on the lino and a paperback propped open, and the mundanity is the argument. Joan is not seduced by evil. She is offered agency, cheap, by mail order, and she takes it because nothing else on offer contains any.

The film refuses to say whether the magic is real. Things happen after Joan performs the rituals; every one of them has a mundane explanation available. Romero holds that line to the end, which puts Jack’s Wife in the company of Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Eagle — films where the question of whether witchcraft works is far less interesting than the question of what a woman does with the belief that it might.

Where it breaks

Honesty demands the ledger. Jan White is good and occasionally very good, and the supporting cast around her is amateur in the specific Pittsburgh-repertory way that Romero’s early films always were. Ray Laine, as Gregg the young lecturer Joan sleeps with, plays a smug academic seducer with a smugness that exceeds the brief. The dialogue in the party scenes is dead. The pacing sags badly in the middle hour, and the distributor’s cuts have left seams you can feel even in the restored versions.

Romero’s own assessment was blunt — he had a tiny budget, he lost footage to it, and the film he wanted was longer and slower. The version we have is a compromise between his intentions and a distributor who wanted breasts. Roughly forty minutes are gone. What survives is a film with a great first twenty minutes, a great last ten, and a considerable amount of daytime drinking in between.

The technique, though, keeps flaring. Romero cut his own films and he was one of the great American editors; the dream transitions here are as good as anything in Martin, and the sound design during the ritual sequences — the amplified breathing, the dead room tone — does more with nothing than most studio horror of the period managed with everything.

The ancestor, and why it matters now

The obvious relative is Polanski’s apartment work — Repulsion especially, a woman alone in a domestic space with a mind coming apart, filmed from inside her perception. The truer ancestor is the woman’s picture of the 1950s, the Douglas Sirk register, where a wife’s dissatisfaction is the entire plot and the genre exists to contain it. Romero’s contribution is to give the wife a spellbook and see what the genre does with that.

The descendants are everywhere now. Every recent film about a woman finding power in a coven, every witch-as-liberation reading, runs through territory Romero mapped in a Pittsburgh suburb with no money and no idea he was early. The most direct heir is Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, which takes the same premise — a woman using ritual to get the life she was promised — and shoots it in lavish Technicolor pastiche, with a control of tone Romero never had the budget or the temperament for. Biller’s film is the better object. Romero’s is the one that had to invent the idea in a real kitchen, without irony, at a moment when the culture had no vocabulary for it and a distributor standing over him asking where the nudity was. Our folk-horror survey tracks the broader rediscovery cycle, and our Romero career piece makes the case that the social reading was always the whole project.

The film sits third in his run, between There’s Always Vanilla and The Crazies, in the stretch where Romero was actively refusing to make another zombie picture. The restorations that have appeared in the last decade — cleaned up, correctly titled, with the surviving material intact — are the first time most people have been able to see what he was doing.

The verdict: Jack’s Wife is a broken film with a real thesis, and the break was done to it rather than by it. It is Romero’s least competent picture and his most generous one. He looked at a woman his mother’s generation would have called lucky and understood that she was in a horror film already, and that the witchcraft was the least frightening thing to happen to her all year.

Spoilers below

The ending is the reason the film deserves its rescue.

Joan completes her initiation. Romero shoots the ceremony with the same flat domestic realism as everything else, and the mundanity gives it a genuine authority — there is no fire, no orgy, no goat, only a group of ordinary suburban adults performing a procedure in a living room.

Then the horror arrives, in the form of the film’s structural masterstroke. Joan, alone, believes an intruder is in the house. It is the masked figure from her dreams. She takes the gun that Jack keeps and she shoots him through the door.

It is Jack. Home early. Her husband, dead on the carpet of the house he bought her, killed by a woman acting on a dream she has spent the film being told was nothing.

The police accept it as a tragic accident, because a frightened housewife shooting a prowler is a story that Pittsburgh has a form for. Joan is never even questioned. The system that could never see her is the same system that now cannot imagine her guilty, and her invisibility acquits her.

The last scene is at a party. Joan is introduced to a group of women, and one of them asks who she is, and she says she is a witch. The title Romero shot this under was Jack’s Wife. That is the distance the picture travels, and he cuts to black the moment she arrives at it.

The distributor cut this down and called it Hungry Wives. Which tells you rather a lot about 1972, and about why it took fifty years for anyone to notice what Romero had actually filmed.