How Halloween Ends Pays Major Respect to Halloween III: Season of the Witch

While Halloween III: Season of the Witch is considered the outlier of the Halloween franchise, it still has a number of passionate fans, which includes Halloween Ends director David Gordon Green. In fact, Green is such a proponent of the film that the credits in Halloween Ends are entirely modeled after the color scheme of the titles in Season of the Witch, which not only serves as a tribute to that film, but also reminds audiences that the two adventures have quite a few things in common, namely how they are both departures from what audiences are expecting. Halloween Ends is in theaters and on Peacock now.

While a majority of Halloween films utilized an orange font, Green specifically used a blue-colored font to signal how different Ends is from other experiences. More than merely being a coincidence, Green confirmed this nod to ComicBook.com.

"Even the font of [Halloween Ends] is blue instead of orange when we're doing our title sequences, which is a little nod to Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which was its own curveball to the franchise," the filmmaker shared.

Following the tremendous success of the original Halloween, John Carpenter and Debra Hill co-wrote Halloween II knowing that the studio would develop a sequel anyway and they hoped they could kill off Michael Myers definitively. This allowed Halloween III to pivot to explore an entirely unrelated story that was connected to the holiday that didn't require the Myers mythology, setting up a franchise where each film could be a different Halloween-centric story. Season of the Witch explored an evil mask-maker who implanted devices in Halloween masks that would kill any child wearing them when a specific jingle played on television.

Regardless of the merits of Season of the Witch, fans were immensely disappointed to see a movie with "Halloween" in its title that had nothing to do with Myers, minus an in-world commercial that advertises a network broadcast of the original Halloween movie. The film's disappointments caused the anthology plan to be abandoned entirely and the next film focused on Michael Myers' comeback.

This isn't Green's first nod to Halloween III, as both Halloween and Halloween Kills featured trick-or-treaters sporting the iconic skull, witch, and jack-o'-lantern masks made famous in that sequel.

Halloween Ends is in theaters and on Peacock now.

Did you catch the reference to the film? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!