Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Last night I was playing some of Batman: Arkham Asylum on the PlayStation 3. It's a really fun game. The background is that Batman has captured The Joker and has brought him to Arkham Asylum, but it turns out that it's all a trap and that Arkham Asylum has been taken over by The Joker and his henchmen, and the staff, including Comissioner Gordon, have been taken hostage. Basically you play Batman and you have to explore the corridors of Arkham, fighting with The Joker's henchmen and all the other familiar Batman enemies, including The Riddler who has left a number of puzzles scattered around that you have to solve. It's a very involving game, and a lot of fun.

Later on I was watching the 1982 movie Halloween III: Season of the Witch, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. It's a very unusual sequel because, unlike every other movie in the Halloween franchise, this one does not focus on the indestructible psychopath Michael Myers. Instead it concerns the insane owner of a toy company called Silver Shamrock, who maufactures a range of popular children's Halloween masks which are advertised endlessly with an irritating countdown jingle ("Three more days to Halloween... Halloween... Halloween... Three more days to Halloween... Silver Shamrock"). However, it turns out that the masks are lethal booby traps which are due to be activated by a special signal transmitted on Halloween night. Apparently, the producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill, wanted to turn the Halloween franchise into a kind of anthology film series with a new seperate horror film released every year focussing on a different aspect of the Halloween season. However the idea was abandoned due to the total commercial failure of this movie. The original script was written by acclaimed writer Nigel Kneale, who created the Quatermass TV series, but he had his name taken off the film when his script was changed in order to make it more gruesome and violent.

I started writing my NaNoWriMo story yesterday. I got 2,026 words done yesterday. The target is to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November.

Today was yet another dull and quiet day in the office.