"A 131-year-old warehouse that provided the backdrop for one of the most misunderstood films in horror movie history is undergoing demolition in Northern California.
Up until 2022, fans of the “Halloween” franchise could easily recognize the exterior of the Loleta Creamery, an old milk-bottling plant that stood in for the sinister Silver Shamrock Novelties factory in the third installment of the series, “Halloween III: Season of the Witch.” But that December, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Humboldt County, rattling the already crumbling building and leaving its roof partially collapsed.
The writing was on the wall — and the loose bricks were falling into the right of way on Loleta Drive, making for a public health and safety hazard, per one staff report. Bulldozers began reducing the landmark to a pile of rubble earlier this month. When they’re done, it’s not clear how much of the building, if any, will remain.
“I’m not a fan of taking down history,” Nadia Matthews, who co-owns the creamery with her husband Dave and bought the property three months before the earthquake, recently told the Times-Standard. “We’re gonna try and save what we can.”
For now, two sections of the main building that are made up of unreinforced masonry and more prone to seismic damage will be removed, as will a separate multistory structure in the back of the property, Humboldt County spokesperson Catarina Gallardo told SFGATE in an email. “The entire building is not being demolished at this time,” Gallardo said. Because the property is privately owned, the county can’t confirm how the site will be used in the future.
Dating back more than a century, the historic plant was initially incorporated as the Diamond Springs Creamery in 1892, separating its first pound of milk the following summer. The property changed hands several times before large concrete and brick buildings replaced the original wooden structure starting in 1917. It was perhaps best known for producing World War II rations of powdered ice cream mix and baby formula, which were distributed nationwide; Loleta’s Main Street once bustled with small creameries. One by one, they shuttered — as did the ailing town’s bakery, cheese factory and meat market — and the Loleta Creamery was abandoned decades ago, ceasing production in 2007 before it was used as a storage space and gradually fell into disrepair.
Still, it was the ennui of the town (population 532) that inspired director Tommy Lee Wallace and producer Debra Hill to set the climactic scenes of “Halloween III” there. Audiences were famously taken aback by the 1982 horror classic starring Tom Atkins, long considered an outlier in the series that has been reclaimed as a sleeper hit among cult audiences in recent years. The film took an abrupt, pagan-meets-science fiction turn with android human replicas and cursed masks, with the town rechristened Santa Mira in a nod to the fictional place where “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was set. It was also the only installment in the series up to that point that did not feature its star slasher, Michael Myers, or its protagonist, Laurie Strode.
That was always the intent of original writers John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who never wanted Myers to be the focus beyond the first film, instead expressing a desire to make an anthology series set on Halloween night that featured a new terror with every entry, a la “The Twilight Zone.” Wallace, a frequent collaborator of the duo who was the production designer for the original film and actually appeared as Myers in its iconic closet scene, was on the same page. When he was approached to direct “Halloween II,” he turned it down after producers forced them to continue following the same template, insisting it would be another hit.
In a way, they were right: “Halloween II” grossed $25 million at the box office against a $2.5 million budget. The demand for a third movie was there, and the following year, Carpenter, Hill and Wallace finally got their wish to go in a different direction, describing the forthcoming sequel in elevator pitches as “witchcraft meets the computer age.”
Viewers didn’t get it. Roger Ebert, in his 1.5-star review, called it “a low-rent thriller from the first frame.” The Sacramento Bee said it was “perhaps the worst movie ever created.” Though it still managed to turn a profit, “Halloween III” was the lowest-grossing film of the franchise yet at $14.4 million.
But as the juggernaut of a series ballooned to 13 films in ensuing decades, “Halloween III” stood out as one of the more thought-provoking entries. With time, consideration and acceptance, fans embraced it for demonstrating skepticism of advancements in technology, the evils of consumerism and corporate power, not to mention the brilliantly irritating earworm of a jingle used to advertise the Silver Shamrock mask factory that echoes in a foreboding countdown throughout the film.
After a Q&A panel was held with Wallace for a 30th-anniversary screening of “Halloween” at Los Angeles’ New Beverly Theater in 2010, the director claimed he was “flabbergasted” by the crowd’s enthusiasm. “That was the first inkling I had that anyone cared,” he said in an interview included on the Scream Factory DVD and Blu-ray for the film, per Fangoria. (
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