In the age of streaming, it’s hard to imagine a time when you couldn’t find every movie in a series when you wanted it. You’d go to the local video store — and for more obscure horror films, not Blockbuster — and hope they had what you wanted. Maybe you started with Part III because the cover looked good. (The first Friday the 13th movie I saw was actually Jason X.) Filmmaker Jay Burleson and Dark Sky Films want to recreate that feeling. You may ask yourself “where am I in this franchise?” Then you’ll ask yourself “does it matter?”
Because The Third Saturday in October wasn’t really a classic (or wannabe classic) horror slasher series. Burleson “unearthed” Part 5, then found the one that started it all. You could watch them in order of when they were supposedly made, but that wouldn’t be in the right spirit. Clearly out of holidays so focusing on the unofficial ones around college football, the films center on masked killer Jakkariah Harding. Even the “first” film sounds like a sequel. But I’m a sucker for sincerely made slasher parody films, going all the way back to Student Bodies. To this day, I try not to think about horsehead bookends.
Take a look at the trailers and get ready for their release On Demand May 5th. Which is neither a third Saturday, nor October. But who’s counting?
From Dark Sky Pictures:
The long lost slasher franchise THE THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER is back!
Red Corpses LLC and Sleep Creature LLC are proud to announce they have partnered with Dark Sky Films to restore and release two entries in the long running slasher saga.
The series began in 1979 as a quick cash-in on John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. Series producer Frank Crafts, an Alabama native, believed he had a great idea for a horror film with Southern roots – what if HALLOWEEN were set in the South, and instead of a traditional holiday, it centered around a Southern institution: college football. Thus, THE THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER was born, a small-town slasher film revolving around a group of friends watching an annual football match between the Alabama-Mobile Seahawks and the Tennessee A&M Commonwealth. Unfortunately for them, an unstoppable killer named Jakkariah Harding shows up to murder them one by one.
The original film garnered little national attention but birthed multiple low-rent sequels throughout the 1980s before the franchise flamed out when the trashy fourth installment ran the series completely off the rails. Borrowing a page from the HALLOWEEN playbook, Crafts doubled down and attempted to resurrect the saga with an unrelated spin-off in 1990, but the series returned to the Jakkariah Harding storyline in 1994, utilizing a comedic approach to hopefully win back its audience. The series officially ended in 2000 with PART VI: THE LAST THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER, but the series ultimately fell victim to what producer Ian Cunningham refers to as “The Third Saturday Curse”, as the films slowly vanished off the face of the earth after a series of unfortunate events, including internal feuding, bankruptcy, a warehouse fire, and cheap VHS manufacturing leading to unplayable tapes.
With the assistance of Dark Sky Films, the creators of the saga have unearthed two of their lost films: the original offering from 1979, and the 1994 sequel THE THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER PART V.
