Last of the October horror movies with my wife is this one. Which to be clear is the 1973 George Romero movie, not the 2011 Nic Cage movie.

So the thing about George Romero is that I’ve never seen one of his movies before. I understand he did a bunch of zombie stuff, and I’ve gathered from cultural exposure that he stuffs them with Social Commentary Relevance stuff, but if you had pressed me about him, I would have said that he was a shlockmeister like Sam Raimi or Wes Craven or whatever.

But this movie makes me wonder if maybe he’s not more Social Commentary Relevance with only a side of horror? Because allegedly this is a movie about witches, but turns out they’re really the Wicca kind of witches, and this is actually a movie about feminism — or more accurately, “women’s lib,” because that’s the particular strain of feminism that it’s focusing on, the stifled housewives yearning to breathe free stuff. (In fact, the movie was originally going to be titled “Jack’s Wife,” before being released as “Hungry Wives” so they could pretend it was softcore porn (there is technically some nudity in it, but not very much at all), and then eventually getting this title after his zombie success made a horror tie-in seem more commercially viable.)

But and so, yeah, this is the story of a middle class housewife whose husband is a shithead (he hits her at one point, and it’s extremely un-shocking when he does, because you kinda already got that vibe from him). She has an affair with her college-aged daughter’s boyfriend (ew, but also the boyfriend is a teacher and the daughter is his student, so double ew) who keeps calling her “Mrs. Robinson” and is himself a shithead, and then she gets really into witchcraft, like joining a local coven and doing some spells at home.

And so there’s this tension in a movie like this of, is magic real? does the supernatural exist? And the movie plays with that a lot by having a demon-masked intruder break into her house and attack her in a dream sequence that repeats over and over with variations, but there really is nothing supernatural in the movie, and ultimately that dream sequence isn’t leading up to any demonic witchcraft stuff, but about her freaking out when her husband gets home from a business trip a day early and is fumbling at the door, whereupon she shoots and kills him.

As social commentary, it feels a little obvious, and Romero is probably not the ideal person to have made a movie about feminism, because you don’t get the sense he leaned into learning about the subject particularly hard — during the protagonist’s affair with the daughter’s boyfriend, there’s at least twice that a scene reads as rape, but then the movie is treating it as consensual, so that’s a thing.

I think where this movie is most interesting is as a period piece, really. It’s an interesting portrait of what ’70s people were thinking about, and how — god help us all — they were decorating their houses.