A
set piece of 1982's
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the sleepy Northern
California town of
Santa Mira, home to Silver Shamrock Novelties. You know, that sinister company owned by
dark magic users who magic-and-science up some very unusual
Halloween masks. But wait.... is this the first we've seen of this town? No, nor the last, not by a long shot. For we were earlier introduced to Santa Mira in the 1956 film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (changing the name from the real town of
Mill Valley in the 1954 source novel,
The Body Snatchers, because filming there would've been too costly). The earlier film famously portrays Santa Mira as the town first overtaken by "pod people," strange replicates of human residents. Santa Mira, here, begins as the quintessential American town caught up in
extraterrestrial weirdness. And according to the
Medium piece below (which I stumbled across late in the game), the
Halloween III usage was intentional, based on that
Body Snatchers location.
The name was again used for locations of generally sinister or bizarre goings-on in things including the 1987 late-run
Airwolf episode "A Town for Hire" (at the point in the series where the original main cast had been substituted out for fillers in a vain attempt to extend the life of the show), where secret
laser weapons are being tested by
bad guys. It was name-dropped again in the 1992
Chevy Chase vehicle,
Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and in 2004
Stephen King used it in
The Dark Tower VII (which is starting to feel like all usage being a tribute), and it again appears in a 2008 episode of the
cartoon Ben 10: Alien Force, and in several of the 2010s
Sharknado movies. Other mentions exist, too trivial to
catalogue.
So what gives? Obviously "Santa Mira" sounds like a real place name -- a reference perhaps to an equally fictional
Saint named "
Mira" (
Spanish for "to
look") (the
Medium's piece thinks it has to do with "looking deeper"). And obviously there's a lot of incestuousness amongst the creatives writing for different projects, such that some writers are bound to have been close with others who were on things which used the name. But.... perhaps there's something here truly deeper still. Perhaps if you actually go searching up in the broader stretches of Northern California, and the long and quiet roads make your
attention drift for a bit from exactly where it is that you are, perhaps you will indeed find a sort of a
nexus town bearing this name. It will be never quite along the same routes, or with the same
scenery, for an interdimensional place prone to visits from
aliens and mutated
beasts and
witches and
warlocks (and garden-variety
warmongers), is something real -- but by the same measure, unreal.
*
Medium has a quite lengthy piece on this
*
Fandom associates it mostly with the Halloween film
*
Insider's view of the Airwolf episode
Going places for Live Deliciously: The 2024 Halloween Horrorquest