![]() ![]() In this context, there seems to be a trepidation to scare and an unwillingness to fully frighten younger audiences. In 2022, Disney’s non-Marvel and non-Lucasfilm live-action output is relegated almost entirely to remakes of animated classics or, ahem, Disney+ sequels to old favorites. For starters, Disney films that are actual live-action adventures with kids embarking on heroic journeys, be they during Halloween or any other time of the year, have largely gone extinct. ![]() What’s striking about it today, however, is how it stands even further apart from modern Disney films. Luckily, it found life on the Disney Channel as a perennial October staple year after year throughout the ‘90s, and that legacy has been passed all the way down to parents now showing their children the original movie on Disney+. The sequences mentioned above were considered perhaps darker than typical Disney fare, while the rest of the movie is an all-ages haunted house spooktacular with the richest of oranges and blacks, and greens and purples, ever put into a seasonal spectacle for the whole family. And when Parker sings “Come Little Children,” beckoning the kids of Salem to the same doom that befell poor Emily, there’s something, well, bewitching at work.Īs has been well-recorded, Hocus Pocus was not the instant Halloween classic it’s now remembered to be. The movie’s core audience will not treat it only as a joke when they curse the room full of adults to “dance until you die.” They won’t laugh either when the Sanderson Sisters steal baby Thora Birch, who also plays a little sister, during the end of the movie’s second act. You can bask in Midler and her onscreen sisters breaking bad and running amok, amok, amok, but in the back of your head, their sinister endgame is clear. It also creates immediate stakes for that audience. ![]() But it’s horrifying enough for its target demographic. I’d hardly call the beginning of Hocus Pocus a horror movie, even by kids’ standards. The prologue of the movie then ends with the witches singing and cackling as they’re hung by the neck until they are dead, and the parents of poor Thackery never knowing what happened to their son, or why that damned black cat is trying to follow them home. Afterward, the three evil witches turn their attention on Thackery, damning him to take the shape of a black cat. There’s no close-up in the final edit of her fate, but it’s still there, sitting in a background where a child’s eye might wonder. One senses there was coverage footage not used in the moment where Midler, Parker, and Najmy bask in being young again-or, at least, younger as Winifred qualifies-since behind them, crumpled beneath a frightful old woman wig, sits a used and withered Emily. And Emily isn’t just killed at the beginning of a Disney movie-she has her soul sucked out by the three otherwise ostensibly goofy witches who stop the yucks long enough to murder a kid. Indeed, the opening of Hocus Pocus clearly went through some heavy tinkering in the editing room given how grim the implications are when young 17th century Puritan Thackery Binx (Sean Murray) sees his even younger sister, Emily (Amanda Shepherd) killed. Even so, there were a few moments where it was a bit intense for a seven year old. ![]() It is a perfect Halloween movie for children. And I did, from the scene of Kathy Najimy’s witch riding a vacuum cleaner to the instantly iconic moment of Bette Midler’s Winifred Sanderson singing “I Put a Spell on You” with Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker as her witchy backup singers. Twelve months older and wiser, I was deemed seasoned enough to enjoy a Disney confection with a spooky flavoring. Nevertheless, I didn’t see the movie until it was on VHS about a year later, and ready for another Halloween season. ![]()
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