SPOOKY MEETS KOOKY
The unlikely 25th-anniversary celebration of Hocus Pocus, a film critics reviled in 1993
Twenty-five years ago, the three shrieking witches of Hocus Pocus flew across the big screen and promptly vanished.
Resurrected from the dead 300 years after they were hanged, the Sanderson sisters — Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy — set out on a mission to suck the life out of children on Halloween night so they could be young again. But for all its wackiness, the July 1993 movie seemed to be stuck in a kind of Halloween-flick purgatory: too campy for a horror film, too creepy for a family film. Critics hated it.
Robert Ebert, giving it one star, described Hocus Pocus as one giant inside joke that nobody will explain to you, so you “stare indifferently at the screen” and don’t know what’s so funny.
The Washington Post’s Desson Howe described it as a “future videotape disguised as a movie,” predicting that in the near future you would find it buried in the rental-store bins or as a $5.95 deal if purchased with three bags of Halloween candy.
But sometime between then and now, Hocus Pocus came back from the dead — reincarnated as a beloved cult classic soaked in ’90s nostalgia that, somehow found a spot in the millennial canon of annual required watching.
The movie marked its 25th anniversary on Oct. 20, with a 90-minute special on ABC Spark, filmed before an audience at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It featured a performance of Midler’s rendition of I Put a Spell on You, a costume contest and commentary about the making of the film from original cast members. Parker said what she remembered most was “how awful we were as characters,” set on “destroying children.” Najimy recited her “I smell children” line to loud applause. Midler said that above all she liked flying on a broomstick the most, hoisted in the air by wires.
“I mean, we had no idea at the time,” Najimy said.
“You never know which ones are going to fly away and disappear into the night like broomsticks and which ones are going to magically seep into the zeitgeist and the veins of you-all forever.”
Hocus Pocus started as a bedtime story the movie’s producer and cowriter, David Kirschner, told his daughters. The cinematic result: a bucktoothed, Midler as Winifred, a child-sniffing, Najimy as Mary and a boy-crazy Parker as Sarah, who enlist the help of a zombie named Billy and their spell book on their mission to kidnap kids. They spend most of their time pursuing a boy named Max, his little sister Dani and Max’s teenage crush after Max, a virgin, lights the cursed candle that brings the Sanderson sisters back to life. A discomfiting number of jokes about teenage virginity ensue.
The film raked in $39 million at the box office but had cost $28 million to make.
“Looking back to 1993, critics just really didn’t know what to make of Hocus Pocus,” Aaron Wallace, author of Hocus Pocus in Focus: The Thinking Fan’s Guide to Disney’s Halloween Classic‚ said. “You had a child die onscreen in the first 10 minutes, and then you have adults obsessing over a teenager’s virginity for every 10 minutes after that. And then in the middle of it, Bette Midler stops to sing a song. I think critics were just flummoxed. But as it happens, I think it’s that blend of spooky meets kooky that imprinted on a young generation.”
The nostalgia factor, Wallace said, has been the film’s most obvious lifeblood.
The movie appeared to gain more popularity than ever in the mid-2000s, when it began to air regularly every fall. ABC Family’s 3 Nights of Halloween (now ABC Spark’s 31 Nights of Halloween), “played an incalculable role” in the film’s re-emergence, Wallace said.
There are now memes, costumes, merchandise, trivia nights and even drinking games for Hocus Pocus watch nights. A remake, which will not feature the original cast, is in the works, the Disney Channel announced last fall.
In 2014, Midler said she was “SHOCKED ... totally shocked” at the “cult status” the movie had attained in a Reddit “ask me anything” thread. She would later pull out her Winifred costume while on tour in 2015 to perform I Put a Spell on You, which in the movie she sings show-tune style on stage at a high school gymnasium, hoping the crowd will “dance until you die.”
“All of us are just stunned,” she wrote at the time. “Kathy, Jessica and I have talked about it. We are totally thrilled to death. Because when it came out, it laid a tiny little bit of an egg, so we didn’t expect much. And now look at it! OCTO - BER is HOCUS POCUS MONTH!”
“We will never forget (Hocus Pocus),” Najimy said Saturday. “Mainly because you won’t let us.”