Children on Toast and Other Musings: 30 Years of Hocus Pocus
For a while, the original Hocus Pocus movie existed in my mind in a pleasant little pocket of nostalgia alongside other campy ‘90s and early aughts movies like Halloweentown, The Witches, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I could remember their plots vaguely, but that was about it. It was a college friend who would quote the iconic, the immortal Winnifred Sanderson in our everyday conversations that got me back thinking about the movie. Eventually, I had to do a rewatch, and I have been rewatching it every October or so since.
I feel my experience with Hocus Pocus has some parallels with the general public’s. The movie started as a flop, losing Disney a cool few million. But then something interesting happened: yearly showings of the movie on TV eventually turned into a renewed interest. Sales for the movie spiked each year around Halloween, and this new interest shifted to different iterations of the main characters, the Sanderson Sisters — there’s a theme park attraction, an adorable short film, and even a lego set. It also resulted in, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, books. There’s an official cookbook (Hocus Pocus: The Official Cookbook), a spell book (The Hocus Pocus Spell Book), and on the franchise’s 25th anniversary in 2018, Hocus Pocus: The Sequel was released.
The 2018 book has two parts: a retelling of the original story and a second part that happens 25 years after the events of the first. In 1993, teenager Max takes his little sister Dani out trick-or-treating, runs into his crush Allison, and accidentally awakens the Sanderson Sisters 300 years after they’d been hanged for sucking the life force of a young girl to make them young again. Now that they’re back, they’re also back to their old ways, and Max’s little sister Dani is at risk of becoming their latest skin care treatment.
The rest of the night is spent working with new friends (like a black cat and a zombified ex-lover) to try and stop the witches’ sinister plan. Part two sees Max and Allison’s daughter Poppy and her friends having their own time against the witch sisters. It’s a cute story with diverse characters and a queer romance.
Just last year, we got a movie sequel with the original cast of the Sanderson Sisters (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy) that gave us a little peak into the sisters’ lives as kids (the actress playing young Winifred was perfect). The new movie engaged in the trend of redeeming villains, but just a little. We’re shown how the sisters were punished because Winifred wouldn’t marry a guy the church authority wanted her to, but any sympathies evaporate after the girls meet the Mother Witch (played by Hannah Waddingham) and she tells them to kill children to stay young. The usual hijinks ensue once the sisters are accidentally resurrected by a new cast of teens; there’s even a magical showdown in a Walgreens.
I’m due for a rewatch of the second movie, but I liked it when I first saw it last year. I thought it’d done a good job recapturing the feel of the first one, and it had some solidly funny moments. With our continued interest in witches, and Hocus Pocus’s 30th anniversary, the first movie released again in select theaters, and there was a Black Flame Ball that included a tour of Salem, MA where the movie was shot.
If you, like me, are here for the enduring camp of the Sanderson Sisters and would like to keep the vibes going, check out Spell on Wheels, a graphic novel about three witches who go on a revenge road trip; Bad Witch Burning, about a teen medium whose summonings get out of control; The Near Witch, about how missing children could be connected to a witch; and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, a cozy, witchy romance with found family.
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