This spooky season, are you craving a film with child murder, necromancy, the erotic menace of witchy doom, and feline trauma? I don’t blame you for thinking I’m describing the latest Neon feature or whatever fresh hell Nic Cage is producing. But I’m actually referring to the 1993 Disney comedy and October staple Hocus Pocus.
Which is, in fact, a horror movie.
Not horror-adjacent or a cute little Halloween romp for the whole family. Absolutely not just a celebration of three misunderstood sisters who get a second stab at life and get to sing jaunty numbers to horny Massachusetts dads.
It’s a movie where three witch sisters resurrect themselves to murder children and consume their life force. A reanimated corpse with his mouth sewn shut is somehow the least disturbing character. A little boy watches his sister get murdered and is subsequently transformed into a cat, spending the next 300 years wandering Massachusetts with the thousand-yard stare of someone who’s seen some shit. And, most realistically, an entire town gets hypnotized by Bette Midler.
It Put A Spell On Us
The fact that we collectively agreed to classify it as a cozy family movie is one of the more impressive feats of mass denial in American culture. Somewhere along the way, we took a story about ritual sacrifice and said, Awwwwwww look at the fun, silly ladies! We did this because there’s a talking cat and Bette Midler wearing fake buck-teeth like she’s in an orthodontist commercial. But beneath the dreamy New England autumnal exterior lies a story that is an absolute goddamn nightmare.
As a society, we’ve become so emotionally attached to Hocus Focus that we overlook three ladies trying to juice kids for eternal youth. The Sanderson sisters (the aforementioned Bette Midler, Kathy Najimi, and Sarah Jessica Parker) are not misunderstood women reclaiming their power. They’re evil. But they’re also a fucking delight. Therein lies the problem.
When properly costumed and given a fun musical number, evil becomes difficult to take seriously. (See also: “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers.) Winifred Sanderson could announce that she’s turning the town’s children into soup and half the dads in the audience would ask for her Insta handle.
Meanwhile, poor Thackery Binx has been turned into an immortal cat. His sister’s been 86’d and he’s spent the better part of three centuries unable to die. Enter Max Dennison, a horny teen with the survival instincts of a suicidal hamster in a pet shop who accidentally unleashes the FoRcEs Of DaRkNeSs because he wants a girl to think he’s cool.
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimpering teen trying to get laid.
And yet! Yet! For all its necromancy and child murder, Hocus Pocus is still, somehow, one of the coziest movies ever made. This brings us to the real horror: nostalgia.
Inviting the Darkness In
Nostalgia is a scary haunted house, but we keep going in anyway. We’ve gotten quite good at ignoring the ghosts. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Memory is a magnificent little con artist. It puts a soft-focus filter over the whole goddamn wreckage and calls it “the good old days.” We fall for it every time.
I remember the living rooms with the October darkness pressed against the windows, people sitting near me who aren’t here anymore. I was small enough to remember Halloween feeling like the entire universe conspiring to make this night magical. Streetlights glowed like enchanted objects and plastic skeletons looked genuinely creepy. The world seemed meant just for me and my neighborhood pals. There we were, cute little kids in superhero caps and dollar store vampire teeth, wandering around in the dark and accepting candy sometimes from strangers like tiny, sugar-addicted lunatics.
It was both beautiful AND weird. We just didn’t know it yet, not really.
Halloween has always been about making the disturbing feel cozy. It’s my favorite holiday, maybe for this reason. We take things that scare the shit out of us and put googly-eyes on them. The darkness gets invited inside and we give it a fun-sized Snickers. (Maybe a full-sized one if you’re lucky!) And Hocus Pocus is the cinematic embodiment of this glorious psychological fuckery. A kid gets murdered, and we’re sitting under a fuzzy blanket and drinking hot cocoa, thinking Oh shit, I love autumn!!!
Halloween has always been about making the disturbing feel cozy. We take things that scare the shit out of us and put googly-eyes on them.
We don’t overlook the horror because it isn’t there. Instead, the coziness is doing a lot of work here. It’s giving the undeniable horror somewhere to live without letting it swallow you whole. We know the ghosts are there, but we know where they live now.
Perhaps that’s why we overlook Hocus Pocus’s deranged premise. We can’t go back. Time is a cruel bitch and so far, no one has found a candle to reverse it. But every October, we press play. The haunted house is warm and the monsters are hilarious.
So Happy Halloween, you sickos. Light your Jack-o’-lantern and hug your people. And for god’s sake, if a teen tells you he found an occult object to impress a cute classmate, take the goddamn thing away from them stat.
