The greatest Halloween movie ever made

Ignore the doubtlessly worthless remake.

This year is the 29th anniversary of the release of the Disney film Hocus Pocus, which itself would be an unremarkable observance but for the fact that Disney this year released a sequel to the movie—one that, if we’re allowed to be at all honest about this sort of thing, is virtually certain to suck, and suck hard. I mean, look: Is there anyone alive anymore, anywhere, who thinks to themselves: “Oh boy, they’re rebooting/remaking/sequel-ing that iconic media property from my late-80s/early-90s youth, and I bet it it’s going to be really good?” Of course not. We’ve all been at this for years and we know how this plays out. It’s all trash.

Well, whatever. I happen to reject the perennial claims that studios are “ruining” old cinematic works by releasing newer, worser versions of them. You can’t touch a fantastic product once it’s been done, any more than you can ruin a meal you once ate by eating a worse one later on. And Hocus Pocus is really good—it is, as a matter of fact, one of the finest seasonal movies ever made, and without a doubt the best Halloween one. Twenty-nine years have not changed that. Time has been kind to it.

Hocus Pocus, for those who have been living on the Bokak Atoll for the past three decades and are unaware of it, tells the story of the Sanderson sisters, a trio of evil witches from colonial-era Salem, Massachusetts, who were executed during that time for being…well, you know. They stay good and dead for three hundred years before they are accidentally resurrected on Halloween night by modern Salem resident Max Dennison, who, along with his sister and his girlfriend, must figure out a way to kill them.

The setup works in no small part because it eschews the really unnecessary convention, popular in most present-day filmmaking, to give the villains a deeply meaningful raison d'être of some kind to explain their villainry. The Sanderson sisters are evil, they’re witches, they seek nothing other than to literally suck the souls out of children in order to preserve their own youth and vitality. They’re bad and they have to be defeated. There is a profound utility in that sort of simplified storytelling, largely because it is so reflective of real life: When someone is trying to hurt you in some way—to ruin you or main you or kill you—you don’t really care how they got there, who made them that way, or why they’re bad. You just need to make them stop. No need to ask questions.

(Early reviews indicate that the sequel attempts to shoehorn a clumsy “pseudo-feminist rationale” for the evil origin of the witches, making them into “Salem outcasts” who by dint of their isolation are preyed upon by an evil being. Sounds truly awful.)

Beyond the utility of the villains themselves, Hocus Pocus actually makes strong use of its characters as players in an effective Bildungsroman, to the point that its protagonists actually experience meaningful growth of the kind most of us aspire to in our daily lives. At the beginning of the story Max can barely be bothered to take his little sister Dani out trick-or-treating, and by the time Halloween night is over he very easily and unhesitatingly puts his own life up for sacrifice in exchange for hers. (“What a fool to give up thy life for thy sister's,” Winnifred Sanderson hisses at him, proving that Max has figured out in just 17 years what Winnifred hasn’t in 400.) Dani, too, grows considerably over the course of the night; she begins Halloween playacting as a witch, and by the time the sun rises she has been confronted with, and accepted, the momentous and really awful facts of death better and more fulsomely than the real witches themselves. (It’s not a mistake, narratively or thematically, that the movie finishes with them dead and her alive.)

Then, too, the film explores deep and meaningful themes of duty, obstinance, obsession and loss, to extents that verge on the uncomfortable, at least for a kid’s movie. Prior to their death in early Salem, the sisters suck the life out of local girl Emily Binx; her brother, Thackery, witnesses her death, and for his anguish the witches turn him into an immortal black cat, doomed “to live forever with his guilt.” Thackery does live forever—or at least until the early 1990s—and in the intervening centuries his thoughts have obviously become wholly eclipsed with both forestalling the witches’ return and ending their lives once they do come back. His plain guilt and misery over his sister’s death, coupled with his being consumed by a singleminded desire for revenge, may have lasted forever. But in the end it is broken not just by the defeat of the Sandersons but more importantly by the warmth and love of a little girl—Dani—the likes for which he has been yearning for nearly half a millennium. “You're going to turn me into one of those fat, useless, contented house cats,” Thackery complains to her, which is an oblique way of saying that he will be well-fed, free of his centuries-old mania, and well-loved. He is plainly relishing the prospect. Grief can at times be so profound that it causes us to forget the touch of the very things we are grieving; it can even happen to undead cats.

These are high stakes for a kid’s movie, but that was kind of how things used to be, back before we decided that kids need to be indefinitely sheltered from the inevitable difficulties of life and that the media they consume should teach them anything and everything but those things. Actually the film itself goes beyond the merely instructive and essentially verges on full-scale Grimmian illustrative horror. There’s this whole business of literally sucking out the souls of children, after all, which the witches at one point actually do, on-screen, mind you. In modern Salem, meanwhile, in one of the great Disney musical sequences of all time, Winnifred and her sisters curse every adult in the city, ordering them to “dance until [they] die,” which is, when you think about it, a genuinely terrible fate to contemplate: these mothers and fathers would presumably continue dancing until they began dying of thirst, heart attacks and/or total exhaustion, collapsing with bloodies feet and continuing to wiggle their cursed hips on the dance floor as the life left their bodies. Oh yeah, and while that’s happening the sisters summon all the town’s children to their evil shack in order to suck out their souls. Imagine dancing until your heart explodes while your precious babies become literal food for hellspawn. This is a children’s movie!

It is a children’s movie, and its unsparing treatment of true horror can seem, with the passage of 29 years, to be rather incongruous if not downright cruel. But we forget how it used to be. This is a children’s movie made in the way we used to make them—with the knowledge that children are actually just little adults in training, that they are capable of both profound understanding and tremendous acts of service and sacrifice, and that it is better to get them acquainted with the hard things earlier rather than later.

One of the most difficult lessons children have to learn, of course, is that adults are both sometimes really bad and sometimes really inept. For the child protagonists in this movie, the grown-ups are either trying to eat them or are off at a party without a care in the world. And yet still they save the day, and the deep, natural responsibility impressed upon them does not seem lost to them when it’s over. (“You saved my life,” Dani marvels to Max after the sisters blow up, to which he replies: “I had to. I'm your big brother.”) Like all the great heroes of all the great fables, those of Hocus Pocus—Max in particular—have become not just wiser but gooder. The world is a better place not just because some evil has been driven out of it but because a considerable amount of good has been created, ex nihilo, within it.

Like some of the all-time great movies ever made—Shawshank, Office Space, Willy Wonka, many others—Hocus Pocus was effectively a flop at the box office and only attained what the critics rather stupidly call “cult status” via home media and television. But calling a movie a “cult film” implies that the appreciation of it is somehow furtive and that it has no appeal beyond a limited set of artistic foibles. Yet Hocus Pocus is about as mainstream as it gets, both cinematically and thematically: It is well-shot, well-casted, well-directed, and its themes—of love, of sacrifice, of death, of life, of despair, of hope—are immediately accessible to anyone. They got it right with this one, which is one more reason, if you needed it, that a second installment is completely unnecessary. It’s okay to just make a really good movie and leave it at that; for 29 years that’s what Hocus Pocus has been, and after everyone has forgotten the lamentable sequel, it will still be thus.