The most popular movie about American witches is one where the central coven kills a small child in the first ten minutes before being hanged in the town square in Salem, Massachusetts. These sisters rise to kill again when summoned by a virgin. They arrive alive and bewildered in the 1990s, where they worship the devil openly on screen, perform necromancy to raise the zombie form of one of their ex-lovers, and flirt with a bus driver who blithely offers to impregnate all three of them.
This film is, of course, Disney’s 1993 cheesy chowderfest, Hocus Pocus.
The Sanderson Sisters, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, Bette Midler, and Kathy Najimy, in 1993’s Hocus Pocus [Disney]
A thematically erratic tonal casserole directed by Kenny Ortega, this musical spook-story focuses on three witches from old Salem: Winifred (Bette Midler), Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker), and Mary Sanderson (Kathy Najimy). Brought back to life by virgin teen Max Dennison (Omri Katz), the trio immediately seizes on his younger sister, Dani (Thora Birch). They mean to suck the life out of her, just as they did to the child Emily Binx back in 1693. After killing Emily, they turned her brother Thackery into a black cat, who exists even now to thwart them and gain entry to the afterlife. Renewed and introduced to a Salem more populous than they could imagine in their most gluttonous dreams, the Sanderson sisters undertake to kill not only Dani but every child in Salem in order to remain young and beautiful forever.
What is this movie about? Is it about youth and the pursuit of it as women face menopause and death? A viewer could be forgiven for thinking that’s the case. As soon as their purloined youth takes effect, an effervescent Sarah feels herself up and exclaims “Boys will love me!” When the sisters encounter Satan, each of them approaches him in an undeniably libidinous way. The devil (an uncredited Gary Marshall playing some guy in a horny costume) finds them charming enough to welcome them into his home for a very intimate Halloween party. When the devil’s wife (an uncredited Penny Marshall) discovers her spouse in the arms of one of these women – who, incidentally, calls him “master” in tones not typically heard in a family film – she puts them out of her house with every air and implication of a wronged wife.
This movie might be about virginity. After lighting the black flame candle inside the Sandersons’ lovingly preserved historic house, Max discovers that this act could only have brought the witches back to life if it were undertaken by a virgin. Appearing to be 15 or 16 years old, Max is roasted for his virginity no less than seven times in the script. It’s pointed out by the witches, by his sister, by his crush Allison (Vinessa Shaw), and by Binx the black cat. If you’re keeping score, that’s a 17th century virgin boy mocking a 20th century virgin boy for a condition almost certainly expected of both of them and required of Binx, who lived under a type of circumspection Max cannot imagine.
It might be about the magic of music. Sarah’s song “Come Little Children” is a haunting lullaby, meant to lure out the witches’ prey and ensure a bountiful harvest of youthful blood — and it works! Winifred’s rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” enraptures and entraps the parents of Salem to keep them from stopping the slaughter of their children. That, too, is effective. The film also contains a little nod to Midler’s Broadway resume, namely a line from a famous show whose title is a slur against the Romani (“Hello, Salem! My name is Winifred. What’s yours?”) There’s also that old classic, Cy Coleman’s “Witchcraft,” tucked coyly into the soundtrack.
Kathy Najimy and Thora Birch in 1993’s Hocus Pocus [Disney]
But where is the witchcraft in all this? It’s present mainly in the trappings that are served to tourists in Salem and Danvers and Tarrytown every year around Halloween. The witches have a big cauldron, they fly on broomsticks (and a vacuum cleaner, because it’s the ‘90s), and they have a proper Book of Shadows. Bound in stitched skin and inlaid with a creepy living eye, the book contains all their spells and potion recipes. Best of all: it comes when called like a hog by Winifred’s whoops. Almost any witch I know would trade her athame for that trick.
Yet the witches’ manner is never explored in their practice, or ever explained. Though they worship the devil, they even use minced oaths rather than commit Christian blasphemy (Winifred utters “cheese and crust” instead of calling that one guy’s name in vain.)
Neither is Hocus Pocus about the defeat of witchcraft. Max and pals lead the sisters into a kiln and attempt to burn them to death like the witches of Europe. This has no effect, and in the end the witches are not killed or even really slowed down. Max manages to keep them from coring out the town of all its children, but a couple of them – the bad ones, the bullies – are surrendered to their presumed deaths in the end. And the Sandersons themselves simply begin to bide their time once again, not vanquished and barely inconvenienced. (Hocus Pocus 2 was released in 2022.)
Omri Katz and Vinessa Shaw examine the Sanderson Sisters’ Book of Shadows in 1993’s Hocus Pocus [Disney]
Rewatching Hocus Pocus for the first time in a long time this season of Samhain, I now postulate that this movie is about the American relationship to Salem, and indeed to all the witch trials in our history. We love our hanged witches, our crushed Coreys and our nixed Nurses. Pioneer Village, where the film was partially shot, is a three-acre recreation of the Salem the Sanderson sisters would have known in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that condemned them to die. It’s an historical lesson, meant to illustrate the way that people lived in that hardscrabble period of colonial rule and treaty-breaking with the Indigenous tribes. But people don’t go there for the meticulously-scraped skins and tallow candles. They go for the witches.
As a nation, we love to cast our projections on the witches of Salem. In 1953, Arthur Miller turned his Pulitzer-winning play The Crucible into a dark allegory of McCarthyism. In our subsequent drug-obsessed decades, medical science sought to unravel the relationship between unexplained behavior and pathology, citing the psychoactive fungus ergot that may have produced LSD-like visions among the accusers in Salem. And across the history of Neo-Paganism, many have sought to reclaim the image of the persecuted and burned witch as our martyrs, though every person executed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony professed Christianity.
As the academy has come around to examining the role of race in the Salem Witch Trials and the pattern of violence against the racialized Other in American history, the story of Tituba, an enslaved Native woman accused of witchcraft in Salem 1692 has come back into focus. Did she have an indigenous practice of magic that led the very children she cared for daily to accuse her of harming them? Or was she merely vulnerable and a scapegoat for the anxieties of America’s first white people, who just couldn’t wait to start calling the cops?
We’ll never know.
What we know is that we love to be entertained. What we project now on to the witches of Salem, the real people who died by state violence, the places where they hanged, the hysteria that killed them and the legacy of the American imagination run amok, is fun. We want Salem to be a theme park, to amuse us and titillate us. To sing to us so that we may come, like little children, to imagine ourselves mischievous virgins once again to summon witches to light up our Halloween night.
We love our seasonal violence, our child sacrifices, our honest Christians hanged as witches, and our wicked women, who seek to remain hot and never become hags. Hocus Pocus isn’t the witchy Halloween classic we need, but it is the one that we deserve.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.