Chelsea Spear
In 1692, America experienced one of its earliest and most notorious human rights atrocities when 19 people were executed after being found guilty of practicing witchcraft. The Salem witch trials, as they came to be known, had huge ramifications that reverberated throughout American history, from the McCarthy hearings to the book bannings and anti-trans laws of the past few years. Salem, Massachusetts, a coastal city north of Boston, stakes much of its tourism on being near the village where the witch trials took place. While Salem has observed the legacy of the witch trials with a sobering sense of respect, the city also holds a month-long Halloween party called Haunted Happenings that focuses on the supernatural and takes irreverent aim at its historical reputation.
If Haunted Happenings had an official film, it would be Hocus Pocus. The 1993 Disney feature, which depicts the misadventures of three time-traveling witches who end up in Salem on Halloween, has a farcical tone and a screenplay full of girl-power epigrams that would fit on a bumper sticker, and its depiction of Salem as a primary color-saturated storybook town has given the chamber of commerce a natural angle for seasonal trolley tours. But for those who know about Salem’s complicated history with witchcraft, the film might leave an unpleasant aftertaste.
Hocus Pocus opens on Halloween in 1693, as the Sanderson witch sisters—dimwitted Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker), earthy Mary (Kathy Najimy), and mastermind Winifred (Bette Midler)—are hanged for their suspected involvement in the disappearance of two children in the village. Before they receive their death sentence, Winifred casts a spell that they will return to Salem on Halloween if a virgin lights the black candle in their cottage.
Smash-cut to 1993, when skeptical teen Max Dennison (Omri Katz) is charged with taking his kid sister Dani (Thora Birch, in cute child actor mode) trick-or-treating in their new hometown of Salem. They end up trick-or-treating at the family manse of Max’s crush Allison (Vinessa Shaw), who takes them to the museum in the restored Sanderson Sisters’ cottage. Max lights the black candle, bringing the Sanderson sisters back to life. When the sisters are resurrected, Winifred reveals that they will turn to dust at daybreak unless they can drain the life force of one child. Wackiness ensues in a string of set pieces, including a musical number, a chase scene, and the kind of fish-out-of-water comedy you’d expect from a trio of 17th-century witches who find themselves brought back to life in the 1990s.
In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Salem and other towns north of Boston had become a popular location for film shoots, particularly for features like Mermaids and The Good Son that depicted whimsical and/or macabre coming-of-age themes. While Hocus Pocus was aimed at a younger audience than these films, it had a similar sense of mischief to Mermaids and explored some of the same themes—such as the experience of fitting in to a new town while having a different set of values than your peers—in a way that was more accessible to viewers who were still in elementary school.
Hocus Pocus was also one of the first films shot in Salem that allowed Salem to be, well, Salem, instead of a generic New England town out of central casting. Director Kenny Ortega and cinematographer Hiro Narita shot many of the key scenes on location at the homes and businesses on Essex and Washington Streets, and the warm, amber-tinted lighting and tableau staging makes the Witch City look like an illustration in a mid 20th century book of fairy tales. Even some of the narrative beats, like Max and Allison’s visit to the abandoned Sanderson cottage and museum, felt real for anyone who went to school in Massachusetts and took a field trip to a recreated historic home.
To more contemporary eyes, Hocus Pocus engages with Salem’s history with witchcraft in a more complicated manner. After an opening scene that takes place a year after the witch trials, the film takes place in the early 1990s, about a year after the city of Salem dedicated a memorial to the 20 people tried and hanged for practicing witchcraft in 1692. Obviously, a broad family comedy about witchcraft isn’t going to be historically accurate, but knowing that production wrapped seven months after the memorial was dedicated can feel jarring. Many of the women tried for witchcraft were midwives or women who had miscarried or birthed stillborn babies, who were later accused of eating babies or sucking the life force from children. In light of that information, the running joke about the Sandersons eating children might make viewers cringe.
Similarly, the film came at a time when many feminists were experimenting with female-centric practices like wicca as an outlet for their spiritual beliefs. While Hocus Pocus doesn’t have the girl-power tone of later comedies like Practical Magic, some aspects of the film pay lip service to feminist ideals in film. The film’s cast is predominantly female (and its POV character ends up being a final boy of sorts), the female leads are not motivated by men or romance, and the dialogue passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. This was the baseline for girl-friendly blockbuster fare in the early 1990s. The fact that the threefold rule, which is the baseline for any practicing wiccan, isn’t mentioned at all could be an indicator of how villainous the Sandersons were, but the film’s denouement—in which the Sandersons turn to dust—perpetuates some of the myths about how those found guilty of practicing witchcraft were executed.
As with Cruella, which came out three decades after the release of Hocus Pocus, Disney’s choice of historical subject matter combined with their focus-grouped attempts at not offending the widest possible audience side-stepped some of the more complicated aspects of the Salem witch trials. The film has earned a perennial slot on spooky season TV broadcasts and special-event screenings, but the combination of broad comedy and weird historical inaccuracies can make this a hard sell if you didn’t grow up watching it.
“Hocus Pocus” is streaming on Disney+.
