Hocus Pocus (1993)

Hocus Pocus arrived in July of 1993, a scheduling decision that asked audiences to contemplate Halloween while sweating through a summer matinee. Kenny Ortega directed. Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy played three witches hanged in 1693 Salem who return when a teenager lights a candle. Critics were unmoved. Roger Ebert gave it a single star and complained of shrieking. Disney lost money. Then, across decades of October cable airings, the film became a fixture, a cult object, and eventually a franchise. The ledger of commerce has a strange sense of humor.

For classification purposes, the film registers nothing on any of the modern markers. The Sanderson sisters are female antagonists, but they are vaudeville grotesques, not vehicles for a feminist argument. The cast is white and the film offers no comment on that fact. Race, class, climate, body image, and neurodivergence go unmentioned, because the screenplay has other business: jokes about virgins, a talking cat, and Bette Midler performing I Put a Spell on You to an enchanted crowd. Salem's witch trials serve as set dressing, a spooky backdrop, not a revisionist thesis. No sermon is delivered. No lesson is pressed upon the audience about how to live.

That absence is the film's entire personality. It is a confection, a bag of candy corn in cinematic form, and it makes no claim to improve anyone. Whether that reads as refreshing or as a void depends on the viewer's appetite. The sequel arrived three decades later, presumably with a few more notes to hit. This one simply wanted to be watched in October, and it got its wish.