Released in 1993, it’s been over 30 years since Hocus Pocus first flew into theaters and flopped at the box office. Despite its poor opening, the movie managed to become one of the most beloved Halloween cult classics of all time, for kids and adults alike. What once was an underperforming Disney oddity has grown into a full-blown seasonal obsession. For many millennials growing up, the movie was as much a part of Halloween as costumes, trick-or-treating, and bright orange pumpkins. In fact, it has also grown popular among Gen Z and younger generations, with Freeform and Disney Channel each year during October.
Watching it back through the lens of adulthood, however, the film is darker, weirder, and not as good as one might remember. There are many things that flew over our heads as kids, from overtly creepy jokes to strangely bleak aspects. Production was also sloppy, with many continuity errors and goofs present throughout the movie. While the nostalgia is strong, so is the cringe.
Here are 10 harsh realities of rewatching Hocus Pocus over 30 years after it came out.
There Are a Lot of Historical Inaccuracies
Everyone knows Hocus Pocus wasn’t aiming for factual accuracy or a history lesson, but its many historical inaccuracies are difficult to ignore as a grown-up. Firstly, the Sanderson sisters were hanged for witchcraft on October 31, 1693, but the Salem Witch Trials were abolished in May 1692 by Governor William Phips, after his own wife was accused of being a witch. Another flaw is the mention of margarine by the Sandersons, a product that wasn’t invented until the 1800s.
Perhaps the hardest to ignore inaccuracy is that most of the movie takes place on a school day on Halloween in 1993, but that year, the holiday fell on a Sunday. In the movie, it’s also the night of a full moon, but in real life, there was no full moon that evening. The last Halloween full moon took place in 1974, and there wouldn’t be another full moon on October 31 again until 2020. The film is Halloween fodder, sure, but it’s hard not to notice these errors years later.
The Obsession With Virginity Is Weird
The return of the Sanderson sisters is built around a virgin lighting the Black Flame Candle. This is the movie’s most crucial plot point — that only a virgin could light it and bring the witch trio back to life. That emphasis on virginity feels uncomfortably weird rewatching as an adult. It might have slid as just fantasy lore, but the movie continually brings up the fact that Max (Omri Katz) is a virgin.
His virginity is continually scrutinized and used as a punchline, turning a minor’s lack of sexual experience into an oddly recurring joke. Even his little sister, a 9-year-old, discusses sex and pokes fun at him about it. What exactly does so much focus on virginity bring to a children’s movie? The hyperfocus on a teenager’s sex life in a Halloween movie made for kids is highly uncomfortable. The running gag has aged very, very poorly.
The Movie Has Many Goofs and Mistakes
The whoopsie moments in the movie don’t end with historical inaccuracies. Throughout Hocus Pocus, there are more production errors than there are candies in a kid’s trick-or-treat bag. Back when you were playing this movie on VHS or watching it on the Disney Channel, you might have been too bewitched to notice, but they’re impossible to ignore as an adult. To name a few: Emily moves quite a lot in the chair after she’s killed, Sarah’s hair alternates between curly and straight, Mrs. Dennison’s (Stephanie Faracy) wedding ring disappears and reappears during the party scene, and Winifred (Bette Midler) quotes Max’s “It’s just a bunch of Hocus Pocus,” despite being dead when he said it.
If you look closely in the Dennison family kitchen, you can spot the camera crew’s reflection. When keeping an eye out during scenes where the Sanderson sisters are flying, you can see the cables holding the actors up. Max gets soaked in the museum with the sprinklers, but is completely dry only minutes later when he, Dani (Thora Birch), and Allison (Vinessa Shaw) reach the cemetery. The note he gives Allison at the beginning of the film changes when she hands it back to him. When the witch trio arrives at the school, the clock reads 3:00 a.m., then switches to midnight and back. There are probably a lot of other goofs and mistakes that have gone unnoticed.
The Bus Driver Is a Predator
It’s actually quite insane that what once played as cheeky humor is just gross and undeniably sleazy. As the Sanderson witches stalk the streets of Salem looking for their beloved spellbook, they stumble upon a bus, whose driver greets them. The lecherous man immediately starts flirting with them when he opens the door. After Winifred asks what the “contraption is for,” he replies, “to convey gorgeous creatures such as yourself to your most forbidden desires.” When she tells him that desire would be children, he misunderstands and his response is: “Hey, that may take me a couple of times, but I don’t think there’ll be a problem.”
Yeah, jokes about children in that context are not funny, and not cool. The man just screams predator. The whole exchange has aged poorly, giving off the energy of a creepy uncle doing and saying things he shouldn’t at a family reunion — no, actually something worse. It’s unbelievable that this ever made it past Disney’s censors. Even if this was intended to skip over kids’ heads and amuse adults, there’s nothing humorous about it. It’s sick.
Max Is a Jerk
If you were growing up with Hocus Pocus in your Halloween movie rotation, chances are that you probably thought Max was a dreamboat. On the surface, he’s supposed to be like every ’90s teenage boy. He was portrayed as a cool outsider forced to adjust to a new town. In reality, Max is a real big jerk. He sulks about moving, mocks Salem’s Halloween traditions, and is unkind to his little sister. After being callous to her when his parents make him take her trick-or-treating, he uses her to score points with a girl.
Max also comes off as cocky and arrogant, as seen in the scene where he casually hands Allison his phone number after she totally annihilates his comments in class. Trying to impress Allison with bravado is precisely what brought the child-killing witches back from the dead. Something that’s also really irking when rewatching the movie as an adult is how he left two teens to possibly die at the Sanderson house. Sure, they were bullies, but not even they deserved that.
Sarah Sanderson Is a Creepy Character
Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker) is widely remembered as the hot, ditzy Sanderson sister, but if you look beyond her good looks and playful exterior, you’ll realize she’s actually one of the creepiest characters in the film. After she and her sisters suck the life out of Emily and become younger in appearance, she exclaims, “I am beautiful! Boys will love me!” In the same cottage scene, she shamelessly thirsts after Thackery, a teenage boy, going as far as caressing his face. There’s something uncomfortably inappropriate about the way she soon tells Winifred, “Hang him on a hook and let me play with him.”
At one point, she’s even seen kissing a teen. Additionally, the way she enchants children with a haunting lullaby to lead them to their deaths is utterly horrifying. Sure, her character is meant to be comedic, but when you combine her child-snatching with overtly sexual antics, it paints a much darker picture than the movie seems to realize. Rewatching the movie decades later, and she’s less of a “fun witch” and more of a problematic predator.
The Female Characters Are Mostly One-Dimensional
One of the harshest realizations when rewatching Hocus Pocus 30 years later is how one-dimensional the female characters are. There’s no denying that the Sanderson witches are iconic, but despite their magical camp, their characters can feel oversimplistic. Winifred is painted as the typical power-hungry, cruel, and angry witch. The middle sister, Mary, is the bumbling sidekick. SJP’s Sarah is the flirty, sexy airhead — a character who’s underused and defined mostly by her beauty and sexuality.
It’s not just the witches, either. Allison, the most grounded character in the movie, gets very little to do besides be the love interest to an overrated male protagonist and serve as a walking resource for all things Salem. Dani is a kid with spunk to spare, but she exists mostly to annoy her brother and be put in peril so that he can be the hero. In a film packed with magic and big personalities, the women and girls don’t get much agency beyond their surface traits. The film could have done a better job at developing its female leads with more complexity and growth.
It’s Surprisingly Dark for a Kid’s Movie
Hocus Pocus opens up terrifyingly for kids, kicking off with the death of a child and capital punishment. Little Emily Binx’s (Amanda Shepherd) death as the three witches drain the life force out of her is a bleak scene — not exactly the spooky fun you remember from childhood. The moment doesn’t get much emotional weight either, quickly followed by jokes. Soon after, the Sanderson sisters are hanged for their crime in a public execution. The nooses around their necks and their dangling feet are extremely disturbing.
It doesn’t stop there. The curse cast on Emily’s brother, Thackery (Sean Murray), is pretty grim. It’s a cruel fate to be cursed to live as a cat forever, watching the ones you love live their lives without knowing you’re there, and then watching them die and being left alone for the rest of your days. There’s also the daring, bold talk of worshiping Satan. It’s easy to forget how dark these aspects are when they’re wrapped in campy humor, but the implications hit harder when you’re older.
Winifred’s Abuse Towards Her Sisters Isn’t So Funny Now
As previously mentioned, Winifred’s whole shtick is being mean and bossy. As kids, everyone laughed at how she constantly called her younger sisters things like “idiots” and smacked them around. While watching the movie decades later, the reality hits that Winifred is actually an emotional tyrant. What once seemed cartoonish, over-the-top, and theatrical is hard not to wince at in some instances as an adult. Mary and Sarah are clearly terrified of disappointing her, constantly seeking her approval while being belittled and pushed around.
Winifred’s constant insults, put-downs, physical aggression, and yelling look like verbal and emotional abuse through the adult eyes. What felt like slapstick comedy and a funny sibling dynamic as a kid just doesn’t hit the same at a time when there’s more awareness of what controlling behavior looks like. Sure, it’s meant to be camp, but it’s easy to spot the toxicity in it today.
Nostalgia Does a Lot of the Heavy Lifting
Hocus Pocus is undeniably an icon in cinema. The movie is a beloved classic, but let’s face it, the Halloween staple isn’t a masterpiece. In fact, one might argue that it’s a sloppy film. Stripping away the rose-colored glasses, what’s left is a clunky picture. From all the aforementioned goofs to the thin characterization to the huge plot holes, it just isn’t a great movie. The story drags in spots, the humor doesn’t land like it used to, and it’s filled with awful ’90s tropes.
A lot of what viewers love about movies is remembering how they made them feel, and that is exactly where the magic of Hocus Pocus lies. It’s a nostalgic comfort movie that one returns to each October searching for a long-lost feeling, yearning to travel back to a past where everything felt easier and more filled with possibilities. It’s precisely this nostalgia that makes it so easy to overlook the plethora of things that are wrong with the film. It wraps even the messiest, darkest, and most questionable moments in a warm jack-o-lantern glow. It’s why audiences will keep coming back to it each fall, even if they cringe through half of it.
- Release Date
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July 16, 1993
- Runtime
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96 minutes
- Writers
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Neil Cuthbert, David Kirschner, Mick Garris
- Producers
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David Kirschner, Mick Garris, Ralph Winter, Bonnie Bruckheimer, Steven Haft