Like many little girls in the 90s, I was in absolute awe of the Olsen twins. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were just over a year older than me, and it was so cool to see kids right around my age that were so famous. Like many, I was first introduced to them as Michelle Tanner on Full House, but it wasn’t long until they started producing and starring in a whole slew of their own original movies and series.
One such movie was another Halloween gem from my childhood that seems to be mostly forgotten these days, a spooky adventure called Double Double, Toil And Trouble.
It’s worth noting that Double Double, Toil And Trouble was released in 1993, just a few months after Hocus Pocus. (And it actually accurately portrays the fact that Halloween 1993 fell on a Sunday!) But, because it was a TV movie initially, it was Double Double, Toil And Trouble that I wound up seeing first. And, surprisingly, it didn’t initially become one of my main go-to movies, for the simple fact that it actually scared me!
Double Double, Toil And Trouble is the story of Lynn and Kelly Farmer, a pair of twin sisters who are growing weary of being twins. (Also, it opens with a very ominous declaration of, “The following is based on a true story…maybe.”)
On the way home from a community Halloween party on October 30th, the girls’ parents make an unexpected stop at the home of their mother’s Aunt Agatha, so estranged that Lynn and Kelly have never met her, and are instructed to wait in the car, as Aunt Agatha doesn’t like children. While their parents are inside, Lynn is playing with the magic wand that she and Kelly won from a clown named Oscar in the Halloween party pumpkin carving contest. When the wand suddenly, mysteriously flies out of her hand, she wakes Kelly and the two, along with family dog Norman, run out of the car to retrieve it. While searching for the wand, the girls run into an actual gravedigger on their great-aunt’s property, digging a grave for someone or something that he hasn’t been told of, due to how intimidated he is by Agatha.
The gravedigger is an incredibly spooky character, but he’s also quite possibly the biggest scaredy-cat in the whole movie, far more than the pair of seven-year-old girls. Nonetheless, he tells Lynn and Kelly the story of the house and the woman who now inhabits it. Apparently the house was owned by a bad witch two-hundred years prior, and when she was burned at the stake, she left a magic moonstone somewhere in the house that no one was ever able to retrieve, until Agatha, along with her twin sister Sophia, decided to go and look for it, hoping to wish away their status as twins. Agatha found the moonstone and was immediately seduced by its power, therefore not wanting to share it with Sophia, but instead using it to make her life miserable until the day, seven years before this one, that she finally banished Sophia and trapped her on the other side of a mirror in the attic. The gravedigger states that at midnight on Halloween, the spell will become permanent and Sophia will officially be banished forever, unless it is broken with the moonstone and right incantation before then.
It’s unclear initially if Lynn and Kelly fully believe the tale, but later that night, while baking cookies, their mom starts talking about Aunt Sophia, and how kind and generous she was, and the strange fact that no one has seen or heard from her in seven years. And when the girls learn that the real reason for their parents’ visit to Aunt Agatha was to ask for a loan because their home is about to go into foreclosure, the girls devise a plan to steal the moonstone and free Aunt Sophia, knowing that she’d help them if she were around.
While trick-or-treating the next evening, Lynn and Kelly bribe another pair of trick-or-treaters to switch costumes with them, and then sneak away to attempt to find the witches’ gathering, mentioned the previous day by the gravedigger, in the hopes of being able to steal the moonstone while Agatha is distracted. On the way, they run into a homeless drifter/con-artist called Mr. N, and Oscar, the clown from the Halloween party, and together they set off in search of the gathering.
The actual witches’ gathering is a very scary scene for something aimed at children, and the imagery stayed in my head for awhile after initially seeing the movie. The makeup is done very well, and the ominous singing and moaning is truly the stuff of nightmares. From that point on, things in the movie get pretty intense and dark (though Agatha is pretty terrifying from the first moment we meet her) and it starts to fall into somewhat of a “horror training wheels” category of a kids’ movie. It’s interesting to me, that most Halloween/spooky-themed films aimed at a younger audience, don’t seem to go in this direction anymore. Most family spooky films these days tend to be more comedic, while the ones from the 80s and 90s, even early 2000s if you think about things like Curtis Danko’s backstory in When Good Ghouls Go Bad, weren’t afraid to go a little deeper. As a young child, I didn’t expect a movie starring the Olsen twins to really provide any scares, but this one did, and then some. It doesn’t scare me as an adult, obviously, but I can still see exactly why it did when I was six.
Agatha, portrayed by Cloris Leachman, is a truly evil character and doesn’t hold back. We never actually see her do anything beyond typical Halloween-special-witch type spells, but she talks about things she plans to do in such a way that it will make you cringe. (Two especially terrifying lines of hers that got to me as a child were when she was plotting out boiling the twins in oil, and also dripping bat’s blood on the mirror that Sophia was trapped in.) Hate just absolutely radiates off of this woman, in a way I haven’t seen done since in a family film. Cloris Leachman also plays the opposite role of the kind-hearted Sophia, which I actually didn’t realize until I got older, because the two characters are so different. (At one point in the movie, Agatha actually disguises herself as her twin, and the look in her eyes is so intense and hateful, you can instantly tell that it’s meant to be Agatha, despite everything else looking exactly like Sophia.)
I won’t spoil the entire movie, as it’s definitely a hidden gem that I’d like other people to check out, but I will say it has some very touching moments in addition to the scares, as well. Lynn and Kelly learn a lot about being twins as they deal with what happened between their twin great-aunts, and some of the other characters grow a lot throughout the course of the movie as well. Mr. N, Oscar, and the gravedigger almost take on the classic “Wizard Of Oz” type roles here, and everyone involved is a lot of fun to watch.
If you’re looking for a family-friendly Halloween movie that’s more scary than silly, and has great characters and a ton of heart, Double Double, Toil And Trouble is definitely worth a watch. It could be a good way to gradually introduce the kids in your life to horror as well.
One other weird, random thing that I remember about this movie is that, once I eventually got the courage and desire to watch it again, it was always unavailable at the local video store. To this day, I sometimes wonder if there was another Halloween-obsessed kid in my town that I just didn’t know, who was always checking it out, or if the tape was just damaged or the Velcro tab was just lost, or something. I usually wound up just taking out the Olsen twins’ Christmas movie, To Grandmother’s House We Go, instead, by default. Strangely enough, I remember nothing about that movie but the title. Is anyone really surprised?
Stay spooky, my friends.
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