Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 When I was seven years old, I saw a movie that changed my life. I was a scaredy-cat kid who loved Halloween, and it was hard for me to find things relating to that that I could watch, and not have anxiety over later on.  But then came Hocus Pocus. I saw the movie for the first time during one of those “free preview” weeks that the Disney Channel used to offer, back in the days when certain channels were “premium subscription” and your parents wouldn’t pay the price to keep it permanently. Ironically, I believe Hocus Pocus aired the day we put the Christmas tree up. To say I fell in love with this movie would be the ultimate understatement. I became obsessed .  I dreamt of being best friends with Dani Dennison. I woke up every morning hoping my cats would talk to me, all the while begging for a solid black one. I desperately tried to emulate Winifred Sanderson, to the point of trying to speak like her. (I have a weird memory of asking the family dog something along the li...

 Being an only child, and always pretty much the definition of a loner, I often idealized fictional characters as perfect potential best friends.  I was pretty much known for this in my household, sometimes even going so far as to name a doll or stuffed animal after my favorite character of the moment, and treat them/speak of them as if they were an actual friend. The “friend” of the moment could potentially change at any time, some lasting for only a few days, others for months at a time.  But I don’t think there was ever a character I wanted so badly for a BFF, as I did Dani Dennison. I know I’ve mentioned several times that I was seven years old the first time I saw Hocus Pocus, and Dani is, of course, eight in the movie, so having a character so close to my own age, in a movie about something so dear to my heart, automatically put her on my fictional-best-friend radar. I remember being truly in awe of Dani the first time I watched the movie; how confident she was, and...

 This week, there has been much buzz in the Halloween community regarding the upcoming, arguably long overdue, Hocus Pocus sequel. I, personally, always tend to be at least a little apprehensive about sequels, especially when this much time has gone by. Unless a movie is intended to be part of a series, I really don’t see the need for a sequel to suddenly be tacked on several years later. The odds of being able to capture the same mood and magic seem to lessen as time goes on with these things. But, the case of Hocus Pocus is a bit of a strange one. I truly had no idea what a flop my lifelong favorite movie had been when it was first released until fairly recently. I was seven when I first saw the movie, and it made such an enormous impact on me that I suppose I just assumed it did for everyone else, too. As a kid, I think, in my mind, anything Disney released just had to be popular. And also, being just about the only true family Halloween film at the time, I just assumed it was a...

Today is an extremely important day in Halloween history. Twenty-seven years ago, my lifelong favorite movie was released into the world. I was just six years old at the time, but as obsessed with Halloween as ever. Back then, there really weren’t many things that the young Halloween enthusiast could watch. My only memories of kid-friendly Halloween media at the time are a few TV specials, mainly something called “Buttons & Rusty In ‘Which Witch Is Which?’”, which I had recorded on a VHS tape and watched so frequently to get my Halloween feels on in the off-season that it wore out pretty quickly. (My childhood mantra, any time I was obsessed with a movie, which happened pretty frequently, was from that moment on, “Is this tape going to break like Buttons & Rusty?”) There was some part of me that didn’t understand how there could be so many Christmas movies, but so few things related to Halloween. So, of course I was elated to find out that a Halloween movie was finally coming! ...

One day I will write a full review and in-depth story about my lifelong favorite movie, Hocus Pocus. As one of very few family friendly Halloween-themed movies that existed in my childhood, I’m sure you can imagine the depths of what it’s always meant to me. But for today, I’d like to just talk about a funny little fact.  Anyone who’s seen the movie likely remembers the scene when eight-year-old Dani Dennison, after having dragged her poor older brother Max around trick-or-treating for most of the evening, decides to get smart with a group of teenage bullies from Max’s school.  The band of bullies is led by two delinquents named Jay and Ice (née Ernie) and their idea of Halloween fun is smashing pumpkins and taking candy from the kiddos. Rather than going the long way around, as Max suggests, Dani decides she’s going to walk right through the middle of their mischief, and the Ice demands she pay a toll of “ten chocolate bars, no licorice” in order to pass them. ...