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...

 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...