'You never know which ones are going to fly away and disappear into the night like broomsticks and which ones are going to magically seep into the zeitgeist and the veins of y'all forever.' 'I mean, we had no idea at the time,' Najimy said, speaking to fans from the stage. Midler said that above all she liked flying on a broomstick the most, hoisted in the air by wires.įor a movie that bombed at the box office, it was a celebration that even the cast members considered unlikely.

Parker said what she remembered most was 'how awful we were as characters,' set on 'destroying children.' Najimy recited her 'I smell children' line to loud applause. It featured a performance of Midler's rendition of 'I Put a Spell on You,' a costume contest and commentary about the making of the film from original cast members. The movie marked its 25th anniversary this month with a 90-minute special on Freeform, filmed before an audience at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. out of season.''īut sometime between then and now, 'Hocus Pocus' seemingly came back from the dead - reincarnated as a beloved cult classic soaked in '90s nostalgia that, rather than rotting in rental-store bins, somehow found a spot in the millennial canon of annual required watching. The Baltimore Sun's Stephen Hunter went full Shakespeare: 'As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, 'Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no rhyme, has no reason/and is. The Washington Post's Desson Howe described it as a 'future videotape disguised as a movie,' predicting that in the near future you would find it buried in the rental-store bins or as a $5.95 deal if purchased with three bags of Halloween candy. Robert Ebert, giving it one star, described 'Hocus Pocus' as one giant inside joke that nobody will explain to you, so you 'stare indifferently at the screen' and don't know what's so funny. But for all its wackiness, the July 1993 movie seemed to be stuck in a kind of Halloween-flick purgatory: too campy for a horror film, too creepy for a family film. Resurrected from the dead 300 years after they were hanged, the Sanderson sisters - Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy - set out on a mission to suck the life out of children on Halloween night so they could be young again. Twenty-five years ago, the three shrieking witches of 'Hocus Pocus' flew across the big screen and, at least for a time, promptly out of everyone's periphery.

Hocus Pocus in Focus by Aaron Wallace