A Harry Potter story of young siblings discovering their witch powers and lineage to this titular town whose denizens and antics bounce with spooky spirit perennially. While that magical book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, precedes this movie by a year, Halloweentown draws liberally and provides the same otherworldly fun that the movie adaptation (2001) blew me away with (1) at age 6--3 years after Disney Channel released Halloweentown. So kudos to the D-COM!--probably for Disnefying (2) the costume-, music-, effects- created atmosphere of… I dunno, Tim Burton and whatever baroque horror he quirks with (yawn).
Indulging in our early couch time, we did face-masks. Gwen’s--a brightening Vitamin C compound--had a narwhal face! I was pleased to receive the penguin printed face mask--moisturizing, I think, and boy was that thin thing saturated. I imagined it was how it felt to have a penguin’s skin. Jessa’s was unprinted. The, translucent, slimy, skin-thin mask hung over her face: mummy-gauzed, hockey-mask, and ghostlike. This was just as the three siblings follow their un-secretly witchy grandmother to Halloweentown and the ghouls, goblins, ghosts, skeletons, wizards, witches, and also dogs--but humans dressed as dogs, even though a real dog does exist in Halloweentown (3)--all make their costumed appearance.
Anyway, as Grandma revealed to her straight-laced daughter who wants a normal life for her children--a dark force is taking over Halloweentown. The violently swirling storm clouds and maniacal laughter, which appear in Grandma’s crystal ball, really struck the my climate-change-perpetuated-by-facism anxiety nerve that’s been pretty raw since last week. And we’re supposed to not side with the Mom keeping her young from this madness?
So, this laughing, green-faced, definitely evil, guy has been abducting the innocent creatures of Halloweentown (HT?(4)), petrifying them, and what’s weird, is that he’s doing this in an abandoned movie theater. What is this: some veiled warning against the stultifying trance of screens? Sneaky tactic, there, Disney Channel: a kind of wholesome admonition, but against TV’s medium and market enemy--the cinema. I’m imagining some treacherous political dynamic between this film’s greenlighter and that of say Hocus Pocus--one of Disney’s feature lengths.
Sorry, back on track: the guy is a real Voldemort *cough, or someone worse, cough* ascending over the masses with a tirade to conquer the human’s world, so the beasts and beings of Halloweentown could live freely like in the good ol’ days. Yikes. You can see where this is going, or where I’m taking it. It really furthers my point that Green-Face reveals himself Halloweentown’s smarmy mayor. Well, it’s pretty cool that ⅘ of the team who take him down are the female characters. I guess the know-it-all pain-in-the-ass brother had to receive his magic powers at the convenient last moment, so boys in 1998 could feel special too. *sigh*
I’ll wrap this up with even less necessary macro-musing about this movie as a now 20-year-old prophecy. With those climate-change resource scarcities, and vast swaths of land submerged or inhospitable, I think we may soon live in a Halloweentown or not at all. Needless to say, our small clusters of civilization won’t maintain our beauty standards, and that inescapably toxic atmosphere may render us a little more ghoulish than today. I am exactly aware of how fucking ridiculous this conjecture is. But it’s Halloweentime, and things are allowed to look like different things. A grim whimsy is the most I can muster right now. If I’m pioneering the new spooky aesthetic of an orange-glowing polluted hellscape, call me J.K Rowling.
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(1) For the record, I had read the book before watching--or my mom read most of it to me, and my obsession began there. Still, something about those movies’ soundtrack or special effects helped define that wonderfully real fictional realm for me, and made it a more inhabitable place
(2) Disnefy (v): Brightening to lower comprehension level.
(3) And what a climactic, gruesome role it plays: as a skeleton cabbie tries abducting the brother (probably the most frightening moment), the adorable younger sister unchains the regular ol’ dog, telling it, “fetch the bone!” The dog bites the skeleton’s bone arm. The cabbie floors the gas screaming, “Not the dawg! Not the Dawg!” Jesus.
(4) Who am I kidding: I’ll say Halloweentown as many damn times as I damn well please.