It’s October 31, 2022 in Salem. Max and Allison, happily married and in their 40s, are decorating their colonial home for Halloween. Their kids, Emma and Zach, are on their iPads on the couch, looking bored.
CUT TO: An exterior shot of a cat shop in downtown Salem. The hand-painted sign, complete with paw-prints, says “Binx.” Inside, Dani, in her 30s, is sipping some herbal tea while she scritches her cat, Butch, on the head. Ding ding! The delivery guy is here with some packages, new inventory for the store. Dani puts down her cup and opens them up: new scratching posts, great. New “magical” kitty litter, awesome.
But wait…what’s this? There’s a much smaller package…what could this one be? She opens it up, and it’s….it’s…it’s the black flame candle?!?
Dani screams her iconic scream that echoes through the entire town.
Next, we see Dani bursting through the front door of Max and Allison’s home. She shows them the candle and frantically explains that she has no idea who sent it to her, and no idea if it’s real or not. Maybe it was just some sick joke? Would Max’s bandmates, Jay and Ice, resort to such an insensitive prank? The kids, Emma and Zach, don’t get what the big deal is. What happened to their parents and aunt all those years ago…did that really happen, or were they just too high on 7UP?
You see where this is going. Once Dani, Max, and Allison leave the house…after they warn the kids to stay away from the black flame candle…the kids, thinking it’s just a bunch of hocus pocus, light it anyway. And the cycle continues.
Anyway, as I believe my example shows, Hocus Pocus 2 could have easily been written to be so much more satisfying. All the writers would have had to do was keep the following in mind:
Bring back the main characters from the original if you really want to evoke nostalgia. And no, I don’t mean the Sanderson sisters. The Sanderson sisters may be the most iconic. They may be the most memorable. Heck, they may even be most people’s favorite characters. That doesn’t mean they’re the main characters. I’d argue the protagonists of the original Hocus Pocus are Max, Allison, and Dani. They are the heroes of the story and they should have been in the sequel. And if they were, we could have all been spared the boring and overcomplicated subplot of the teen witch coven.
If there’s drag queens onstage, use them!! I thought this was obvious, but apparently not. First of all, that whole stage should have been full of nobody but drag queens, and they should have all been included in the musical number…oh, and they should have picked a different song.
Camp doesn’t mean vague weirdness. The characters of Gilbert and the Mayor/Reverend were examples of shallow, non-specific visions that needed clarification and specificity to have impact.
Make it more queer. A lot more queer. If it’s truly supposed to be present-day Salem around Halloween, there should have been 50,000% more queers in the movie. Again, that stage should have been filled with drag queens.
Tie up your loose ends. Why did we meet that lonely MILF witch in the beginning if she was never going to come back again, except for as a bird? And don’t tell me it’s a set-up for another sequel….
While it’s unclear what exactly went wrong in the process — perhaps too many cooks in the kitchen or maybe all of the funding went into paying Parker, Najimy, and Midler — one thing is certain: the fans of Hocus Pocus deserved more, and it wouldn’t have been that hard for Disney to make something better.