'Halloweentown' (1998)
Bringing the "being normal is overrated" to future millennial teens everywhere.
Halloweentown is a movie mostly about a girl named Marnie Piper, who is thirteen years old and loves spooky and weird things, despite her mom not even letting her and her siblings celebrate Halloween like the normal people (Marnie’s friends are literally in the house advocating for Marnie to go out with them and the mom is like no and then the friends have to be like, “um okay, I guess. See you in class.”). The story takes place on a particular Halloween night, where Gwen, the mom (who is hot), crushes the spirits of Marnie and her siblings, Dylan and Sophie.
That is, until Grandma Aggie (played by the iconic Debbie Reynolds!!!) shows up unannounced. The thing about Aggie is that she’s a little strange. She wears an outfit that can only be described as “robes,” has a handbag that is both sentient and limitless in size, and oh yeah she appeared on a flying bus. Just regular things.
Mother Gwen is not pleased by this visit. She wanted a NORMAL non-Halloween Halloween, and her mom is RUINING it for everyone (just her, and maybe her dork son Dylan). Marnie and youngest Sophie on the other hand love when their grandmother visits. She comes in causing mayhem in the house by giving the kids costumes, candy, and a storybook about this place called Halloweentown—somewhere obviously super fictional and not at all where Grandma Aggie lives.
Unsatisfied with her mom’s strict bedtimes (the same bedtime for an elementary school kid and a twelve year old is crazy, I’ll say it I’m not a mother) and her grandmother’s quick departure home, Marnie sneaks downstairs to eavesdrop on the conversation between older mother and daughter and finds out some tea: Aggie Cromwell is a witch from the very real place called Halloweentown, and so is Gwen, which means Marnie also has witch powers! She always knew there was something different about her!
Because Gwen wants her kids to be raised as mortals, like their father, time is running out. Marnie hasn’t done ANY training yet, and without that start she will lose her magical powers by her thirteenth birthday. Marnie, clearly, feels violated by her lack of choice of destiny at the hands of her mom, and sets out to follow her grandma back to Halloweentown to get that witch training started ASAP.
Also during this argument, Aggie mentions that a bunch of Halloweentown residents have been disappearing to which Gwen replies, “Maybe they moved.” Bitch, WHERE could they move? There’s like one inter dimensional town for monsters and then, like, the Earth? She just doesn’t care much for her hometown it seems.
As Debbie Reynolds leaves, a bus stop at the corner of this suburban street appears. Now THIS is what public transit should look like. Marnie sneaks off into the night, but she is not alone. Both Dylan and Sophie have followed along and now they’re on a school bus that flies and breaks the fabric of both time and space, listening to cheeky monsters say some absolute zingers like, “I was a demon from the underworld and they’re like, ‘Big deal I saw that on Jerry Springer.’” Hilarious stuff
The first time I ever saw Halloweentown was when I was about five years old, back when I was just in awe of any sort of movie marvel, so I was not really aware of what any of these 1998 made-for-television animations really looked like until watching again as an adult. Kids are just happy to see a floating cookie or a flying school bus, and sadly the magic disappears when you’re in your 30s and the new Dune exists (David Lynch Dune and Halloweentown do share similar special effects, sad to report).
After this flying sequence, we (and the kids) arrive in Halloweentown, a place that is very real and exists. It’s basically like the most high-end Spirit Halloween that you could imagine. There are monsters of all shapes and sizes walking around and in the middle of the town square there’s a giant pumpkin, the same one from that picture book Grandma Aggie showed them the night before. But there’s something off about it—Marnie thinks that it looks more sinister than in the book, where the pumpkin looked friendly. To my untrained eye, it looks like a regular old jack-o-lantern.
While looking for their grandma, who is now lost in the crowd, they are approached by a dandy-looking man in a top hat who introduces himself as Kalabar, the mayor of Halloweentown. It is very clear when he figures out they’re Gwen’s kids that Gwen and Kalabar used to be lovers. This will be important for later. Being a helpful mayor, he hooks the kids up with Benny, a goofy skeleton taxi driver who takes them up to the Cromwell residence.
Their grandma, seemingly pleased by her grandchildren’s act of defiance, decides not to hand the kids over to the police (their mom) just yet. She agrees to start Marnie on her training, but says she has to take care of “the bad thing” first. She shows them in her cauldron a hooded figure laughing maniacally. He must be the reason why everything in this town is going awry! The only way to stop this madness is to activate Merlin’s talisman, but it doesn’t work right away. You can’t just use instant microwaveable Witch’s Brew to activate an ancient artifact! So they have to make it the hard way, with specific ingredients you need to find in town.
The whole family goes into town, where Marnie is enamored by all of the Halloweentown stuff (like magic brooms), Dylan is ambivalent by it all, and Sophie is secretly holding a ton of magic potential (little kids, right?). Aggie is telling the kids stories about her time as an immortal being Halloweentown, like how she got Merlin’s talisman from Merlin himself back in the days of King Arthur. This raises some questions that go unanswered. Obviously, Aggie is immortal and I’m guessing that witches age but very slowly so she’s been alive for a long time and it’s starting to show. Gwen is also immortal, so how old is she actually? When she met her late husband in the human world, was she a regular 30 year-old or has she lived several lifetimes by then? If that’s the case what made Gwen so enamored by a guy who one, doesn’t have any magic powers and two, is probably most definitely way less mature and experienced than her. And since all of the kids are only half-mortal, how do they age? Do they die at a normal human pace, aging normally just to die while their grandma and mom are out there still living life for a couple more centuries? Does Gwen get to turn her magic powers off to die as a human? There are so many questions that this series will probably never answer.
There’s a boy in town named Luke who looks like a normal boy except he’s actually a gross goblin who made a deal with an evil shadow creature who gave him a facelift. Everyone in town knows about this and they don’t really ask any questions about who the evil magic plastic surgeon is, they just tell the gang to stay away from him. He tries flirting with Marnie but he’s creepy and weird right now so she just goes like, “Bug off, Luke!”
Speaking of Gwen, she shows up big mad that her kids would sneak off to an alternate dimension right after Marnie and Grandma went on a very well-edited broom flying sequence on some of the ugliest brooms I’ve ever seen. Gwen says it’s time to go home, but the bus depot guys say there isn’t a next bus anytime soon. The transit system between Halloweentown and Earth is very complicated. The portal between the two worlds only opens once a year (Halloween), which is for 24 hours in the human world and ???? in Halloweentown. They have to wait until morning for the next ride home.
Unsatisfied with monster bureaucracy, Gwen goes into Karen Mode and rushes over to City Hall to see if the mayor can do anything about this. The mayor we met earlier, Kalabar, was actually Gwen’s ex-boyfriend. They were quite the item back in the day, before she left him for the mortal world. This guy—what else can I say—is super horny for this hot now-mom. He says there’s nothing he can do about the bus timetables, even as mayor. They’ll just have to stay another day. Gwen, now a widow who definitely has needs that are most likely not being fulfilled because she’s too busy being a narc about her family history, is charmed by the top hat man and is like, “Oh all right.”
While they’re doing that, Aggie is still in town trying to get her potion stuff and Luke is like, “Hey lady, I got something to show you,” and she follows him into this decrepit movie theater. Everyone including her were saying not to trust this guy and she’s trusting him! The kids and Gwen see this happening and follow her inside. What they find in there is pretty fucked up. All those missing Halloweentown residents are stuck frozen in time, growing cobwebs. A demon pops up on the movie screen and zaps Aggie and Gwen into stone. Before that a random man gets zapped up and sucked into the vortex on screen and it looks very silly, even though it was very scary to me at five years old. Luke dips out like the bitch ass he is. The kids now have to find the potion ingredients for this brew, all while remaining incognito.
Even though their mom and grandma effectively are dead until further notice, the kids now have to explore the town on their scavenger hunt in what I’m calling a DCOM Goof Sequence. First they go to a salon to get some hair from a gay werewolf. Then they enter the monster gym, which is full of extras that have monster masks and regular human arms and legs, to then lock an overweight ghost in a sweat box for so long that he gets jacked (they need his sweat). And then they just walk into a dentist’s office and grab a vampire’s rotting fang. That’s everything for the potion. They go back to the house and with the power of ingenuity and family instinct, they activate the talisman.
It’s now time to go to the square. At this point, Halloweentown is in chaos. Aggie’s friends are all either evil or frozen in the theater and even the friendly taxi skeleton driver is now trying to actively kidnap the Piper kids. Who could be up to this? The demon appears before they can put the talisman in the great pumpkin. And guess who it is…
…it’s Halloweentown’s dandy mayor himself, Kalabar!
The guy Marnie’s mom used to date? It seems so!
Marnie needs to put this stick in the jack-o’-lantern or the whole world is fucked. Kalabar sees her walking to the pumpkin and zaps her without even reading her Miranda rights, but it was actually Luke doing a distraction (he’s good now). Marnie tries her best to get up the pumpkin, but gets zapped before she could do it. The mission failed…but wait! The talisman falls out of Marnie’s hand into the pumpkin and the town square is filled with a bright light! Aggie and Gwen are revived and come out to face Mom’s ex-boo.
Why would Kalabar, the mayor of Halloweentown, do something so evil to his constituents, his neighbors, his friends? Turns out, he’s been really mad that Gwen decided to get married to a human instead of him, an immortal warlock who is obviously superior (in his eyes). He was going to use Merlin’s talisman combined with his great power to control both the magical and mortal worlds and get his revenge for getting rejected romantically. Even though this movie came out years—decades—earlier, there have been Gamergates and Elon Musks anywhere you care to look a little close. Kalabar was really the blueprint, wasn’t he?
Despite being an incel, Kalabar is magically quite strong. The Cromwell women try using their combined powers to defeat the demon mayor, but it’s not enough. Marnie joins in, as she is starting her magical training, but it’s still not enough power. Sophie joins, and Dylan as a boy who is rational says, “I don’t have any powers. I can’t help!” But some sparks show up on his fingers indicating that he IS a magical boy. The whole family holds hands and does some chants and vaporizes the evil. Halloweentown is saved!
Luke goes back to being an ugly goblin, but Marnie kisses him on the cheek as a thank-you for no longer being an asshole. Gwen is open to her kids learning magic, and Aggie says she’ll spend some more time on Earth to be with the grandkids and start Marnie’s witch training. We love to see high-stakes and years-long conflicts be resolved in an instant with everyone getting what they want.
Halloweentown the movie is probably one of the most popular and iconic Disney Channel Original Movies of all time. It’s a movie that holds up pretty much all the way through, even though there are some flying animations that look very silly—they were doing the best with what they’ve got. The way that they built the world of Halloweentown was perfect for a kid’s movie, mixing in both elements of the scary and the silly into a place where kids wish they could go to.
Most tweens want to have a concrete answer as to why they feel weird inside and like they don’t belong anywhere, and while that answer is just hormones and puberty, secretly being a witch from a long line of magical beings is just way more satisfying of an answer. I feel for Marnie in the beginning of the movie, being even extra different because her strict mom won’t let her do any of the fun things that her friends are into. Before the events of this movie, the Piper household would definitely be one of those families that weren’t allowed to watch Harry Potter because of Satanic witchcraft. Speaking of Harry Potter, thank god we have another magical teen series to enjoy during Halloween so that we don’t ever have to give that nasty British lady any more money. The goblins in this movie are the teen love interest, not racist stereotypes—that’s not nothing.
General nostalgia has me loving every second of this movie, but my favorite part has got to be the musical score. From the jump, the composer has constructed melodies full of such fun and whimsy, it pulls you in. You want to know what Halloweentown is about. You want to see the town of hallows. The uneducated would think that Halloweentown is a spooky place, but with these whimsical tunes we know that this is a place of love, joy, and community. Marnie, Dylan, and Sophie are going to have a good time here, and so are you. I could listen to the score all day. And maybe I will!
This is a movie about so much: family history, growing up in a world where you feel strange, and most importantly that you always need to keep tabs on your charismatic exes because they might try and become an inter-dimensional dictator because your pussy WAS that good and he’s mad he fumbled you.
