The DCOM Pantheon #4: Halloweentown (dir. Duwayne Dunham, October 17, 1998)

This often happens in big action movies. The antagonist is righteously angry and the story tells us they have every right to be, but then they go too far and suddenly we're supposed to forget about any of their complaints. Ed Harris wants restitution for military personnel cast aside by the government and then he gets his hands on nerve gas. Michael B. Jordan wants Wakanda to redistribute some of its resources to help a suffering world and then he kills people. Daniel Brühl thinks it's messed up that some superheroes have declared themselves a sovereign international police force and then he kills people (Marvel movies pull this trick semi-annually). The villain is defeated, usually through the good kind of murder, and nobody changes much.

Halloweentown is about a bunch of monsters and ghouls and witches who used to live among us mortals, but were eventually rejected by a society that hated and feared them. They created an alternate dimension where they could live in peace, and they founded a city called Halloweentown, which is like if I got together with some Jewish friends and decided to live in Hanukkah City. Most of the monsters are happy in Halloweentown, but people are vanishing and a shadow demon is planning to take over the mortal world. I don't think the shadow demon should enslave that world, though his plan is totally unclear and the desired level of genocide isn't defined. I think he's fine for wanting to escape the small town he's been shunted off into for being different! I would be mad, too.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start over.

Welcome to this chilling tale, boys and ghouls and non-boonary people! Your cadaverous pallor betrays an aura of foreboding, almost as though you sense a disquieting metamorphosis. Is this haunted column actually reaching its first holiday special? Or is it your imagination?

In Halloweentown, Gwen Piper, née Cromwell, lives in the suburbs with her three kids. There's Marnie, the 13-year-old protagonist who longs for something more. There's Dylan, her nerdy little brother who doesn't believe in the supernatural and will continue to deny its existence even as he's directly interacting with ghosts and vampires, which makes him less "intellectually skeptical" and more "the Halloweentown equivalent of an Info Wars fan." And then we've got Sophie, the smallest Piper, who accidentally uses powerful magic. The Pipers get a visit from their grandmother Aggie (Debbie Reynolds) once a year on Halloween.
Aggie is introduced stepping off a magic bus, sentient handbag scurrying close behind. When she's in the Piper house, her daughter demands she present as regular ol' Aggie. The kids don't know they're descended from witches and they think Halloweentown is just a picture book Aggie reads to them from. Gwen is so ashamed of her life pre-Mr. Piper (who is presumably dead) she doesn't let her family celebrate Halloween. Dylan and Sophie are banned from trick-or-treating and Marnie can't go to a friend's party. At least when religious nuts hate Halloween, they make up for it two months later with a blowout Christmas. The Piper children get nothing.

Gwen's got a very strong "Lord, forgive me but it's time to go back to the person I am inside" arc. She's trying to move on from a past that just won't let her be, like Viggo Mortensen's character in A History of Violence. Did Cronenberg rip off Halloweentown when creating his ex-gangster character who semi-successfully bottled down his primal beginnings, only to have them crash into the present in a moment of crisis? Yes. Absolutely.

Marnie overhears Gwen and Aggie having a tense fight about teaching Aggie magic. Marnie's getting older and if she doesn't start training soon, her powers will be gone forever. Aggie wants Gwen's help investigating strange happenings in Halloweentown. Her neighbors keep acting strangely or disappearing altogether. She needs mom's magic, but mom ain't giving it. Aggie leaves, thrown onto the street by her only child.

Now that Marnie knows something's up, though, she follows Aggie into the night, and the kids sneak onto the magic bus, which raises the question of how Halloweentown is still a secret when two girls and a dorkus malorkus can get there with minimal effort.

The Halloweentown arrival isn't quite Dorothy crashing into Oz, but it's a lot of fun. There's a range of effort put into the costumes and makeup; somebody will be decked out in an elaborate, grotesque mask and then the person next to them will have very long hair, as if those are equally strange sights. This split between professional-looking costumes and Spirit store cast-offs will be familiar to Star Wars fans who remember that guy in the cantina who was dressed as a devil.

Everybody has personality, even if that personality is inexplicable (the broom store clerk is an Elvis impersonator zombie, or maybe he's actual Elvis). The mayor has a little bat secretary that lives in his desk, like a Flintstones "it's a living" dinosaur and then five minutes later we meet a second secretary, a regular-looking woman with a pin cushion butt. They're both cool little creatures and we don't see either of them again. That's the sign of a creative movie. The filmmakers could have easily made half the town werewolves and the other half vampires and called it a day. But they put the time in.

And there's this woman, who looks like The Village Voice's Michael Musto:

The little details are perfectly silly for a kids movie about monsters. Aggie talks with a friend about donating food to a headless shelter. The microwave in her house has "bubble," "toil" and "trouble" settings. The cab driver is a skeleton named Benny and he has a Harryhausen brow. It's wonderful.

The plot, especially from this point, is structured like a neo noir (i.e. Blue Velvet-- see below). Normal people descend into a dark, strange world where conspiracies are operating on a level the protagonists never predicted. Like so much noir, including the ultimate neo-noir, Chinatown, the scheme ties back to a powerful and corrupt person pulling strings for his own ends. In Halloweentown, that's mayor/Gwen's ex/result of Kevin McDonald and Ian McShane walking into teleporters at the same time, Kalabar.

He's basically Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, who faked evidence and conspired with gangs to get his little corner of the world into the shape he was convinced it needed to return to. His heel turn is telegraphed both by his behavior and because Disney+ pulls up the title "Halloweentown 2: Kalabar's Revenge" in your "Halloweentown" search results. Kalabar wants to break out of Halloweentown and take over the mortal world. He's been transforming into the shadow demon, suckings his citizens' souls and powering up for what promises to be some kind of mash with monsters.

This is where Halloweentown gets sincerely creepy. Unsettling media for kids will sneak up on you. You think you're on a fun trip focus-tested to appeal to the scardiest of cats and then an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? becomes a meditation on child death or a Goosebumps story ends with a person frozen as a statue for eternity. I know John Carpenter is going to do everything he can to get under my skin, but I get knocked off balance when a Disney Channel movie introduces grandma's sweet, costume-less friend...

...who then inexplicably shrivels up a couple scenes later and is unable to recognize the person she was just talking with...

and finally winds up a semi-living corpse in a movie theater.

We meet Harriet in her final form when Aggie and the Piper clan (Gwen comes to town when she realizes her kids are gone) make a deal with a formerly ugly goblin tween named Luke. The tween, who introduces himself as "kind of a big cheese around here," had reconstructive spell surgery to look more human and rumor has it the rhinoplasty came courtesy of the shadow demon. Luke leads the protagonists to the movie theater, where Harriet is one of a dozen or so dead people, forever staring at a blank screen.

Kalabar shows up in shadow demon form and freezes Aggie and Gwen, though the kids escape. Marnie leads her siblings on a scavenger hunt to make her grandmother's anti-Kalabar potion, and the film takes a left turn, becoming a slapstick quest for a wolfman's hair, a ghost's sweat and a vampire's fang. It's fun-- we get to see some bizarre costumes-- but totally snuffs out the tension old undead grandma brought to the table. Look at this guy:

Across town, which is a generous two blocks away, Kalabar appears before a mass of extras and preaches that they don't have to be exiled to Halloweentown, that they can take over the real world if they want, mortals be damned. The fucked up thing is the assembled crowd nods to each other. When Marnie accidentally does what she's supposed to with the potion and Kalabar is weakened, everybody cheers, like we didn't just see these white moderates fully ready to let a bloodthirsty kook lead them to war with humans. They should want to break out of their open-air prison, just maybe not on this guy's terms.

The family all use their powers and, with the help of Luke, who didn't think it would go this far, man, they kill Kalabar. Gwen comes to terms with her witch life and Marnie gets the implicit go-ahead to learn magic. With Kalabar's essence removed from the world, Luke goes back to looking like his old self, and it turns out he looks pretty normal. He only thought he was ugly because of low self-esteem. Just kidding, he's very ugly! I don't think that should have led him to fascism, but I get why you'd want to use magic to change your hideous face if you looked like this. Please leave, Luke! The Disney Channel is right, you don't deserve to live in a real world with freedoms! You should be banished to Halloweentown forever!

It's a quick movie, and there's so much going on it can feel like a pilot. Maybe Halloweentown was always going to be the first DCOM franchise (Zenon, released three months later, got a sequel first, but the Halloweentown series premiered earlier and got more entries). When I watch Halloweentown 2, we'll see how much of this is recycled, how many one-joke characters show up to deliver that same joke again. If that happens, though, it'll speak poorly for that film, not this one. Halloweentown rules.

Before they were big: Lead actor Kimberly J. Brown also starred in the next two movies in the Halloweentown series and in Quints, a DCOM about quintuplets. She was in the same tiny Disney Channel star tier Kirsten Storms (Zenon) occupied, where you saw her all the time but she wasn't in too many of the bumpers where actors outlined Mickey ears with their sparkling fingers. You know the ones. Kenneth Choi, the Elvis-like broom salesman, has gone on to have a long career in TV and movies, but to me he'll always be Lewis in The Last Man on Earth.

Well after they were big: Director Duwayne Dunham has by far the most impressive behind-the-camera resume in the DCOM Pantheon so far. He got his start as an assistant editor at Industrial Light & Magic, working on the second Star Wars and first Indiana Jones (Wikipedia says he also worked on Apocalypse Now and A New Hope, but I couldn't corroborate that anywhere). He was upgraded to Editor on Return of the Jedi, hooked up with David Lynch and cut Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and the pilot of Twin Peaks. His first three directing credits were on episodes of that show, including the second episode, which he also edited. Two years after Twin Peaks ended, he directed Disney's live-action pets-in-peril film Homeward Bound and made six DCOMs in six years. In 2017, he edited all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return. That is a very weird career. Dunham is still active and directed a movie in post-production, so it's too early to say this, but I'll say it anyway: He's done everything an editor/director could do. He worked on two of the biggest blockbuster series, two of the most cherished David Lynch films, Steve de Jarnatt's Cherry 2000 (I concede this is only exciting to me), a Rick Moranis comedy for children, a bunch of Disney Channel movies, a film where Michael J. Fox, Don Ameche and Sally Field voice plucky animals running around a forest and a television show so revered that many critics argued it was actually an 18-hour-long movie. Damn.

And while this couldn't ever be considered his career-best moment, it's a career-best piece of trivia: Duwayne Dunham was technically the first person to play Boba Fett. He signed autographs and marched in the 1978 San Anselmo County Fair parade in a pre-Empire Strikes Back version of the costume. Star Wars fans talk about Boba Fett's first appearance being in the Star Wars Holiday Special, a famously well-regarded animated segment in an even more famously terrible television event. The coolest fans, though, impress everybody with their very useful brains, clear their throats and say, "Um, actually, he premiered two months earlier at a county fair. Ta-ta, I'm off to make even more friends!" The obscure provenance is sincerely interesting and was just enough of a thing to get turned into an action figure.

Aside from its above the line talent, Halloweentown has, coincidentally, the most impressive on-camera resume in Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds. She was also a rare "did everything a person in her field could do" case, from Singing in the Rain to her own sitcom to Broadway work to Charlotte's Web. She's also one of the few actors to raise another performer so good people don't mind the nepotism. It's Debbie Reynolds/Eddie Fisher, Lloyd Bridges, Stellan Skarsgard and Janet Leigh/Tony Curtis and that's it. Get out of here, Johnny Depp and Kevin Smith.

Reynolds was making a lot of kids movies around this time, and I'd like to think it's because Billie Lourd and I are around the same age and Reynolds was trying to make things her granddaughter would like, but I also recognize studios don't know what to do with women once they get older. Still, I bet/hope Disney was paying well!

Most impressive of all, Gwen Piper is played by Judith Hoag, who was April O'Neil in the 1990 live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

What I had remembered from childhood: Most of the plot. My family owned a DVD set of the first two Halloweentown movies, so it was something we returned to around the holiday. Plus, obviously, Disney Channel replayed it next to stuff like Hocus Pocus. The seasonal theme meant it had longer legs than something like Brink!, which would have disappeared after three or four years.

The year is 1998: Nothing's that dated. No half-assed "Booritney Spears" posters around Halloweentown, nobody's playing a GameBoo Color, the theater marquee isn't advertising Eddie Murphy in Dr. Boolittle. My god, the "our 1998 world but with boo puns" jokes we could have seen. They should have had Tony Kushner punch the script up. A wolfman says "yeah, baby!" in an Austin Powers voice, though, which is extremely 1998.

Wouldn't fly today!: Everything's pretty okay here. Will take this category out if the next DCOM doesn't have anything weirdly problematic.

The _____ was in your heart the whole time: need to accept your Pagan birthright and live deliciously

Ultimate Ranking:

Brink!
Halloweentown
Under Wraps
You Lucky Dog

Ultimate Ranking Notes: This almost beat Brink! I had to go back to the last post and look at Val's faces to cement how special Brink! is and how hard a movie would have to work to best it. I need to be clear, though, that Halloweentown is a very close number two.