If you ask anyone who knows me, one of the only movies I hate is Hocus Pocus. Even when I watched it for the first time at 7, I hated it. And whilst I was a little more scared of it then than I am now, I still consider it the worst Halloween movie ever. Of course, a lot of my reasons are fueled by my intense fear of it as a child, but they are still relevant enough that I can't watch Hocus Pocus anymore.
1. The Sanderson Sisters are literally murdering a child for her “youth.”
Did that not scare the hell out of anyone else? Like, seriously, they took Emily’s life just so they could be forever young... what the everloving f**k is wrong with them?!? No one could ever convince me that this movie is for children, especially after the opening scene contains THE MURDER OF A CHILD!
2. The sisters turn Thackery into an immortal cat.
They are forcing Thackery to live with the guilt of not saving Emily for all of his life. And to add to Emily’s death, we see Thackery Binx get run over by a car, FLATTEN, and then suddenly re-inflate, thus coming back to life. As someone who grew up with a black cat, seeing that scared me beyond belief. I know it’s supposed to be funny and a joke, but it just makes the final scene a little bit harder to watch.
3. “Come, little children, I’ll take thee away…”
This song haunted my nightmares growing up. Sarah Jessica Parker's character literally had the power to hypnotize children and have all of them follow her so she and her sisters could pick the best one to kill. I was terrified every Halloween that I’d unknowingly be lured to my death by SJP and have no way to stop it from happening. No, thank you!
4. Max lights the sisters on fire… only to have them come back to life.
When I thought these awful witches had finally been stopped, they just come right back with an even bigger vengeance. Of course, this is standard in “scary” movies; the bad guy always comes back, but this fed right into my young trust issues regarding scary movies. The villains always keep coming back, and there never truly feels like there's an end to their tyranny, but I guess this is why a sequel is being made.
5. Max sacrifices himself for Dani…. And the Sanderson sisters were totally okay with it!
You know what that means? They don’t just need children, they are perfectly okay with teenagers. Nope, not okay. Of course, it was cute and heroic that Max would do that for Dani, but my fear of being taken by the sisters grew 10x stronger when he did that-- I would never be too old to be taken.
This movie haunted my Halloweens for 99% of my life. Of course, I've gotten over the fear I used to have for the movie, but whenever I see it now, I can't help but think of all the messed up stuff that the movie portrays. I might be exaggerating when I say "It's the worst Halloween movie ever", but it is kinda awful. I just can't get over how cruel some of the scenes in the movie are.
