The Kitchen Sink

a classic of the Disney genre

One of Disney’s most beloved classics of its genre, Halloweentown is a 1998 fantasy comedy starring Kimberly J, Brown as protagonist Marnie and Debbie Reynolds as her grandmother, Agatha “Aggie” Cromwell. 

Being the first of many moody tween Disney Movies, we open with 13 year old Marnie, who is, in her words, “practically an adult”, arguing with her mother about not being allowed to go out on Halloween – which, as her friends are glad to tell the audience, doesn’t make sense given Marnie has always had a morbid curiosity for the macabre and obscure (as macabre as will be allowed in a Disney movie, of course).

After a long back and forth that culminates in Marnie’s friends being kicked out of the house to trick-or-treat on their own, leaving an upset Marnie in the company of her brother Dylan, the know-it-all sceptic of the family, as her mother promptly yanks her little sister out of the window and into the kitchen even after she ominously says “there’s someone coming”, Marnie has a small argument with her brother about how her obsession with Halloween is weird and she should instead focus on realistic things, like Animal Planet documentaries. 

Marnie’s father died years ago, and as much as I’m sure there is a plot explanation for it, I do not remember, as this movie throws a lot of information and set-ups for future instalments at the wall for its 90min runtime, so it’s frankly difficult to grasp all the extensive lore.

Turns out the figure Sophie saw approaching the house was their grandmother Agatha Cromwell, their mother’s mother who only visits once a year, on Halloween. It is implied that she only visits during that time because that is the only time the residents of Halloweentown are allowed outside their dimension, but by the end of the movie that seems to be disproved by their catching a bus back to the human world – although, maybe, that’s because time passes differently in Halloweentown? We’ll never know.

Anyway, Agatha’s visit is important for two reasons:

1. Marnie’s currently in her 13th Halloween, meaning she was supposed to be a graduated witch by now, and if she doesn’t at the very least START her magical studies this year, she will lose her powers forever and become human.

2. There’s a strange force taking hold of Halloweentown and disappearing its citizens, and Agatha needs the help of another Cromwell witch to defeat it – for the Cromwell’s are a long and powerful dynasty of witches, and their power is stronger together.

Neither of these facts seem to matter to Marnie’s mother, since she’s made the decision, after falling in love with a human, to raise her children as humans, not even allowing them the knowledge that they’re half magical, much less the choice to train or not train as witches. Gwen also couldn’t care less about her birthplace being overtaken by evil, and simply tells her ancient mother to look for someone else to bother about her lunacy. 

It goes without saying, but I despise Gwendolyn Piper, and don’t think her “redemption” works at all. 

This woman gave up infinite power, knowledge and immortality for human dick, and if that wasn’t enough, doomed her children to be forever confused about their true origins and feel like they don’t have a place in the world. I mean, how do you consider yourself a good mother as you watch your daughter feel strange and out of place, feel completely misunderstood like she doesn’t quite belong to this world, when YOU HAVE THE ANSWER as to why she feels that way, but you just don’t want to share it with her?

Forgive me for over analysing the mother-daughter relationship in this disney movie, but my god is this woman a bad mother. 

So, after Marnie discovers that secret by overhearing her mother and grandmother talking, she decides to follow her grandmother into the Halloweentown bus, and is surprised to find out her brother and sister also accompany her.

In Halloweentown, they are immediately greeted by the mayor – an absolute incel throwing every single red flag at the audience’s face who is really pissed off with Agatha and Gwen because he used to date, and be in love with, Gwen before she fell for a human and abandoned Halloweentown.

So we get to the core sentiment of the movie, and something that surprised me, as I had been unable to properly analyse and understand this in my young age.

Halloweentown is an allegory about Naziism. 

The main plot of the movie centres around a villain who believes monsters to be racially superior to humans due to their power, and incentivizes his followers to leave their dimension and move back into the human world to use their power to subjugate and destroy the human race. Due to his views of humans as inferior, he also views Gwen as tainted for having married one, and her children as being weak due to their mixed-blood. He talks of a return to the “glory days” when humans were scared of them and told their children bedtime stories to warn them of monsters, and where they could essentially do and get away with anything, before they were forced to be silenced and isolate themselves in a different dimension. He also believes that, since they are racially superior, the mortal world should belong to monsters.

Disney using their movies as allegories to explain tough issues to children isn’t exactly a new thing, and Halloweentown wouldn’t be the last time they do it (think of the Zombies series, for example), but it truly surprised me that this movie wasn’t just the campy silly little witch movie I remembered from my childhood, and had a lot to say about racial profiling and white supremacy. 

After 90 minutes of Marnie trying, and failing, to connect with her magic, we end with the Cromwell witches (Marnie, Agatha, Gwen and Sophie) and Dylan, who finds out at the last second he’s a warlock (not a wizard, for some reason), uniting in a spell that vanishes Kalabar, the mayor turned nazi warlock. 

We then get a semi-heartfelt apology between Gwen and her children, and Gwen asks her mother if she wouldn’t want to permanently live with them in the mortal world to spend more time with the children and teach them about their heritage. 

Now, a lot of things happen between the kids arrival to Halloweentown and them beating Kalabar, like them having to collect several ingredients for a potion to help ignite the sceptre of Merlin that will reveal who the villain is, but the most important thing to me was the revelation that witches’ powers are the most sensitive and difficult to control in their early age, which is why they’re supposed to finish their training at 13, implying they start much earlier.

We get several demonstrations of this throughout the movie as Marnie’s sister, Sophie, is the one who actually ends up helping defeat Kalabar the most. She levitates a cookie in the beginning of the movie, turns Agatha’s gate’s lock into a frog allowing the kids to get in, realises their kind skeleton taxi driver has been turned evil by sensing the energy within him, and is the only one to remember the incantation Agatha says to turn on the sceptre – after only hearing the spell ONCE. In fact, the sceptre doesn’t turn on when Marnie says the words herself, it is only when her magic is combined with her sister’s  that the damn thing decides to work!

All of this made me so curious as to how the dynamic between Marnie and Sophie will work in the future, and whether having the influence and teaching of her grandmother from a much younger age than Marnie will help her powers grow stronger than her older sister’s, potentially becoming an issue between them both.

I don’t actually expect any of the Halloweentown movies to tackle this issue, but it would be very fun if they did.

Another big surprise I had revisiting Halloweentown was the discovery that the makeup special effects were incredibly cool! The prosthetics and makeup, with virtually no post-production SFX added (at least none that I could tell) made this movie go from good to great. The designs of the monsters were unbelievable, with some of the costumes and makeup making me wonder not only the time they took to apply but the level of discomfort they must’ve caused the actors due to how elaborate they were. I’d honestly say this movie is worth the watch solely based on the need to see for yourself how interesting the monsters in it are designed – it’s truly astonishing how instead of honing and implementing the art of special makeup effects in movies and television, hollywood decided instead to chuck all that wonderful work out of the window and invest instead in adding SFX in post to everything, with the new age of filmmakers not even bothering to write their own scripts or hire actors who speak the languages they’re attempting to portray in film but instead subsidising this work to AI. 

How the hell did we end up here?

There’s a reason why Halloweentown remains such a beloved Disney Channel Original, and it is because of the artistic integrity, lovely script, great performances and the heart involved in it. There are many projects (Disney Original and otherwise) that could learn a thing or two from this little movie. 

Final score is 4.7/5, I genuinely wish it was longer and took more time to elaborate some of that lore, but I’m hoping we’ll get plenty of that in the next instalments.