It’s been over eight years since I first saw Something Wicked This Way Comes, the 1983 Disney Pictures adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel, when we covered it for “Movie of the Month” in July of 2017. In looking back over what I wrote, it seems that at the time I was most interested in communicating how the film differed from the novel and allowing my cohort to get more into the meat of what the film meant to them. In that discussion, there’s mention of the fact that this film works best on VHS, but I recently got to see the digital, full screen version that was just added to streaming at the beginning of this month, and it was virtually a brand-new experience for me. I’m not sure if it was because the tape I had was substandard or I was suffering with some kind of mind-numbing flu at the time of my initial viewing, but this felt like a brand new movie to me, as if I had never seen it before, and I felt the need to revisit it in writing as well. 

I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an “80s kid horror syllabus” lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it. The film is told from the point of view of an adult Will Halloway, about the final days leading up to his fourteenth birthday on Halloween, sometime in the 1950s. The young Will (Vidal Peterson) tells us early on that this is really the story of his father, Charles (Jason Robards), and the way that his father saved Will and his best friend Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) from a dark and mysterious force that appeared in their small midwestern town of Green Town. This evil is mostly represented in the forms of carnival proprietor Mr. Dark (a delightfully malevolent Jonathan Pryce), his brutal right hand man Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fisher), and the enigmatic “dust witch” (Pam Grier) who charms men to their doom. 

I mentioned it way back when, but Something Wicked (the novel) undoubtedly had an effect on Stephen King’s Needful Things, so much so that the latter work bears as much similarity to this film as, say, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass does to King’s own work. What I was struck by on this watch was how much it must have also influenced IT, given that the narratives both revolve around young children on the cusp of adolescence who resist the machinations of an intangible force of evil to which adults are blind (or blinded). The difference is that in IT, Pennywise seeks to consume the fear of children because their fears are much more concrete than those of adults and thus are something it can manifest while its supernatural powers make it nearly imperceptible to adults while, in Something Wicked, Mr. Dark’s mystical offers to the adults of Green Town are specifically aimed at the regrets that age has wrought on them. It’s telling that his offers are mostly lost on Will, a boy with two loving parents (even if his father is in poor health) and who has experienced only one traumatic event, while Jim, a boy living with a single mother because his father disappeared years ago and who can’t wait to grow up, is much more susceptible to Dark’s machinations. Jim and Will represent the two sides of fantasy; while Will still has the childlike imagination that inspires play, Jim’s daydreaming is maladaptive and, thus, makes him more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by Dark (and darkness). 

In that above-linked “Movie of the Month” discussion, there was a general consensus that Mr. Dark and his legion were preying upon people’s selfishness, but I see something different in it now. For some, their temptation may be related to something that we could call weakness—Miss Foley, once the town’s greatest beauty and now an old spinster, desires her youthful grace vainly; Mr. Tetley the cigar-peddler has piddled away his money on lottery tickets greedily; Mr. Crosetti the barber desires the company of a woman as apparently the only single man in a town of married women lasciviously (although I think the last of these is arguable). But I think maybe we were all operating under our own youthful blindness back then, because we failed to identify that what Dark was offering wasn’t the opportunity to indulge in a variety of selfish, carnal desires but to overturn the regrets of the past. This is made most manifest in two characters: Mr. Halloway (naturally, as the main character), but more blatantly in the form of the town’s bartender, Ed, played by real life amputee James Stacy. Ed is a strange figure, as he still wears his old football jersey around the town and can’t stop talking about the good old days, and if he were still an able-bodied man, we would pity him for being the kind of guy who peaked in high school and never shuts up about it. As it is, since he has lost an arm and a leg, we are sympathetic both to his fond remembrances of the past as well as the ease with which he is seduced by Dark’s promise of making him “whole” again. This reveals that there’s more than mere selfishness (or vanity, greed, or lust) at the heart of Dark’s bargains, but the false promise of a life without regret, and sets up the offer that he makes to Mr. Halloway. 

This is a wonderfully clever bit of narrative misdirection. Mr. Halloway’s greatest regret isn’t that he’s not wealthier or younger, but that his being a relatively older father and thus not being strong enough to save Will when he was swept up in a current at a riverside picnic means that he failed his son. Halloway’s regret lives outside of him; it’s in the way that his son panics and tries to run from the adult conversation about what happened that day at the river. Dark can only perceive that Halloway desires to be young and strong again, and his offer to return his youth to him fails not just because Halloway isn’t calloused and heartless enough to give up his child for a few more decades but because Dark can’t see that Halloway’s heartache exists in relation to another person. Turning the clock back for the elder Halloway won’t magically erase his failure to save Will from drowning (allowing the drunken and long-disappeared Mr. Nightshade the opportunity to be the unsung hero), and won’t mystically restore what fractured between father and son that day on the riverbank. The irony is that what Dark offers and what defeats him is the same: regression. He can only offer Halloway the chance for mystical rejuvenation by regressing him to an earlier age, but it’s Halloway’s regression to the state of childlike optimism that starves the carnival, since it feeds on negative emotions, allowing a chance for Dark to hoist his own petard aboard the aging/de-aging carousel. 

This film is also a visual marvel. Now that it is widely available again, it’s entering The Discourse, and I’ve seen several neutral(ish) criticisms that the film is wonderful “despite” that the “visuals don’t hold up.” I would disagree wholeheartedly, as I don’t think that the representations that we see on screen were ever meant to fully evoke “reality.” As the malevolent train rolls into town, eerie wisps of smoke are drawn over the frames, and this same smoke attempts to capture the two boys later in the film, but it was never really meant to be smoke, it was “smoke” in a more ephemeral sense. Several vistas are clearly matte paintings with the occasional distant, twinkling light in them, but it’s only “unconvincing” if you expect the film to perfectly reproduce a landscape, and I feel that the film informs us that we shouldn’t be expecting that from the first moments, when the adult Will tells us via narration “This is really the story of my father and that strange, leaf-whispery autumn when his heart was suddenly too old and tired and too full of yearning and regrets, and he didn’t know what to do about it.” This is the old home town through the eyes of a child, and what most modern viewers mistake as the “fakeness” of the images used to convey this narrative is an externalization of the mysteriousness of the world to a boy on the cusp of young adulthood, inevitably putting him on the path to being a man whose regrets will crystallize into something manipulable. It’s expressionistic, like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or Metropolis, or the non-narrative “fictional” interludes in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. To hold Something Wicked to a standard of photorealism is to miss the point utterly, and the film’s visual beauty lies in the way that it plays with this self-mythologizing of one’s own childhood, the way that the real becomes the surreal in mind and memory. 

I can’t recommend a revisit (or a first-time watch) of this one more highly, especially in these twilight hours of the spooky season (or, depending on when this goes live, in the dawning days that follow it). Even if you, like me, watched this one once upon a time and weren’t entranced by it, give it another shot. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond