Halloweentown (1998)

directed by Duwayne Dunham

Tasha Coryell

The thing that the Halloweentown franchise gets right is that monstrosity is demarcated by the visual. The movie suggests that fictitious beasts and magical creatures live a life that mirrors one of humans living in a western culture. They get married, have children, and feed into a capitalist labor system. What renders these monsters as different and incompatible with the human world is their appearance, which is so ghastly as to require a separate plane of existence. The thing that the Halloweentown franchise gets wrong is that these monsters should be stopped from taking over humanity.

The first Halloweentown movie premiered on the Disney Channel in 1998. In 1999, I started junior high school and, in the process, lost all of the people that I had previously labeled as friends. My sixth-grade teacher told my parents that I was “friendly with everyone” and not “cliquey,” which was another way of saying that there was nowhere I truly belonged. This outsider status was cemented in seventh grade when my former friends, who were athletic and conventionally attractive, recognized something within me that meant I was no longer good enough to be friends with them. I say something within me, but I suspect that it had more to do with the outside of me, which didn’t fit within the realm of junior high school hot in the same way that they did.

Even though neither of my parents watched much television, we always had cable and our old wood-paneled TV was my near constant companion. I didn’t discuss what I watched with other people. I knew that there were “cool” things and “uncool” shows, but I didn’t know how to differentiate between the two so I kept my media consumption to myself. Later, I watched TRL and the Real World on MTV, because those things seemed safely cool. As a burgeoning teenager, I mostly watched the Disney Channel.

This was the Disney Channel before High School Musical. Lizzie McGuire was still a year and a half away and afternoons were filled with replays of shows like Boy Meets World, Sister Sister, Smart Guy, and anything the Lawrence brothers starred in. At night, I watched Disney Channel Original Movies. Television was how I made sense of my body, my isolation. These movies made it seem like a magical transformation was inevitable. In Thirteenth Year, an adopted kid becomes a mermaid after his thirteenth birthday. Instead of finding himself covered in acne and growing pubic hair as I did, he discovers that his legs can turn into a tail, among a variety of other mermaid powers. Before he leaves for the undersea world, he gets a kiss from his crush.

The first Halloweentown movie follows this same basic formula. Marnie Cromwell has always loved Halloween, despite her mother forbidding any sort of celebration of the holiday. One Halloween, her grandmother, who only ever visits on October 31st dressed like a witch, shows up. Marnie overhears a conversation in which her grandmother tells her mother that Marnie has to start learning how to use her magic by midnight or she will lose her powers forever. As it turns out, Marnie comes from a long line of witches, a heritage that her mother has rejected in favor of a normal life in the human world. In order to keep her magic powers, Marnie and her siblings follow their grandmother to Halloweentown, where they meet all manner of creatures.

This plot made sense to me because my own transition into something magical felt inevitable. Certainly, I was destined for something more exciting than bland humanity. How crushing it was to discover that despite my feelings of alienation from my peers, I was wholly normal. I had no magic powers, no one was coming to whisk me away to Hogwarts or Halloweentown. Instead, my parents got divorced, no one in junior high had a crush on me, and I spent my nights wracked with anxiety, popping my pimples. I would make a pan of brownies every few days and eat one with ice cream each afternoon, thinking only about the pleasurable rush of sugar and the few moments of joy that the sweetness brought me. I gained weight. It was inevitable. My breasts and hips became large and heavy and my perception of myself in my head no longer matched my outward appearance. In eighth grade, I got an early-model digital camera and I took a series of selfies, only to realize that I wasn’t who I thought I was. If only I had been a vampire, blissfully unable to see my own reflection.

Beyond Marnie’s family drama, the main tension in the Halloweentown franchise is the relationship between the human world and the monster world. According to Marnie’s grandmother, the monsters were originally banished to Halloweentown because the humans were afraid of them and this fear led to violent conflicts between the two. The solution that was devised was to send all the monsters to a separate realm with a portal that only opens once a year, on Halloween. For witches and warlocks that appear human, they can choose to live in the monster world or the mortal world, as Marnie’s mother does. While most of the monsters in Halloweentown appear satisfied with the arrangement, Kalabar (the villain and also the mayor) is not. Despite his human appearance, Kalabar resents that the monsters have been relegated to Halloweentown and makes plans for them to take over the mortal world. Mere hours after she arrives in Halloweentown for the first time, Marnie manages to defeat Kalabar’s plan and ensure that the monsters are stuck in the magical realm until the portal opens on the next Halloween.

The difference between good and evil is implied rather than explicitly stated within the Halloweentown universe. Marnie and her family are presumed to be good as they have a human appearance and have a wholesome family life in their middle-class household. Because they look like humans, the Cromwells are able to pick and choose whether they want to live in the regular world or in Halloweentown. Marnie’s mother is so dedicated to this human façade that she attempts to hide her children’s witchy identities until it becomes inevitable. The monsters within Halloweentown are also labeled as good as long as they follow proper social conventions. The monsters are taxi drivers, dentists, barbers, anything other than the thing that their appearance portrays.

The anxiety about the creatures in Halloweenteen seems not to be related to a fear of attack, but rather a fear of contagion. In the second film, Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge, Kalabar’s son, Kal, hatches a plan to use an ancient spell that turns humans into whatever creature they imitate on Halloween at a school dance. Marnie’s mother, wearing a green-faced witch mask with orange hair, becomes the exaggerated version of what she already is. Everyone is the worst possible version of the thing that they are dressed as. It’s like a children’s version of the 1932 film Freaks, where the carnival “freaks” accept a normal-looking woman by chanting, “We accept her, we accept her. One of us, one of us. Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble." At the end of the film, the woman becomes one of the freaks after she is mutilated into a “human duck.”

This fear of contagion can be described by the concept of abjection. Julia Kristeva writes that it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscious…the killer who claims he is a savior.” The abject is something that flows freely from inside the body to outside and vice versa. When Kal turns the attendees of the Halloween party into the costumes that they wear, he takes the superficial and turns it into their being. This is why the monsters of Halloweentown cannot be allowed into the real world, because they will infect the mortals with their monstrousness. This is why uncool people aren’t allowed to sit at the table with the popular girls in junior high, because their loser status is contagious.

Interspecies dating is a running joke in the movies. In the first movie, a teenager named Luke flirts with Marnie when she arrives in Halloweentown. Luke is a bad boy, obviously. All the desirable teenage boys are bad. The skeleton taxi driver references how Luke “thinks he’s a big shot just because he got a nose job and had a few warts removed.” Later it comes out that Luke was working with Kalabar in exchange for a human appearance and in actuality, he’s a goblin with a large nose. After Marnie sees his real appearance, Luke says, “I did what I did because he made me handsome. I guess it wasn’t much of a reason for being all evil and all, huh? Especially since even when I was good looking, I didn’t have much of a chance of getting a date with you.” To show that she is not bothered, Marnie kisses him on the cheek, but the prospect of them dating or becoming romantically involved is never broached again despite Luke’s lengthy role in the second movie. In the third movie, Halloweentown High, an abomination barely worth mentioning, Marnie’s brother has a brief flirtation with a girl from Halloweentown who is wearing a human disguise. When her true form is revealed to be that of a bright pink troll, Marnie’s brother expresses disgust. At the end of the movie, they almost kiss and then express revulsion for one another and agree that they should just be friends.

If the Halloweentown movies taught me anything, it’s that magical creatures are only acceptable if they meet the junior high standards of hotness. Marnie was the coveted object of affection for both Luke and Kal seemingly because she was the only human hot girl they knew. Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t magical entirely because I wasn’t attractive enough. No one wanted a witch who spent hours squeezing her zits or scrutinizing her body in the mirror. Even if I had the power to travel to Halloweentown, no bad-boy goblin would have a crush on me. Because of this, I leaned into what I viewed as my own monstrousness. I started wearing all black. I pierced my own ears until earrings stretched from top to bottom. I wore thick black eyeliner and drew stars on the sides of my eyes in marker. I wanted to have power over the way in which I was labeled and if my peers were going to label me as other, then I wanted to go all the way.

In retrospect, I’m able to recognize that I’m more like Marnie that I would have ever admitted as a teenager. As it turns out, being a writer is not the same as being subjected to a different realm, particularly if you are white, straight, and cisgendered. There were boys who had crushes on me, though none of them turned out to be literal goblins or evil warlocks. Most of my feelings of alienation could be attributed to anxiety and depression, which alleviated when I began to nourish myself as a human that needs food and sleep. Still, I think the movies tell an unintended truth about the way that people we render as other become subjected to a different realm, a realm whose doors only open and close as those in power want them to.

I have to admit that if I were a Cromwell witch and an evil warlock who wanted to combine the spooky world with the human world and make me his queen, I would do it in a second. Marnie and her mother are supposed to be perceived as “good” because they reject this particular power grab, while failing to acknowledge that they already render the power that the villains seek. When helping monsters overtake the mortal world, the key is to overturn existing power structures. There’s no use in having monsters who are just like humans or monsters who only value conventional forms of hotness. We need to let the monsters be monsters. We need to help them destroy things.

Tasha Coryell teaches English at the University of Alabama. Her first book of short stories, Hungry People, was published by Split Lip Press in 2018. She recently bought a book on witchcraft for new witches.