Aight, considering its now Halloweekend it’s time to get a little spooky while simultaneously looking way too far into a Halloween must, Hocus Pocus. I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone what this movie is about but, basically some witches are looking to live forever by sucking the lives out of little children in Salem, MA. They get caught but not before they can suck the life out of a girl, gaining her life force and becoming younger. They curse her brother to be a cat and live forever, they get hanged, and 300 years later they are resurrected and wanna keep doing what they were doing. Good? Good.
Anyway, what I want to talk about is their magic in general. Antics aside, these 3 actually show a lot of really powerful abilities that given the right application could easily have gotten their plan to work and then some. Let’s just review some things they can do:
- Drain the life force of children(or a person in general) to effectively become immortal.
- Concentrate magic into blasts of lightning
- Lift people and objects with magic.
- Transform people into animals
- Using magical objects, they return from the dead.
- Fly with the aid of a broom (or mop….or vacuum cleaner)
- Resurrect the dead.
- Curse an entire room of people to dance themselves to death by exhaustion.
- Track children by scent
- Burning to death has seemingly very little effect; they regather from the smoke.
- Compelling large number of children, if not every child in Salem to their doorstep by singing
- Anything I missed, plus Winifred’s entire book of spells that we only see a handful of things from.
Granted, some of these abilities seem to be special abilities such as Mary’s children tracking and Sarah’s singing enchantment, and Winifred seems to be the most powerful of the 3. Had they used their abilities more effectively they could have easily done some serious damage or at the very least kept on living past Halloween. Near the end of the movie, the sisters regain Winifred’s book which contains the recipe for the potion that allows them to suck out the life force of a child. The heroes of the film do intervene and spill most of the potion on the ground but enough is left for 1 dose. For the first time in the entire movie, Sarah, the simple, flirtatious sister has the best idea and Winifred totally ignores her out of a ridiculous drive for revenge. She suggests that they can make more of the potion and reminds Winifred that they have the book, and that the children she summoned are currently arriving. Given the time limit of sunrise that is quickly approaching at this point, you would think it would be a simple decision to grab any given child from outside, give them the potion, suck out their life force, ensure you can live past the single night that the Black Flame Candle has given you, and then work on your revenge scheme.
If we take this really far, the Sanderson Sisters could have very likely enslaved Salem. With their ability to compel people to do certain things given time to say the incantation, key people in town could be made to do what they would like. Not to mention the entire book of spells which is said to have been given to Winifred by Satan himself which likely has much more dangerous magic in it than we actually saw. Also if they used magic to make the townspeople think nothing of them stealing the life force of children they could likely live forever, get even more powerful magic with time, etc. I would say I am not rooting for the bad guys but, I always kind of want to see alternate ends to movies like this where the villains succeed.
I really like looking too far into things like this. Have a reeeeeal spooky (but safe) Halloween everyone!
TCG fairy 