How Disney’s Sleeper Hit ‘Hocus Pocus’ Changed Salem Forever
If you’ve visited Salem, Massachusetts, in the last decade or so, you’re probably well aware that the Disney movie Hocus Pocus was shot there. During spooky season, which now starts in the middle of August and runs through Halloween, the historic coastal city known for being the site of the 1692 witch trials is inundated by fans of the 1993 family film, which stars Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy as 17th-century sister witches who are accidentally resurrected by a Grateful Dead-loving high schooler and, lest we forget, virgin on Halloween night. So many Hocus Pocus fans have started showing up during peak season that the city of just under 50,000 has had to add an extra police presence at certain filming locations in order to keep overzealous fans in check.
What these fans might not realize is that the cast and crew spent less than a month shooting in Salem. The majority of the three decade old movie was shot across multiple locations in Los Angeles, including Stage 2, the largest soundstage on the Walt Disney Studios lot, where only thirty years earlier, Mary Poppins was filmed.
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Yet the short time the production did spend in New England remains some of the best moments from the shoot, as many in the cast and crew told me for my new book Witches Run Amok: The Oral History of Disney’s Hocus Pocus. It was also noteworthy for the locals, who shared what it’s been like to see their hometown become a popular film tourism destination. As one might imagine, it’s both a blessing and a curse.
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William Sandell (Production Designer): I was living in Burbank, California, and flying back and forth to Salem scouting locations. I put, like, a hundred thousand miles on my American Airlines and Delta cards waiting for the trees to change. I was in heaven. It was actually the happiest time of my life.
Neil Cuthbert (Co-screenwriter): My wife and I drove up to Salem, Massachusetts, just to check on the place since that’s where the film was set. It was really fun because we got there and realized this is a town that is in fact insane for Halloween. I mean, they go crazy there. I thought, Oh, this is just great!
Omri Katz (“Max Dennison”): We filmed in October and saw the change of seasons. Being from California, it was the first time I’d ever really witnessed that in real life. I have fond memories of visiting Walden Pond and taking all that in, the beauty of the landscape and how different it was from a Southern California desert, which was all I knew then.
Mick Garris (Co-screenwriter/Co-executive Producer): Taking a trip to Salem was the thing that exploded my imagination. I’d never been there before, and I went right before Halloween. They celebrate the eleven days leading up to Halloween, and it climaxes with a candlelight vigil to Gallows Hill, where the witches were stoned and pressed to death. There is so much of the city that has given over to the wicked history of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. That trip was probably the biggest influence of all [on my script]. It’s why the movie, in my head, had a lot more shadows.
William Sandell: We were in Salem on Halloween shooting on the tercentenary anniversary of the witch trials. They were building the Salem witchcraft victims’ memorial while we were there. They inscribed on each of the stones the last words that they said on the gallows.
Rachel Christ-Doane (Director of Education, Salem Witch Museum): In the ’90s, there was quite a large tourism industry emerging in Salem really focusing on its witch-related past. That was also the time of the tercentenary, the three hundredth anniversary of the trials, so there were some really important conversations going on in Salem about how we engage with modern witchcraft and what all of that means to people today.
Kate Fox (Executive Director, Destination Salem, 2007–2023): We estimate that about 85 to 90 percent of the visitors who come to Salem as tourists say that they’re coming for “the witchy things.” A lot of them don’t know what that means so we will often break it down for them and say, “This is what happened in 1692. This is the historical fact of the witch trials.” Then we also have a modern witch community and then we have the pop-culture witches like the Sanderson sisters. I do think more people are coming because of Hocus Pocus, whereas at one point people were coming because they wanted to do the Salem Witch thing, whatever that means to them.
Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll (Mayor of Salem, 2006–2023): Ever since the three hundredth anniversary of the witch trials in 1992, the city has had a steady drumbeat of recognition for what our history means to tourism and hospitality. We could tell all of our stories, right? The witch trials, the golden age of Salem, and Hocus Pocus. That more pop-culture piece of what was filmed here and filmed in other places, but was about here. Give the people what they want, so to speak.
David Kirschner (Creator/Writer/Producer): I remember soaking in the vibe of Salem. All of this history was really exciting and just the feeling of fall and what could be created from that.
Ralph Winter (Executive Producer): We were worried that we were going to miss the changing of the leaves. That we’d show up in New England and all the leaves would be gone or everything is still green. It was hard to predict. Now it’s become more of a thing to watch the colors, but we wanted to be sure we had the right materials, so we brought our own leaves. We filled a five-ton truck full of orange-painted leaves. That’s a lot of leaves, but we used them.
William Sandell: If you look at some of the scenes in Salem, you’ll see it’s pretty green up [near the top of the trees], but a little more colorful down lower when the camera pans down. Everywhere I went people were laughing their heads off because I had bags and bags of fall leaves and branches. I had my greensman running around sticking them into trees and throwing ’em all in front of the kids and in front of the camera. Good old-fashioned movie making, right?
Rosemary Brandenburg (Set Decorator): It wouldn’t have been as cool a project if we’d done the whole thing in L.A. It was just really cool that we were able to go to New England; that set the tone. It set the stage for a lot of really good historical discovery and layering. It just gave it a richness that I might not have been able to achieve by being able to go there and see things personally.
Steve Voboril (“Elijah”): The locals in Salem were literally on set walking around like, “Hi! How’s it going?” I remember standing with Sean [Murray] before shooting a scene and a little girl, she had to be like five years old, brought me this little stick of wood. She says, “This is your wand to protect you from the witches.” I still have it.
Russell Bobbitt (Prop Master): We’re shooting in Salem. I think it’s the scene where Max is riding his bicycle through town and he gets his shoes stolen. This little boy walks up to me, he’s got to be eight years old. He goes, “I know who you are. You’re Russell Bobbitt.” I was like, “Okay, this is weird. Who are you? What’s your deal?” He goes, “I just love movies. I pay attention to everything and I’m just really into it.” I was like, “Okay, weird,” but he was just a nice little kid. He had no fear. He goes, “I want to give you my phone number. Can I have your phone number? I’m gonna stay pen pals with you.” He was really legit, so I said, “Of course, we’ll stay in touch. It’ll be great.” I get back home and the kid calls me and goes, “Hey, my parents said I could come out for the summer and I was wondering if it’s okay if I come and visit you and your wife?” I’m married, I have kids, and I was like, “Well, okay.” Weird moment number two. I called the parents and they’re free-spirited people. They explain, “He met you on set and he met a bunch of people and he is going to stay a week with this person, a week with that person. If you want to have him, great. We appreciate it.” The kid comes out, we have a great time. He comes to the set with me. He goes back home. Next year, he calls me again. It’s summer vacation. “I’m spending a week with Ivan Reitman and another week with Al Pacino. I’d like to spend a week with you.” I was like, “Okay, Jeremy, come and visit.” He did this for many years. He ends up getting a degree at Yale because he said in his essay, “If you let me into this school, I’ll get Al Pacino to come here and talk to your class at graduation.” And he did. He went to school for law, but now he’s [Succession star] Jeremy Strong. When I see him now, I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s Jeremy, my little friend from Hocus Pocus.”
William Sandell: I stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel right in the middle of town by the Salem Common, which, by the way, is a very haunted hotel. There are a couple of floors that are very active. Laurie Cabot, the official witch of Salem, had her crystal shop right by. At the end of the day, I would see Laurie and her girlfriends sitting by their Chevys smoking, all in their witch dresses, which were all kinds of chiffon. I’d always wonder where they were going. I would walk in the cemeteries at night and you could peek into these old crypts. For a guy who had been doing a spook show on his front lawn, I was seeing the real thing. I really did a lot of research on Salem witches. It took me a long time after this movie, which was a very happy experience, to sort of shake the horrible images from that time. The horrible ways these women were treated. I wish it wasn’t in my head. Accuracy wasn’t that important to Kenny, but it was important to the art department.
Rosemary Brandenburg: I’m definitely a research maven. My father was a historian and professor of history. My mother was an art historian. I was dragged around to every museum in the world. I love the process of finding historic detail. Sometimes it puts me at odds with a director. For example, when I worked with Quentin Tarantino on The Hateful Eight, which was another period project, he was really into looking at old movies and using that as reference. It may be cool for shots, but as far as the dressing, those old Westerns are kind of primitive. They were working strictly from what was available in the prop houses at the studios. You can see the same stove over and over again. I just prefer primary references, as historians say; really going to the historical documents. On Hocus Pocus, everybody did their research: the windows and doors, the size of the stairs, the weight of the beams. I would go into a store for those reenactments of the Civil War or Revolutionary War and buy beautiful period nails and hooks. You rust them up and you stick them in the set. Whether you see all these details in the movie or not, I don’t know, but I don’t care. We just really took it seriously.
Mary Vogt (Costume Designer): In order to exaggerate, you have to start with realism. When you start doing any kind of research, the best thing to do is to read people’s diaries. That is the closest to the truth. It’s not an interpretation, it’s actually there. They usually mention the clothes and things they packed and things they did during the day. In the museums they have a lot of patterns for period clothes, and Hocus Pocus wasn’t set that long ago so we stayed pretty close to the patterns of the original 1600s clothes. Once I’ve gotten a good feeling for what was happening then, the politics and the culture, then I start to exaggerate and hope that some of that realism comes through.
Kate Fox: People don’t realize Hocus Pocus is fiction, which boggles my mind. We have lots of requests for, “Where’s the Sanderson sisters’ house?” In LA on a soundstage. It doesn’t exist, which was great until Disney made the Airbnb for Hocus Pocus 2. Every day we tell people the Sanderson house doesn’t exist, and then they make it exist.
For one night only in October 2022, fans were able to stay in a re-creation of the Sanderson sisters’ home via Airbnb. The cottage may not be an actual Salem landmark, but the movie turned several of the city’s real historic locations into photo opportunities for fans, including Pioneer Village, America’s first living-history museum.
William Sandell: Pioneer Village is the wildest thing of all. I went there and no one told me that it’s a replica of Salem as it was in the seventeenth century where people pretend to be living in that era. It was a rainy, drizzly day. No one was there. I poke my head into one of the buildings and there’s this woman sitting there darning something. She says, “Hello, good sir, come on in. Is the weather so bad?” I’m getting goose bumps right now just telling this story. She says, “Where are you from?” I said, “Well, I’m from California.” She says, “Oh, I don’t know where that is. Where would that be?” I said, “Well, it’s a bit far away.” I go outside and I see a guy hoeing behind his little house and I say, “Boy that looks like a lot of work.” He says, “Oh, it’s God’s work,” and keeps on hoeing. I take pictures of everything. I go back to the studio and I say, “I gotta see Kenny right away.” I go into his office in LA and I’m still in shock. He says, “What’s the matter with you? Your eyes are all bugged out.” I’m like, “I just got back from the East Coast on a scout. We gotta go right away.” When we went back it wasn’t as magical as the day I saw it; there were more people there, but that aerial shot in the beginning of the movie, that’s Pioneer Village. It really was the coolest thing I ever saw.
The exterior of Allison’s house in the film was filmed at the Ropes Mansion, which is owned by the Peabody Essex Museum, one of the oldest continuously operating museums in the United States. The location is the third-most-googled home of all time, according to TheStreet in 2023, with searches for “hocus pocus house” averaging 12,000 searches per month. (The houses in Home Alone and Twilight came in first and second, respectively.)
Paula Richter (Curator, Peabody Essex Museum): [The Ropes Mansion] was built in the late 1720s and it’s on Essex Street in Salem, a really main thoroughfare through the downtown of Salem, one of the historic districts. I think it is one of the most recognizable sites in the film, in part because of how it was decorated. The fence outside was completely surrounded with carved pumpkins, really large pumpkins, all beautifully lit, the cornstalks and hay bales and all the trappings of Halloween and fall in New England. I think it’s a very memorable moment in the film because of all of the decoration and the attention that went into it.
Rosemary Brandenburg: We made a pact that we wouldn’t buy one store-bought Halloween decoration, that we would make everything ourselves whether it was corn husks or red devil tridents. We had a really fun crew that really got into it.
Paula Richter: I have worked at the Peabody Essex Museum for many years and I was present during the filming. It was a very dramatic experience. The furnishings of the historic house actually represent four generations of belongings of a single family, the Ropes family of Salem, who originally lived in the house from the eighteenth century until 1907…. The last couple of years, the museum actually partnered with a Disney fan club to decorate the historic house like it was in the film during Halloween; it really became a favorite spot for selfies.
The movie also turned a private residence into one of the city’s most Instagrammed sites.
William Sandell: I was looking for Max Dennison’s house in Salem. I picked that one because it’s so charming. That house was actually right on the water on this beautiful little bay. There was a big long scene where Max and his father have this heart-to-heart down on the beach. I wanted to put them by the water because Salem is surrounded with water. It was a huge important shipping port. Everybody was a captain who was living in these marvelous homes. Everything has a plaque, “Captain so-and-so, 1801.” There’s just so much history there. You just get a vibe.
Rachel Christ-Doane: I don’t mean to speak for everyone in Salem, but I think that nobody really expected Hocus Pocus to become as popular as it’s become. That’s an important part of this conversation. The feelings around Hocus Pocus I think have changed in recent years because it’s driving so many people here who are coming with this kind of different perception of the witch history here. They’re coming because they want to see the Sanderson sisters’ house, which doesn’t exist. They want to see the house where Max lived in the film, which is a real house that’s privately owned. That’s actually becoming a problem because so many visitors are going there.
Kimmy Blankenburg (@KimmyBlanksHocusPocusLife; Hocus Pocus Devotee): I’ve been lucky enough to go to Salem every year since 2008 and have created my own personal “Kimmy’s Hocus Pocus Tour” for my family. We hit all the filming locations. I tend to get emotional whenever we pull up to Max and Dani’s house, properly known as the Balcomb Cottage. During one of my yearly visits, I was fortunate enough to meet the adorable owner of the home, sitting in a rocker on her porch, enjoying the view of the water. She actually lived in the house while Disney was filming and told me all of the wonderful experiences she had with the cast and crew, and how respectful they were.
Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll: Everybody wants a picture in front of that house, that’s for sure. That’s probably the place most people go. We now have to put up a police detail in front of the house.
Kate Fox: I’ve had tour buses filled with fifty people from Canada who just drive right up to that house. Picture a bus just stopping in the middle of the road and letting everybody get out to take a picture. That’s a huge problem for the entire neighborhood. It impacts not just that house, but all the neighbors, and the neighbors complain more than the people in that house.
William Sandell: This was a couple of years ago, but I got Dot, the little old lady who owns the Max Dennison house, on the phone. I said, “So do you hate me for picking your house for this thing?” She says, “No, Bill. It was fun. I remember when I saw you down by the water in front of our house and you were looking for sea glass for your mother.” I said, “I remember you invited me in and made me coffee and offered me some of your cookies.” We had the nicest talk, but I always wonder about that poor street. It’s just loaded with people getting their picture taken in front of their house. She said, “Everybody’s pretty nice. Nobody bangs on our door. Nobody’s disrespectful. They just stand in the street and take a picture.” We painted a portrait of the Max Dennison house. You see our painting in the movie, hanging in the hallway. The owners still have that picture and it’s hanging in that same spot. That was my gift to them.
Text copyright (C) 2024 by Disney Enterprises, Inc.
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