Halloweentown: The greatest project from a man who worked with George Lucas and David Lynch

By: Peter Neville, Asst. Sports Editor

In 1993, Sheri Singer – senior vice-president of TV movies for Walt Disney Television – was asked the question, “Where do all the creatures from Halloween go the rest of the year when it's not Oct. 31?” That simple question spawned one of the best Halloween movies ever made, Halloweentown, a made-for-TV movie released on Disney Channel in 1998. 

For this bold idea, Disney needed someone with the experience to be able to pull off this audacious project of bringing to life the ghouls and creatures of our nightmares from Halloween to tube TVs across the world. 

Disney landed on Duwayne Dunham, an editor on “Return of the Jedi” and an editor/director on “Twin Peaks.” With experience working around Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic, which brought to life the science fiction world of “Star Wars,” and working with David Lynch on his surrealist television series “Twin Peaks” and its subsequent sequel, Dunham provided the answer to the question Singer was asked in 1993. 

The movie opens with Gwen Piper, played by Judith Hoag, lambasting her oldest daughter, Marnie – the protagonist of the film – for wanting to go out on Halloween with her friends. Marnie makes her best arguments as to why she and her siblings, Dylan and Sophie, should be allowed to participate in the festivities, but to no avail – until her wacky grandma Aggie and her otherworldly bag flip the story on its head.

The introduction of Aggie, played by the legendary Debbie Reynolds, is where the story really starts to pick up. We shift from a typical Disney Channel movie set against the backdrop of Halloween to one that showcases what Dunham learned from his time working with George Lucas. 

After the children secretly follow their grandmother onto a magical bus, they are transported to the town square of Halloweentown – aptly decorated with an oversized pumpkin at its center. The children find what they’re seeing hard to believe at first: goblins, ghouls and vampires roam every street corner in this otherworldly town. It’s here that we meet perhaps the most iconic character in the movie: Benny, an animatronic skeleton cab driver whose cheesy jokes make him one of the most memorable characters in the film. In a time before poor CGI ran rampant in low-budget movies, bringing this reanimated skeleton to life stands out as one of the film’s more impressive achievements.

With the film’s low budget of four million dollars, which was significantly reduced from the thirty million Dunham was originally promised when he signed on for the film, the fact that this movie is as iconic as it is stands as a testament to his filmmaking more than anything else. Is this movie a Halloween classic akin to “The Shining” or “Psycho”? No, but for many people who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this film was a staple of their childhood and something they looked forward to watching every year when the calendar flipped to October. For that reason, it is a staple of filmmaking in its own way, even if it is not as technically impressive as a Hitchcockian horror masterpiece or a Kubrick-style Stephen King adaptation.

Via Sophie Asher