Share and Follow
This was the earliest vision for the movie, which Kirschner pitched as Halloween House to Walt Disney Pictures in 1984. Disney invested in the idea immediately, which also is likely why the finished film was so different. Because if Disney hadn’t gotten involved with the project… Steven Spielberg might have.
In a small reminder of how different Hollywood culture was in the 1980s, back in ’84 Disney was still recovering from lean years, both creatively and commercially, following Walt’s death. 1984 was the same year that Roy E. Disney brought in Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to revitalize Disney as a creative movie studio after several hostile takeovers were attempted, each with a plan to dissolve Disney’s movie productions. Meanwhile Spielberg was at the height of his powers as a brand name in family entertainment after creating Amblin Entertainment with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall in 1981.
Hence why after getting Disney to buy into the then titled Halloween House, Kirschner and Garris failed at luring Spielberg on as a producer and possible director. Initially, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility since in addition to Garris writing for Amazing Stories, Kirschner had created the story of Spielberg/Don Bluth’s first big push into the animation realm outside of Disney: Amblin’s An American Tail (1986), which Kirschner also executive produced. So it seemed like a winning proposition when, as with Disney before them, Kirschner and Garris gathered Spielberg and his associates into a conference room covered in Halloween decorations, and with bowls of candy corn and cornucopias filled with autumnal vegetables.
“I remember this fantastic meeting… in the Amblin conference room,” Garris said on his podcast, “and the two of us pitched it to Steven Spielberg together.. and Spielberg loved it. And then he heard that Disney was involved and he said, ‘Wait a minute, what? I’m out of here, this is done.’ They were feeling very competitive for the family audience at the time between Disney and Amblin.”
Spielberg thought he had the bigger hand at the time of telling Disney no.
So Halloween House stayed exclusively at Disney where it would go on a nine-year journey in which 12 different writers would touch the story until it became Hocus Pocus, the Bette Midler movie with a musical number. The last bit is a credit to director Kenny Ortega too since he, unlike perhaps Spielberg or King, took one look at this material and said the whole “is a musical.”
