As I write this, it's coming up on Christmas, and the ubiquitous A Christmas Story has begun appearing. It's no longer limited to a 24-hour Christmas Eve marathon on TCM; no, it's possible to watch A Christmas Story any time of day, any day of the week, on an endless loop if desired.
The seemingly unlimited appeal of A Christmas Story can be found, not surprisingly, in its nostalgia, in its remembrance (for those of an advanced age) and yearning (for everyone else) of a time in which life moved more slowly, more simply, when simply wishing for something could change your life, and when a boy realized his father was more than an old man, but a complex, living human being with dreams both big and small.
A Christmas Story was released at the tail end of 1983, and was a box-office failure on its release, garnering mixed reviews and little attendance. It vanished from theaters, only to somehow be resuscitated by VHS and, most of all, by those TCM showings.
About six months before A Christmas Story, another movie hit theaters. It was also the tale of a young boy living in Depression-era middle America. It told of his wishing to be older, of his small-town friendships, of his discovery of a man who could make his wishes come true, and of his realization that his father had dashed dreams, both big and small.
But it took place at Halloween, not at Christmas (though was dumped into theaters in April, the cruellest month for movies), and came not from a humorist and a director of crass sex comedies, but from a wildly successful novelist and the director of one of the most unnerving of all black-and-white horror films. And it came from Disney, a company that was then near the nadir of its existence.
Something Wicked This Way Comes was, for Disney, a bold experiment, a wildly expensive adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel, which Gene Kelly, of all people, had tried for years and years to get made. When he finally gave up, the rights were snatched up by Disney, which hadn't learned its lessons on the expensive flops of The Black Hole or Tron, or from its other foray into horror, a massive flop called The Watcher in the Woods. But Disney was undaunted. It wanted to produce movies that could succeed with young audiences who had been lately flocking to Friday the 13th and Halloween movies.
What better, then, than a nostalgic, wistful movie about two young boys whose biggest curse word is "hell" and who live in an autumnal-colored small-town world? There's nothing about Something Wicked This Way Comes that is, in any way, like a horror movie. The script, by Bradbury himself, revels in flowery prose, that doesn't come close to the way people talk, and as director Disney chose Jack Clayton, whose movie The Innocents starring Deborah Kerr is both claustrophobic and scary but also intellectual and distant.
After spending $20 million, enduring endless reshoots, and adding, at the last second, a score by James Horner, who was still making his name in Hollywood, Disney had no idea what to do with the movie.
They still don't. It only just appeared on Disney+ a couple of months ago, where it sits uncomfortably next to Alien movies, American Horror Story and The Omen. Anyone stumbling on it will be perplexed because Something Wicked This Way Comes is not a scary movie. It's not a horror film. It's a gentle, tenderhearted movie about growing up and having regrets and learning how to love the people in your life despite all their faults. It's a movie about the sad and secret ways the heart will always yearn for the way life used to be, and how easy it is to be tempted into thinking that maybe, just one more time, it can be that way again.
Those temptations are made real by Mr. Dark, the proprietor of a mysterious, clearly sinister carnival that comes to a place called Green Town in the middle of an October night, long past the time of year that carnivals should appear. Mr. Dark is played by Jonathan Pryce, in one of his best roles ever — he's hypnotic and seductive and filled with darkness in his soul.
Mr. Dark and his carnival, it turns out, are the Autumn People — dark creatures who feed on the pain and torment of average people. It is how they live. They are emotional vampires, sucking the sadness and regret out of everyday lives, leaving behind nothing but a soulless creature who, for just one brief moment, gets to experience everything they ever desired.
Young Jim Nightshade (played by Shawn Carson) and Will Holloway (Vidal Peterson) find the carnival. Jim is entranced. Will is scared. But both have a hard time staying away. Will fears the carnival, because he knows of no one more filled with regret than his father, played by Jason Robards, whose presence lends the film a necessary weight.
Ultimately, there's a showdown — two, really. One is an extraordinary scene between Mr. Dark and Mr. Holloway, in which Dark tries his best to tempt the man with the promise of youth. The second is a more straightforward one, in which the boys and the father confront the demons at the carnival. It's filled with smoke and pyrotechnics and visual effects that are all wrong for the movie.
The pacing throughout most of Something Wicked This Way Comes is often off, probably a result of Bradbury's own attempt to keep the core of his novel. His script retains too much kindness, too much gentleness, and it is tempting to wonder what might have happened if someone else had written the film. Often disjointed, featuring performers like Diane Ladd, Pam Grier and Royal Dano in roles that are barely even there, Something Wicked This Way Comes will lose a lot of viewers because it's too sweet, too quiet, too wistful.
But isn't that what nostalgia is? We remember the past with the softest of filters because we focus on the moments that shaped us. Something Wicked This Way Comes, which has one of Horner's very best scores, remembers a time of innocence, a time when the sweetness of youth turned momentarily sour ... but became sugary again both by vanquishing evil and by the mere passage of time.
It is the kind of film that grows better with every viewing, or maybe it just grows better because with every viewing we're that much older, that much more weighed down by life, that much more willing to wonder what it would take for us to resist the kind of temptation presented in the story ... and if we would really have been the kind of children who would have seen evil for what it was, stared it down, and chosen our families over all the other tantalizing possibilities Mr. Dark and the world could offer.
December 18, 2025
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