Fantastic Fest Review: “The Spirit of Halloweentown”

I still remember the first time I watched Halloweentown: the night of its premiere on Disney Channel on October 17th, 1998. I had just turned eight years old, and every Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM, if you will) premiere was event television in my house. But there was something immediately special about Halloweentown, the story of a young girl called Marnie (played by Kimberly J. Brown) who follows her witch grandmother (the legendary Debbie Reynolds) to her homeland, where it’s Halloween everyday, and all manner of monsters and magical beings make up its inhabitants. It’s a whimsical film that caters to every kid’s dream of discovering that they aren’t, in fact, normal and boring, and indeed have some extraordinary destiny waiting for them to discover. But it’s also, for a made-for-TV family movie, thoughtfully made and cleverly crafted, it’s mostly practical effects, make-up, and costumes continuing to hold up in a world where its contemporary iterations lean on cheap digital components.

That’s to say, that in the now 25 plus years and three sequels of diminishing returns later, Halloweentown has become something of a cult classic, with the kids who watched the film on its first release introducing it to their children, and St. Helens, Oregon— the seaside town where the Halloweentown exteriors were filmed—hosting an annual Spirit of Halloweentown event every October.

It’s the latter event, whose website calls it a “blend of small-town charm, community involvement, and a deep love for all things spooky,” and how the history of St. Helens and its inhabitants intertwine around it, that is the focus of The Spirit of Halloweentown, a documentary from Butterfly in the Sky filmmakers Brett Whitcomb and Bradford Thomason. The directors neatly side-step leaning heavily on nostalgic callbacks to and footage from Halloweentown, centering their story instead on the people involved in Spirit of Halloweentown and how the impact of the film on viewers all over the world impacted their lives in turn.

The result is a delightful surprise, a Wiseman-esque portrayal of regular folks going about their daily lives that is alternately a lightly comic crowdpleaser and a serious meditation on the curveballs life throws at us. The film opens inside the St. Helens petite history museum, whose curator throws out some brief facts about the city, points out some artifacts from Halloweentown’s filming on display— and refuses to speak on any rumors that the city is haunted. This effort to connect the spooky facade St. Helens and its citizens don every fall season to some actual supernatural occurrences is pursued intermittently throughout the film, and it’s far by its weakest aspect. When a ghost hunter and his colleagues become the movie’s subjects, the film turns away from an observational portrait of the town and toward a facsimile of those annoying spooky reality shows that follow people through supposedly haunted houses. It just isn’t very interesting, especially when no conclusions are drawn that say anything of significance about St. Helens or the inhabitants we are interacting with.

But otherwise, The Spirit of Halloweentown manages to successfully immerse its audience into small town life. What happens when the sort of intimate place where everyone knows everybody and most people who live there haven’t left for their entire life experiences upwards of 50,000 tourists encroaching on their home every year like clockwork? This is most perceptibly realized through Holcomb, the man who purchased the Klondike restaurant and bar, a long-standing establishment in St. Helens that had been vacant for some time. As an outsider moving in (he claims that he had never even heard of Halloweentown before living there), Holcomb was met with both excitement and hostility; the film follows one devout woman who protests the concept of Halloween as a whole, including footage of a city council meeting in which she claims that “the devil has a plan” for St. Helens, and describes to the camera a sinister dream she had about Holcomb (it’s difficult to tell via how the film frames her— depicting her singing about Jesus and offering up prayers on the sidelines of a colorful Halloween parade— whether the movie is playing her admittedly outrageous claims for laughs). He’s also the center of one of the film’s major incidents, some hubbub surrounding a viral social media response he had to a diner who left his restaurant a negative review. These small town squabbles, a source of both humor and drama, are part of the film’s charm, but it also paints a fully-realized portrait of its characters’ lives in the brief period leading up to Halloween. There’s the self-proclaimed “Halloween Queen,” who takes comfort in providing joy to others during the season, especially after a year of so much personal loss, while a dancer choreographing a zombie routine for a group of anxious high school cheerleaders contends with the stress of the job and an absent father. Thomason and Whitcomb manage to accomplish this without beating sentiment over the head. It helps that they also imbue their film with so much lovely photography of the area that makes the inhabitants’ environments feel as fully fleshed-out as they are: the downtown streets, the little homemade haunted house, the local movie theater and bowling alley, groups of costumed children trick-or-treating at dusk amidst the orange glow of Halloween decorations, and of course, the square where everything takes place, including the lighting of Jack, an iconic symbol from Halloweentown who we follow being pulled out of storage and trundled across the city streets for display at the start of the season. The Spirit of Halloweentown may not be explicitly about that 90s kid classic, but its impact ripples across this sweet film with all the clarity and warmth of a jack o’lantern’s glowing grin.

The Spirit of Halloweentown had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024 on September 21. Runtime: 95 minutes.