1. The original title was Halloween House, but eight years and about 11 writers later, it became a much less scarier, more kid-friendly movie so a name-change was in order: Hocus Pocus.
2. Production initially started out in Salem in November before finishing on sound stages in Los Angeles. Great for fall foliage. Not so great for decorations.
“The thing I love about the Salem stuff is when we went there, it was getting into Christmastime, and so people were starting to put up their Christmas ornaments,” Tobias Jelinek, who played the bully Jay, told E! News. “They were having to pay them out block by block to take down all their decorations so we could get all the Halloween stuff.”
3. According to Doug Jones (Billy Butcherson), Bette Midler had a unique requirement in her contract: Her feet had to be shown on-screen.
“A little known fact there, I heard a rumor that Bette Midler had written into her contracts that there had to be an isolated shot of Bette’s shoes and her feet walking somewhere in the film,” he alleged, pointing to the iconic “I Put a Spell on You” scene for reference.
“So you’ll see two shots in the party scene, one when she’s entering the room walking forward toward the camera,” he said. “Another one on stage, it’s a quick blip of her feet going from one side to the other while she’s walking across the stage. If you look at it quickly, it’s like, why would they even bother to put that clip in there? Well, it was contractual.”
