Vote up the Halloweentown details that have you dressing up and headed back for a visit.
The Halloweentown franchise is made up of four movies, all of which center around Marnie Piper and her witchy lineage. Marnie learns about her gift for witchcraft from her grandmother, Agatha Cromwell – played by the spectacular Debbie Reynolds – her mother, Gwen, and a host of other goblins and ghouls she meets on her first visit to, well, Halloweentown.
The Halloweentown movies are more than just wickedly entertaining flicks about spells, tricks, and spirits. Behind-the-scenes stories about Halloweentown are full of treats while small details in the franchise itself are sweet reminders of just how enjoyable Halloweentown truly is. In fact, everything we know about Halloweentown has us ready to dress up and head back for a visit.
Halloweentown is just one of many classic Disney Channel Original Movies like Mom's Got a Date With a Vampire, Scream Team, and Under Wraps. All of these and more are now streaming on Disney+.
This sponsored list was created with the participation of Disney+.
Filming The First 'Halloweentown' Took Less Than A Month
Despite being set in the autumn, Halloweentown was shot in St. Helens, Oregon, during what Kimberly Brown called, “the dead of summer.” J. Paul Zimmerman, who played Dylan Piper, told Bustle,
The heroes of the very first Halloweentown are the townspeople. It was taxing because they were working all the time and on top of that, it’s Halloweentown but we shot it in July of ’98 and it was unbelievably hot in Oregon. It was like one of the hottest summers that they ever had, so there were people with these huge — the fish guy mask, and the crazy alien mask and stuff, and people were passing out.
Over the course of 24 days, Halloweentown extras would “double up and change costumes and make it look like there were more and different people” in the movie. This was the result of a limited amount of resources available for special effects, sets, and personnel.
After Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, the small town of St. Helens near Portland, Oregon, was, in Halloweentown's producer Sheri Singer's words, “kind of a ghost town.” While the town was not abandoned entirely, the location was an ideal place to film the holiday classic. Singer explained,
In terms of making the store fronts and getting the location and making a huge town square, there's not a lot of places in LA you can do that. They were so grateful to have us there and so easy to work with. We had a good crew up there and it fit the demands of the movie. We made all these storefronts. It was really fun and became very iconic.
The Halloweentown vibe in St. Helens remains so strong that the town holds an annual celebration called Spirit of Halloweentown. Visitors can explore some of the actual locations where the movie was shot and take part in events from mid-September through the end of October.
Television executive Steve Smith's daughter once asked him “Dad, where do all the creatures from Halloween go the rest of the year when it's not October 31?”
Halloweentown, of course.
This was the impetus for the movie. Smith was a producer working with Sheri Singer at Walt Disney Television and, together, they pitched the idea to a television network that passed. The Disney Channel swooped in and took on the project.
At the time, the Disney Channel had just started making original movies. Halloweentown director Duwayne Dunham said he'd expressed interest in doing a different Disney Channel movie, Brink!, but was offered Halloweentown instead.
The mayor of Halloweentown in the first movie, Kalabar, was also a magician. The actor who played Kalabar, Robin Thomas, actually learned some magic tricks for the role.
Thomas admitted in 2018 that magic “was not one of my skill sets. I had to practice with a cane, I practiced with an appearing cane and coin tricks where I pull a lollipop out of my ear and a coin out of [Sophie's] ear.”
On the whole, Thomas found the entire project to be fun – especially since he got to play a magician and a warlock all wrapped up into one character.
Halloweentown screenwriter Paul Bernbaum named the kids in the movie after his own children: Marnie, Dylan, and Sophie. Five years after he'd penned the story, Bernbaum was told Halloweentown had been greenlit by Disney. Before the movie could be made, however, Bernbaum worked with director Duwayne Dunham to revamp the plot. Bernbaum explained,
The [original] version [of the script] was actually darker... I remember a general sequence where they were traveling at night through Halloweentown, and it just got really scary.
The ending of Halloweentown was also changed. According to Kimberly J. Smith, at first, Marnie was supposed to put the talisman in the forest, growing older and older on her journey. Smith even went through the process of casting a mold to make an older-looking mask:
They put straws in my nose so I could breathe so that way I sat there for I don't know, might've been an hour as it hardened and dried.
The mask was never made but Smith kept the mold as a souvenir.
Coming up with a magical spell that works isn't easy – Marnie proved that in the first Halloweentown movie. To be an actor who has to recite a magical spell has its own challenges, but when Daniel Kountz had to cry out a spell in the Halloweentown sequel, he had a unique problem: he had to come up with one on the fly.
The creature spell Kal said in Halloweentown II, Kalabar's Revenge wasn't in the script but, when Kountz was asked by the movie's director, Mary Lambert, if he knew what to say, Kountz told her he did. Kountz had a few minutes to come up with something and,
I just pulled that out of nowhere, and they ended up using [it in the movie], and I think it actually worked out pretty well… Little did they know I was freaking out because I didn’t have my spell prepared.
Kountz actually said some German words he knew from a song he'd learned in high school choir.
