Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and his best friend Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) live in Green Town, Illinois. Will’s father, Charles Halloway (Jason Robards) is an older man and runs the town library. Jim’s father is away. Jim believes he will return soon by others in town believe he abandoned his family. There are some characters in town that spend their time unhappy with their lives and wish for a different lot in life.
It is October and the seasons will be changing soon. During autumn there are usually no carnivals passing through. This year, however, an unusual carnival comes to Green Town. “Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival” is run by the mysterious Mr. Dark (Jonathan Price). Walking around, it appears as if it is a normal carnival. Will and Jim notice that some of the town’s residents are acting strangely. Snooping around they see Mr. Dark and his employee Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fischer) at the closed carousel. When Mr. Dark runs the carousel backwards Mr. Cooger grows younger. When it stops, the child Mr. Cooger (Brendan Klinger) steps off and runs into the night. The boys realize the carnival is magical, but the magic comes with a cost.
The schoolteacher, Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield) becomes young and beautiful but goes blind. The one armed and one-legged bartender, Ed (James Stacy) regains his limbs but is reverted back to being a child. All the other townspeople who wished for something, sacrificed something more important and each one became a lost soul and member of Mr. Dark’s evil carnival.
When Mr. Dark realizes that the boys know more about the carnival than they should he is determined to acquire their souls for his own. Their only hope is to convince Will’s father, Charles, that something evil is going on and Mr. Dark is the devil.
“Something Wicked This Way Comes” was released in 1983 and was directed by Jack Clayton. It is a big budget fantasy thriller produced by Walt Disney Productions. The screenplay was written by Ray Bradbury and was based on his 1962 novel. The 1962 novel was based on a short story Bradbury did in 1948 called “Black Ferris”.
The title of the film comes from the William Shakespeare play “Macbeth”. The line in Act IV Scene I is "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." The movie was filmed in both Vermont and the Disney studios in Burbank, California. It is a family movie but with some really dark aspects to it.
The film is full of rich visuals and wonderful stars such as Jason Robards, Jonathan Price, Diane Ladd, Pam Grier and Angelo Rossitto. The music score, by James Horner, adds darkness to the film that punctuates Bradbury’s prose. The movie is reminiscent of “The 7 faces of Dr. Lao” 1964 but on a much darker scale as well as Stephen King’s “Needful Things” 1993.
The film does have its critics and most of the problems are due to the history of the film. The Disney studios made a lot of changes to the movie and even cut some sequences at the last minute. The music was originally composed by George Delerue. Disney hired James Horner to redo the entire score. When the test audience didn’t like it, Disney did a lot of rewrites and filming of replacement scenes. The result was a little choppy. Supposedly there is a VHS copy of Clayton’s original film out there somewhere.