Something Wicked This Way Comes / Jack Clayton (1983)
There are films that fail interestingly, and Jack Clayton's adaptation of Ray Bradbury falls into that category. I haven't read the book, but AI tells me that the "source novel is one of horror's great prose achievements — autumnal, elegiac, suffused with the particular dread of boyhood's end." The film achieves some of this. Mainly, autumnal.
The film, which gets the atmosphere right in some moments, is an interesting product of an imaginative story and a corporation determined to make it family friendly (or at least not family alienating). The carnival arriving at night, calliope silent, is genuinely unsettling.
The story focuses on two boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, on the cusp of their 14th birthdays in a small American town when a mysterious carnival arrives in the dead of night. The carnival, led by the sinister Mr. Dark, harbors a dark secret: its carousel can age or de-age anyone who rides it. There is a vague sense that the boys yearn for something, but the plot is fairly thin. Each towns person introduced flatfootedly announces what their life's regret or wish would be. One wishes for money. One for youth. One for sex. The carnival folk prey on the unfulfilled desires of each trapping them in a twisted version of their wishes, a watered down Monkey's Paw.
Will's father Charles (Jason Robards) becomes a reluctant ally to the boys, when he finally acknowledges the carnival's evil. When Mr. Dark discovers the boys have witnessed his carnival's secrets, he pursues them relentlessly. The confrontation reaches its climax at the carnival itself, where Charles proves that laughter and joy are weapons against the darkness. He destroys the incarnation of the carnival's evil, the Dust Witch (no shit, it's Pam Grier!) and ultimately kills Mr. Dark by smothering him with goodness. Jim, who had been fatally seduced by the carousel's promise of growing up faster, is brought back from death's edge by the combined joy of father and son.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
Jonathan Pryce commands every scene he enters as Mr. Dark and seems almost out of place amidst the rest of the talent in the film. That could be a deliberate choice by Jack Clayton, or it could be the first signal that the horror elements will be underdeveloped. Robard's Charles Halloway is disaffected and pissy. In a moment of cowardice, we learn he created a life of regret that has left him embittered, and set up a potential wish for Mr. Dark to tempt him with.
The film is oddly anachronistic. It's made in 1983, but it is very hard to tell when it's supposed to take place. There's electricity. There's clothing that ranges a wide range of fashion epochs. There's a character who is legitimately a lightning rod salesman (played by Royal Dano), making the time and place hard to nail down. I don't quite recall the last time the lightning rod salesman visited my hamlet.
The small town feels like a back lot. The details on screen are mostly right, but the sense that a grip is standing just out of the frame is palpable at nearly all times. This is part because the film jumps from the town's main street area, which resembles Seinfeld's New York City set in scale, to the wide open fields and woods surrounding it, without providing the connection. There are homes, but it's not clear that they're near main street or the field where the carnival lies.
!Something Wicked This Way Comes reverse carousel effect by Peter Kuran and VCE.
Some props for the film; an incredible use of Emperor Palpatine's force lightning in the final duel.
Disney's hand is visible throughout, mostly through choices that soften impact and tension. The film flinches from the implications of its own story, the mirror maze, the carousel, the lightning rod salesman's fate, pulling back at the precise moments Bradbury leaned in and preventing the film from reaching its potential. The result is a kind of TV movie version of horror.
What remains is a children's horror film with ambitions it couldn't fulfill within its constraints. Worth watching for Pryce, and for what it almost was. A horror film by Disney is worth a watch as a curio, but it's not the classic you'd hope it to be.
Key scene
Spoilers below
The discovery.
Own it (if it's out of the Disney vault)