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. The source novel is one of horror's great prose achievements — autumnal, elegiac, suffused with the particular dread of boyhood's end.
The film gets the atmosphere right in moments. The carnival arriving at night, calliope silent, is genuinely unsettling. Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark commands every scene he enters.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
But Disney's hand is visible throughout. The film keeps flinching 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.
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.
Own it if it's out of the Disney vault