I Rewatched A Forgotten Disney Horror Film For The First Time In Decades, And It's Somehow Better And Worse Than I Remember

The idea of a “Disney horror movie” certainly sounds like a contradiction in terms. While Disney has certainly branched out into more mature fare thanks to the likes of Marvel and the acquisition of 20th Century Fox, the Disney name is usually still only attached to fairly family-friendly content. If you have a Disney+ subscription, however, you can now finally watch one of Disney’s attempts to break into horror with the 1983 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I remember seeing Something Wicked This Way Comes as a kid. While the movie has been almost entirely unavailable for years, it was the sort of movie that showed up on cable television regularly decades ago. Now that the film is finally off the list of classic Disney content conspicuously missing from Disney+, I took the opportunity to rewatch it. In some ways, it was everything I remembered and more, and in some ways, it was a great deal less.

Something Wicked This Way Comes Has Perfect Atmosphere And One Fantastic Performance

The best performance in the film comes from an actor who was a relative unknown in 1983, but would go on to great things later. Jonathan Pryce plays the film’s villain, Mr. Dark. Pryce has been in good movies and bad movies, but I’m not sure he’s ever been bad in a movie. He certainly isn’t in this one.

Pryce commands the screen in every scene he’s in. His performance is so good that if there’s a big problem with him in the movie, it’s that he’s just not in enough of it. I certainly would have said before rewatching that Pryce was the part of the movie I remembered the best, but now I have a better understanding as to why.

The true star of Something Wicked This Way Comes, however, isn’t an actor, but a vibe. The film’s spooky atmosphere is absolutely perfect. Watching the movie feels like reading a Ray Bradbury novel. There are some truly chilling moments in the film, the sort that won’t exactly terrify seasoned horror vets, but the sort that are shocking simply because you don’t expect them to be in a movie with Disney’s branding in its title. A young teen kid staring at his own bloody severed head is not something you’d expect from the House of Mouse.

The Adaptation Of Ray Bradbury Suffers In the Edit

As I rewatched Something Wicked This Way Comes for the first time in years, the part of me that remembered what it was like being the kid watching it the first time appreciated a lot of what the film was going for. Unfortunately, the adult part of me that is also a professional film critic couldn’t overcome the flaws I never noticed as a child.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. The movie went through a pretty significant reshoot, as well as re-editing. Elements of the script, which Ray Bradbury wrote himself, were apparently rewritten without the author's knowledge. The result is a bit of a jumbled mess. Exposition is delivered in a fairly ham-handed way; a lot of telling rather than showing, which makes the film's emotional moments fail to land. The teen protagonists are noticeably older in some scenes than in others. The ending feels like it’s part of almost another movie entirely.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a movie I remembered from childhood, so it clearly had an impact on me despite only seeing it once or twice. Having rewatched it, I now understand why, because a lot of it is absolutely memorable, even if it isn’t quite the movie I remember. Bravo for Disney+ finally adding it to the library. Now if it can only do that with Watcher in the Woods, and maybe a couple of decades' worth of classic Disney TV and film still missing from the platform.