Something Wicked This Way Comes (Walt Disney Enterprises, Bryna Enterprises, Buena Vista Distribution, 1983)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, after watching that disastrous Sherlock episode Charles and I had enough time last night (Friday, January 24) to watch a great movie: Something Wicked This Way Comes, a 1983 film produced by Peter Vincent Douglas (Kirk Douglas’s son and Michael Douglas’s half-brother) for Walt Disney Enterprises based on a 1962 novel by writer Ray Bradbury. Both novel and film had convoluted production histories; Bradbury (who disliked being pigeonholed by the term “science fiction”; he said he wrote just one science-fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451, and the rest of his work was fantasy) first conceived of the basic idea – two boys in a small town in the northern Midwest are transfixed by the arrival of a carnival in October, well after the usual season, only this carnival harbors dark secrets – in 1945. He originally called it either “The Ferris Wheel” or “Dark Carnival” and sold the story under the latter title to Weird Tales in 1948. Bradbury used Dark Carnival as the title for a short-story collection he published with Arkham House (an independent company owned and run by H. P. Lovecraft’s literary executor, August Derleth), but he did not include the story in the collection. He then left the material alone until 1955, when his good friend Gene Kelly (to whom he dedicated the book) showed him an as-yet unreleased movie Kelly had made in Britain in 1953 called Invitation to the Dance. Bradbury was fascinated by the film, which was just three extended ballet sequences telling three different stories without dialogue, and he immediately decided to write his carnival story as a screenplay for Kelly. But Kelly was unable to get financing, so Bradbury decided to turn the tale into a novel and spent the next seven years working on it. He also switched from his original plan to write the novel as a first-person narrative of the adult Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and wrote it in third person instead, though when it came time to make this movie Bradbury reverted to his original plan and started the film with a narration by an adult Will (Arthur Hill).

It takes place in “Green Town,” a fictionalized version of Bradbury’s own birthplace, Waukegan, Illinois, which he used in many stories. Will and his best friend, Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson), were born just minutes apart on Hallowe’en, though Jim was born on October 31 and Will on November 1. Will lives with his father, librarian Charles Holloway (Jason Robards), and his mother (Ellen Geer); Jim lives with his mom (Diane Ladd) and has an elaborate fantasy that his absent father is a big-game hunter and explorer in Africa, though it becomes pretty clear after a while that his dad is dead. They are drawn to Dark’s Phantasmagorial Carnival (in the book it was Cooger’s and Dark’s, but the film downgrades Cooger to just an employee) and meet both Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce) and Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fischer). The carnival contains a mirror maze that discomfits anyone who enters it, including schoolteacher Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield); a large number of freaks; and a merry-go-round that can change a rider’s age depending on whether it spins forward (you get older) or backward (you get younger). Mr. Dark has a series of illustrations on his body that show moving images – he’s billed as “The Illustrated Man” (a character from an earlier Bradbury story that was itself filmed in 1968) – and he claims to be able to use these to predict people’s futures. The carnival also features a “Dust Witch” (played by the marvelous 1970’s Blaxploitation actress Pam Grier, though she’s so heavily made up and veiled it’s hard to tell she’s Black) who lets loose a swarm of tarantulas on our boy heroes. (The credits list on imdb.com includes five people as “tarantula suppliers” and three more as “tarantula handlers.” That’s the sort of thing you had to do to have exotic menaces from the animal world in your movie in the days before CGI.)

In the book she puts a spell on Will and Jim that keeps them from talking, hearing or seeing, but the spell in the film just stops them from talking, and only briefly. Mr. Cooger gets on the magic merry-go-round and morphs into a younger man (Scott De Roy) and then into a child (Brendan Klinger), and as a child he moves in with Miss Foley – who’s undergone her own age reduction via the magic mirrors and is now played by Sharan Lea – and poses as her long-lost nephew. (I want to give a shout-out to the film’s casting directors, Virginia Higgins and Pam Polifroni, for being so good at finding actors who could be believable as the same person at different ages.) Will and Jim realize that the carnival’s proprietors have marked them for death, and in a chilling scene taken straight from Bradbury’s novel they hide under a street via a grate and worry that they’ll be discovered by the denizens of the carnival as they parade down the street. As the story progresses Charles Halloway emerges as the film’s most important character; he discovers where the kids are hiding and tells them to meet him at the town library, where he works. There he explains that the “carnival” is actually a group of people who are neither alive nor dead but have kept themselves going by feeding off the fears and heartbreaks of normal people. Though the explanation in the movie is inevitably shorter and less comprehensive than in the novel, the version in the book ends:

“All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They’re a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people’s sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn’t care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That’s the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the screams from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along the way.”

If I still thought of Ray Bradbury as a liberal – if I hadn’t read the Wikipedia page on him, which revealed how hard-Right his politics turned over his later years to the point where, giving an interview in 1994 on the 40th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, he said the novel should now be read as an assault on Left-wing political correctness (“Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The Black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control”) – I’d cite that passage as among the best explanations available for the power of Donald Trump and his appeal to so many Americans that has put him in the White House not once, but twice. Like the people in Bradbury’s carnival, Trump and his supporters get off on other people’s pain and nourish themselves by making others (immigrants, Trans people, poor people, people of color) suffer. And the book ends with Charles Halloway telling Will and Jim that the only way to destroy the carnival’s power over them is literally to laugh at it. They act as silly as possible and sing Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susannah,” and they keep themselves in a state of joy so long that eventually the carnival from hell literally disintegrates around them. That again reminded me of Trump, and specifically his savage attacks on late-night TV comedians – Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Myers in particular – for making fun of him on their shows.

I was a bit worried about the directorial credit on the film of Something Wicked This Way Comes: Jack Clayton, a British director who made only 10 films in his career. One, Room at the Top, was a great film about an opportunistic young man determined to achieve business success no matter how many people he had to step on or exploit along the way. Another, his 1974 version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, was a dreary bore; Clayton utterly failed to find any cinematic equivalent to Fitzgerald’s prose style. When I first saw it in 1974 it made me wonder if the book was as good as I’d thought it was; years later I got the DVD and ran it with Charles, who said, “It was like attending a reading of the book in evening dress at San Simeon.” The Great Gatsby was such a box-office disaster it took nine years for Clayton to get to make another film, this one – and though he’d failed to dramatize Fitzgerald’s quasi-poetic prose style in Gatsby, he did a vivid job of exactly that with Bradbury’s. (Maybe that was because when Clayton made Gatsby, Fitzgerald had been dead for 34 years; when he made Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury was right there, having written the script.) Bradbury also added a quite haunting character: Ed (James Stacy), the bartender who lost both his left arm and left leg (presumably in combat in World War I – this film takes place in the 1930’s) and hops around town reliving his past as a college football star. There are flaws in Something Wicked, and some of them are pretty typical of moviemaking: Jason Robards would be more credible as Vidal Peterson’s grandfather than his father. Also, either Bradbury, Clayton or both muffed the ending so we don’t get the all-out explosion of laughter and joy that ended the book. But overall it’s a surprisingly strong tale, and (getting back to why I was both reading the novel and watching the film in the first place: I’m writing a review of the new soundtrack CD for Fanfare), James Horner supplied an excellent score that notably added to the film’s incredible mood-setting and the sweep and scope of Clayton’s quite good direction.