Something Wicked This Way Comes

Mr. Pat

11 minutes ago

5 min read

One of the aspects I enjoy least about my job is having to make beat calls. When I was the morning show producer at the station across town, on my desk was a sheet of local police departments and sheriff's offices, and every two hours or so, we had to call each one and ask, "Lol, do you have any accidents or crimes going on right now?" all the while putting together a 2-hour newscast.

Why did we have to do that? Because the rival station I'm currently at was much better at covering breaking news overnight because they had the staff. You see, the extra bodies meant they could allow their photographer to go out and shoot at any hour. During the height of my time there, there were three people in the entire building: me, the editor/photog and a master control person. It was not ideal or fun. Anyways, let's talk about...

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

Something Wicked This Way Comes movie poster

I had read this book earlier this year, but if I'm being honest with you, I don't remember much of it outside of the carnival setting, some of the cooler bad guy names, and the father of one of the main characters. He wasn't your normal hero; in fact, put him in a lineup, and he's probably the last person you would expect, or want, to be the hero. He's a much older gentleman with a child around 10. His son resents him a bit because he's at that age where he's super active, but his dad is too old and tired to really play with him. In the movie, and I'm sure it's in the book too, he says to his wife something along the lines of, "What kind of father can't play baseball with his son?"

I can imagine what that does to a father, especially when you learn about the incident the family had while on the river. The son, Will, got caught up in a rapid and was taken downstream. The father, Charles, doesn't know how to swim, so when it comes to saving Will, he couldn't even get in the water. He needs to be saved by the father of Will's best friend, Jim. It's that pain and regret that propels him forward. As far as hero characters go, Charles is an interesting choice. You get more from the book with his inner dialogue, but the movie does a good job of showing the difficulties Charles has to go through as a man who has surrendered inside his own shell to someone who will stand up to and then walk straight into certain death to save his kid.

The movie takes place in an idyllic small town in Illinois. While the town sleeps, at 3:00 AM, a train rolls into town holding a traveling carnival. After setup, Will and Jim decide to visit. It's there they sneak into the carousel, but they're caught by a worker and the head of the carnival, Mr. Dark. When you first hear the name, it sounds like a group of wannabe edgy teens calling themselves "Death Riders" or something. But unlike that name, the more Mr. Dark gets said, and the more you learn about this man, the name starts to hit harder. From the moment you see him, something is chilling about him, and he only gets worse as the movie goes on. As an aside, he's played by Jonathan Pryce, the High Sparrow from Game of Thrones, and it is so weird seeing him with a full head of jet-black hair.

If you couldn't guess from the fact that a carnival rolls into town at 3:00 AM that there may be something off about these guys, the movie lets you know pretty quickly these guys and gals are bad news. Basically, what they do is convince you to go into their hall of mirrors, and it uses your strongest desires against you until you eventually lose who you are and become another attraction for the traveling carnival. You realize that probably all of the workers were once normal until they fell into Mr. Dark's trap.

But that's not all they do. There is also a carousel that, depending on which way it goes, can either accelerate your aging or send you back. Each rotation represents one year, so one year forward, you age a year; and every backwards rotation, you age one year back. That... is interesting. There's a scene in both the movie and the book where Mr. Dark is tempting Charles into giving up the hiding spot of Will and Jim. Mr. Dark offers him a spot on the carousel, telling him he could take him back to his mid-30s. Charles remains tight-lipped, so Mr. Dark rips out a page from a book, and the offer keeps going higher until he finally gets to around 50 and decides he's had enough. If I were a younger Mr. Pat, that scene wouldn't get to me. But now that I'm older and I deal with aches, pain and a lot of fatigue, that would be very tempting. No, I'd never give up my kids to a monster, but any other deal would be hard to pass up. Now, considering Charles' age is already a big plot point, it shows how he absolutely refuses to let his son down again.

Before I get into my verdict, I have to point out what I believe was the most unsettling thing in the entire movie. One of the workers, Mr. Cooger, gets on the carousel, and they go backwards until he's a kid about Will's age. When they meet up with Young Cooger, he is so unsettling. He doesn't speak; he just stands there with a thousand-yard stare. Watching him inside the house of their unsuspecting teacher is the most tense scene in the movie, and nothing happens outside of Young Cooger framing the kids for breaking a window.

I liked it. It's a solid movie to watch around Halloween with your kids. I went in not expecting much because it's a Disney movie, but it's entertaining. I loved the look of the town, and the settings were very pretty as well. I think some of them were just painted backgrounds with the characters standing in front of them, but that doesn't bother me too much; they still looked cool! The movie follows the same beats as the book because it was actually written as a screenplay BEFORE it was a book. Ray Bradbury had difficulty selling the movie script, so he rewrote it as a novel, and then it found new life. There are some changes because the technology hadn't caught up to the effects Bradbury wanted, and the character of the Dust Witch is an old crone in the book, while in the movie she's played by Pam Grier, looking like an absolute knockout.