Movies
Hocus Pocus 2 Will Reveal What Exactly Happened To The Sanderson Sisters As Children
“You get to see the young version of them and have a great time and understand the what and why of what happened to them.”
When we first met the Sanderson Sisters in the iconic 1993 movie Hocus Pocus, they were up to heaps of nonsense. Murdering a little girl by sucking her soul away just to look younger, turning that girl’s brother Thackery Binx into a black cat. These shenanigans earned Winnie, Sarah, and Mary Sanderson (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy respectively) a triple hanging for being witches in Salem, Massachusetts as the townspeople watched. But what happened before that brief glimpse of the Sanderson Sisters? Apparently we’re about to get a bit more of their origin story in Hocus Pocus 2, and we cannot wait for it.
Director Anne Fletcher, who is best known for directing Dumplin’ and The Proposal, spoke to Entertainment Weekly about giving the Sanderson Sisters and everyone’s favorite zombie, Billy Butcherson (Doug Jones), a bit of back story in the new movie.
“The opening sequence of the movie, we get some history of our witches and Billy. We get a little kiss — pardon the pun — of the Billy aspect of it and the world that they lived in and what happened to the witches. I always missed that in the first one. Like, [why] are the witches the way they are?”
Fletcher went on to note that she “really wanted to point at, ever so slightly.... the idea that the 1600s and the now are the same. There's no difference. I just want to poke at the irony of it. But, in the joy of the film you get to see the young version of them and have a great time and understand the what and why of what happened to them.”
Hocus Pocus 2, which drops on Disney+ on Sept. 30, will even show the Sanderson Sisters before they became witches. And their stories will be intertwined with three teenaged best friends, played by Whitney Peak, Belissa Escobedo, and Lilia Buckingham, who try to resurrect the Sanderson Sisters. Each of whom is a bit of a mirror image to the witches even as they try to stop them from sucking the souls out of children.
It’s all in good fun, of course. “At the end of the day, the movie is about sisterhood, it's about sticking together through thick and thin, and being there for one another,” Fletcher told Entertainment Weekly. Ideally a sisterhood where no one is taking the souls of children to look younger, but let’s not nitpick here.
