Walt Disney Pictures released "Hocus Pocus" in the summer of 1993. Directed by Kenny Ortega, the film tells the story of three children in present-day Salem who inadvertently resurrect the Sanderson sisters, three witches who were put to death three centuries earlier, and now must fight them off as the witches must consume their life force to survive. The film received mediocre critical reviews and was considered a bomb at the box office, but due to becoming a Halloween staple on TV, has become over the decades a cult hit with a large fan base.
James Horner was originally set to score the film, but later had to drop out, due to scheduling conflicts. He had already composed "Come Little Children", the song sung by Sarah Jessica Parker's character, a lullaby used to lure children to their death. John Debney was hired at the last minute, with only two weeks to complete the score, incorporating Horner's melody in a few places. Debney's score is an old-fashioned orchestral romp, with that nostalgically warm 80's and 90's style that many of us grew up on, anchored by a fantastic central theme for the witches, which itself has become an essential Halloween hit.
The score never received a proper album at the time of the film's release. There was a promotional album floating on the markets with over forty minutes of score. It wasn't till 2013 that Intrada Records released the first official score release. This disc included over seventy minutes of music, including Horner's contributions, though with a fair amount of music still missing, or edited from their original versions. In 2022, Disney put out a Walmart exclusive release on vinyl. I didn't grow up seeing the film, and only got around to finally seeing it a few years ago, but I know the film is beloved by many, and the score is lots of fun. I present a total of sixteen new covers to choose from.
There really weren't a wide variety of posters created for the film at the time of release, so most of the collection comes from fan-created pieces or later video art. Fortunately, since the film has so many fans, I was able to track down a bunch of cool pieces that suited my liking.
Cover 1 is an custom version of the main theatrical poster. In this case, I took as a base the cover for the later vinyl release, which was a lot more colorful than the original versions. I then reincorporated some elements from the original versions, to make a composite of the two. I took the city at the bottom, and added a new moon back in to generally match the style of the older art (the new one had the moon in blue), and tried to tie it all in together.
Cover 2 adapts the late Drew Struzan's classic poster. This was used on the Intrada album, though I always hated the text placement on that cover. I also wanted to try to save as much of the overall poster as I could, meaning sliding the whole bottom quarter of the image up (the city below). Of course, I would make saved myself countless hours if I'd just cropped that out, but I hate losing such a big portion of art, plus having a sort of wider landscape at the bottom of the image usually works well to ground the image and give it a proper sense of weight, especially since without it, there would have been too much empty sky space in the image. I still really struggled with this one, I kept endlessly toying with the color balance, light and dark curves, etc., as the original source just didn't have the same detail or range that Struzan scans usually have. Blending the bottom into the top (and a second insert over the moon) was tedious (and let's not look too carefully at the vacuum cable, but again, I didn't want to just cut it out entirely...). The final struggle was how to balance the title. Originally I had it down at the bottom, but it ended up just being way too cluttered, too heavy, plus it then covered any of the details of the city, and just didn't work. I actually started a whole new project file to then try this configuration, which overall worked better. I think the end piece is ok, I usually don't struggle so much to make a Struzan piece work, but I felt I needed to keep hammering away until I felt right.
Cover 3 is a newer piece of marketing, using the central Sanderson sisters publicity shot, I simply had to shift all the cobwebs into better positions and then blend it all back in together.
Covers 4 and 5 were officially commissioned pieces. Cover 4 uses Blu-Ray artwork by Matt Ferguson. I couldn't find a clean hi-rez version of this, let alone in textless, so this took a lot of hodge-podge compositing and patching (and a slight cheat of bringing the top half of the image down just a smidge). The piece itself is very nice, though up close it doesn't look great, given what I had to work with.
Cover 5 uses a piece created by Ukrainian artist Liza Shumska for the Poster Posse group, to celebrate the film's 30th anniversary. I had to paint out some part of the pumpkin to allow my title to take up the bigger space, as well as shorten the candle at the top and lower the moon, to better suit the tighter crop.
The rest of the covers, 6 - 16 all utilize fan-created pieces.
Cover 6 uses an incredible illustration by Adam Rabalais. The original design however was a wider banner, so the challenge was to compress the elements of the image, this time from side to side, not vertically. The witches I left in place, but I had to completely change up the kids at the bottom (with Max on the right side, and Allison, Dani and Billy even farther to the right). So I had to cut them each out, and then I ended up flipping their positions in the image, as they just seemed to sit better that way, space-wise. Then blend them back into their new background. Because of this, I had to change the rope to be attached to Winifred's broom instead of Mary's on the right).
Cover 7 uses art by Irish artist Conor Merriman, fortunately little editing was required. I thought it was a nice contrast in art styles.
Cover 8 uses an illustration by Chelsea Lowe. This one was quite a trick to edit, as I couldn't find a clean version of the image. I shifted the bottom up and changed the title location.
Cover 9 uses art by horror aficionado Devon Whitehead. All the sources I found were small and fairly blurry, so I had to run it through two different enhance filters, and then combined the two to try to get the best quality.
Cover 10 uses art by Stevan Aleksić. I had to slide the bottom of the image up, blend between the two, and insert my own title. I also ended up switching the character in the top left corner, as I thought the skeleton man was a more iconic image.
Cover 11 uses a piece created by user by the name of Manuel IDA, originally for a t-shirt design, but it fit the cover format nicely, I simply had to add in the text and title.
Cover 12 uses an illustration by Sarabeth Kett. No editing required.
Covers 13 and 14 uses illustrations by Sam Coyne, who also focuses exclusively on horror covers, these being much lighter than his usual fare. For 12, I took the bottom landscape of the kids trick-r-treating, shrunk it down and moved it higher in the image to paint out the title. It's nice when these composites blend together fairly smoothly, and the art itself provides enough material to be able to be reworked in other areas.
For 14, I just slid the witches at the top down a little bit to tighten the composition.
Cover 15 features work by Spanish artist Juan Carlos Ruiz Burgos, which is hot off the presses, as he only published it a week or two ago for this Halloween. I of course jumped at the chance to add it to my collection here. That said, it actually took me a while to figure out how I was going to adapt the piece to fit my needs. I either needed to cut off a large chunk of the bottom (my first idea), though in the end, I kept the bottom, slid it all up significantly (sadly losing the cat in the process), and then blending it all together, which can be a bit tricky with such a beautifully detailed illustration, but I ended up being pleased with the end result.
Finally, Cover 15 uses a digital painting by Zackary Jackson Brown, which just has so much life and color. This was one of the rare cases where I just left the artwork untouched, and just expanded the border on the sides. Usually I try to avoid so much negative space, but I thought the style worked well here, and I really didn't want to go in and start messing with the illustration.
Hope you all enjoy, overall a fun and colorful collection to work on, though it was a bit annoying that several of the pieces used the same source poses as inspiration, but the artists are clearly limited in what they had to pull from, so I can't blame them. Let me know your favorites below!
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