Hocus Pocus Party! (2017)

So I just have to start out­—in light of the astounding number of Hocus Pocus–themed costumes last year (probably owing to Disney’s announcement and other marketing, but still)—by saying that I started planning my Hocus Pocus party and costume theme in September of 2016, yes, more than a year before the actual implementation, so basically, I’m a trendsetter. Or psychic. Take your pick. Also, Hocus Pocus has been my favorite Halloween movie since pretty early childhood (although I don’t think I actually saw it until several years after its theatrical release). It’s just one of those infinitely quotable classics (year-round, even), and I just love everything about it.

Me with my two IRL sisters—we did a sort of long-distance group costume 

(we live in Utah, Germany, and Virginia, respectively) 

So every year, I have the idea for a party but then suffer some period of doubt—can I even pull this off? Is it really worth the effort? But then something sparks my creativity, and from there it’s basically a downward spiral. Last year, two things happened that really kicked me into gear. 1: Disney came out with their Hocus Pocus costume line. Now, I’m really more of a DIY-er most of the time, but I knew that if I could just find a purple hood, the costume would be instantly recognizable, and I could go from there, so—problem solved. I bought the Disney version of Sarah’s hood from the Halloween store but supplemented with a few pieces from my own wardrobe and finds from the thrift store. 2: I happened across one of those Facebook food videos showing a recipe for pizza-stuffed skulls, which then led me to this delightful website with pages and pages of Halloween-themed recipes (hungryhappenings.com), and suddenly the ideas were overflowing and the motivation fire was lit!

Disney'sSarah Sanderson hood and Party City witches' broom

Now, the nice thing about Hocus Pocus, especially compared to my previous year’s theme, Once Upon A Time (the TV show), is that you can go fairly broad with general witch-themed décor, and then highlight a few specific pieces and food items to make it Hocus Pocus specifically. So I got onto the Michael’s website and scoped out a few decorations to buy once it all goes on sale for 50-60% off (which, pro-tip, is about halfway through October, roundabout Columbus Day), while planning my overall look around that.  The few specific set pieces I decided to make were Winifred’s book, the black flame candle, and Billy’s (the zombie) and Emily Binx’s gravestones.

For the book, I used the same technique as I had the year before, which was to create one of those paper-bag book covers they teach you how to make in high school to cover an existing book I had (making an actual complete book is a little outside my skill range). I started with a Trader Joe’s paper sack, crumpled it up good to make it look like aged leather, and mapped out the dimensions for creating the front-of-book decorations. My first task was deciding how to create the look of sewn-together bits of skin. I thought about just making folds in the paper along the lines I wanted, or maybe painting, but it wouldn’t hold or give quite the effect I was after. So I decided to try actually sewing the folds (I did not rip the bits apart to sew together, just sewed along the folds), but I wanted something thicker than thread, to really highlight the stitching and make it look a little coarser. So I had the kind of bizarre (yet brilliant) thought—I had kind of accidentally bought unwaxed dental floss a while before, and it had been sitting unused in our bathroom cabinet, and it made the perfect twine-like medium for sewing together folds of a paper book cover. Once the sewing was finished, I painted kind of unevenly over the folds to give the illusion of age, and I think it turned out pretty dang awesome, if I do say so myself.

 

My next problem with the book was the snakes. I wanted to do something 3D, but I knew the paper cover really wouldn’t support the weight of anything like clay or, if I were anywhere near that ambitious, actual metal. So I went to Michael’s and basically just browsed the whole store looking for something that would work. I saw some black floral tape (literally walked the entire store looking for ideas) and decided that if I could wrap it around a cluster of pipe cleaners, that would give me about the right look (and, importantly, flexibility) while adding very little weight. I also initially mistook the color of the snakes as being kind of a dark brass, so in the end I was painting my beautifully wrapped black snakes with several coats of a silvery paint. For the heads of the snakes, I found some doodads in the bead section that were about the right size and shape. I wasn’t able to get the bends in the corner snakes to match the ones in the movie exactly, but in the end it was basically close enough.

Now, the eye. I actually, before I even started, scoped out this really intricate DIY blog where someone had created a much more heavy-duty replica than what I was going for, and they had like, embedded a whole, round plastic eyeball that moved around inside its plastic ball into the side of their book. Again, not really feasible for my project, but knowing that there was a book out there that had a moving eye—I wanted one! So what I ended up deciding to do was essentially rip apart and repurpose a craft googly eye. I got a hold of some decent-sized ones, and I printed off an image of an eyeball (photoshopped a little, since the only one I could find that had enough eyeball to use was purple… I really thought there would be more eyeballs on the internet). It took several tries, and in the end I had to leave a little bit more of the clear plastic part intact (for gluing purposes). I also realized after I put it together that the googly eye (which I had stuck my photoshopped iris to) wasn’t moving, because apparently the back of the googly eye is slippery, and it won’t just slip around on paper. So in the end I had to draw some light veins on the plastic googly eye back with colored pencil, but MY EYEBALL MOVES!!!

I created these *interior pages* based on lines/screenshots from the movie

So, for the black flame candle I thought, easy, just buy a black pillar candle and melt it a little. There were two problems with this idea. 1: If you watch the movie again (and pay attention), you will see that the black flame candle is not, in fact, made of black wax. It is basically printed all over with incredibly intricate designs that I decided I was just not up to replicating, and I figured that since there’s no way of actually replicating the black flame part, black wax would get the idea across just fine. 2: Pillar candles—and I knew this from working at Yankee Candle back in the day—are really not designed to melt over the sides (the way they make them now, anyway). I was kind of thinking I could burn it for a little while and tip some melted wax from the center down the sides and create some effect with that, but the pillar I bought was even hardier than I expected, and that basically got me nowhere. So I thought, I wonder what would happen if I set it upside down on my electric tart warmer (tarts are small patties of wax that give off fragrance when melted, and you put them in this dish over a warming device, like a candle or a special lightbulb). To be clear, I don’t exactly recommend this, and I very much expected it to go poorly. Then, I forgot about it for like an hour. When I remembered, it had sure melted all right, but was completely lopsided. However, this worked to my advantage, because it ended up giving me just about the half-melted look I was going for. So, inadvertent success.

The last thing I really expended serious effort on to make appear just like in the movie was the gravestones. Now, when I set out to do this, I definitely expected to carve a couple of names and cut out the shapes and call it good… Then I watched the movie again, to get an idea of what they should look like, and it turns out that the Disney propmaster was feeling extra ambitious that day, because these gravestones are some serious art. I simplified a little, mostly because I’m not that much of an artist, and also I was working with cardboard. Now, you may or may not know this, but there’s a certain kind of spray paint that creates the texture and look of gravel. It is awesome, and I have used it in several (mostly Halloween-related) projects before. The problem is that it would be virtually impossible to draw in pencil on top of the paint, and these gravestones were wayyyyy too intricate to even consider attempting freehand. I can barely write a name across a gravestone freehand (I had to add a middle initial to one of my background graves that I tried to do freehand…). Actually, I should back up. I thought it would be neat to carve (using a box cutter) the gravestones to make them look more like stone, so I drew it all in pencil, then carved on top of it, then spray painted. (There’s also a hilarious anecdote in which I broke the spray paint nozzle a little bit, brought the whole thing back inside since I was going to have to go buy a new one, ended up getting it to work 20 minutes later, and ended up getting spray paint all over my living room floor, but it was fine because my floor is some kind of wood laminate and I wiped it all up while the paint flecks were still wet…) Well, the carving effect did not translate visually in the way that I’d hoped, BUT it was not a wasted effort, because it allowed me to follow the carvings to trace in sharpie what I had previously very carefully drawn out and then carved. 

I also thought it would be neat (since I ended up with some extra spray paint) to create varying smaller gravestones to create the illusion of a full graveyard outside my sliding window doors. I only put names on the intermediate ones, named for Matthew’s brother, my sister, and I made up a first name for the Sanderson sisters’ mother (briefly mentioned in the film). I also had some extra cardboard, and I had seen some silhouettes at Michael’s of black cats, but they were too cartoony for my taste, so I drew and painted my own to just prop up in the corner for people to notice (or not—that’s the beauty of the subtle things).

Another thing that was really important to me was this idea that my sisters and I were going to dress up together and be the three Sanderson sisters (instead of just me by myself). Since they didn’t live near enough to be able to actually come to my party, I asked them to take pictures of themselves in their costumes, and then I photoshopped them into Hocus Pocus backgrounds to put up on my wall. I looked for old-looking frames at the thrift store and I found this great one with a crack in the glass (the lady at checkout was apologetic, but I was like, “All good!”). 

So I set those things all up, along with some potion bottles and other spellbook props from Michael’s, and then I covered everything on the one side of my house that wasn’t Hocus Pocus–related with cobwebs. Oh, I also found this neat lampshade drape thing that I hung from our main light fixture like a chandelier, and I bought a candelabra (that turned out to be sparklier than I realized, but you only notice up close).

The last touch for the décor was an homage to literally my favorite line in the entire movie. It’s an obscure joke that I knew people wouldn’t get, but honestly, explaining it was half the fun. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, the kids lure the witches into the pottery kiln at the high school in an attempt to burn them to death, using a French-learning tape recording. So the witches hear the voice and follow it into the kiln and then get trapped and burned. It doesn’t end up working, because the ashes come back together to form the witches again, but Winifred is mad, and with this extremely grumpy look on her face, she says, “Hello. I want my book. Bonjour. Je veux mon livre.” And it’s just one of those smart jokes that you have to be paying attention to but that is actually completely hilarious. So I borrowed a similar, repetition-based French CD (sorry, it’s no longer the 90s…) and set it up to play (quietly) in my bathroom throughout the party, with a sign outside the bathroom door saying “WARNING: Do not operate kiln without an instructor present” (mimicking the one in the movie).  And I totally enjoyed and didn’t mind at all explaining the joke.

You can sort of see my laptop in there under the sink (I also don't actually still own a CD player...)

So, food. Obviously, dead man’s toes had to be on the menu—I figured these could easily be made out of pigs in a blanket—and so did the witches’ life potion (Sprite mixed with lime sherbet gives that green-glowy, frothy look) but I had to go to the movie (and the internet) for more ideas. In the movie, the life potion ingredients include, in addition to dead man’s toe, “oil of boil” and “newt’s saliva”—I really wanted to find a way to incorporate those, but I didn’t want to make them their own drink, and what else is liquid enough to be that? Condiments, that’s what. It just came to me, eventually. 

Also pictured: pizza skulls and candelabra mentioned earlier

The real winners were the ideas I found on that HungryHappenings website. I mentioned before that the great thing about Hocus Pocus is that general witch-y things work well with the theme, and I found some great ones. The pizza-stuffed skulls, of course—I ordered the pan to make them as soon as I saw it, along with a silicone mold for my other great recipe find, which was the black chocolate-caramel spiders. In fact, Sarah eats a spider out of someone’s garden in the middle of the movie (“What a pretty spider!”), so—perfect!!

The pizza skulls didn’t go quite as planned… I cheated a little on the dough, because the recipe calls for a TON of it, so they ended up a little patched together, and some of them had sauce leaking out the sides. Also, my pan wasn’t quite the same size (I think the skulls were a little smaller since it was a 6 instead of a 4 like on the website), so it was hard to proportion the ingredients, and I felt like it was a lot of crust. I also meant to do an imitation Domino’s herb crust, but I ran out of time. But they sure looked awesome!!! And that’s really the important thing. I prepared them on the day of the party. I started about 3 hours ahead of time, which almost wasn’t even enough because I had to do them in two batches and I didn’t realize when I initially skimmed the recipe that they have to be chilled for half an hour before baking, but it worked out.

The skull pan (see recipe for more details)

The spiders were a little trickier, because it turns out that the candy company no longer makes the black caramel. I thought about just trying to mix the black chocolate with the regular caramel and hope it just turned out a really dark brown, but then I found this black food coloring paste at Walmart and decided to get some, just in case. This was the correct decision. I wasn’t sure how well it would integrate with the caramel, but it worked like a charm, and the “black” chocolate turned like, light purple when it was melted, so I would have ended up with super funky-looking spiders without the paste. I also didn’t follow the directions quite precisely enough (I think I stirred too fast toward the end), so the ball of caramel-chocolate ended up greasy, but the website had directions on how to fix that. The molding part was also a little tricky to figure out (basically I ended up not being able to use my fingers at all because it warmed up the chocolate too much, so I ended up using a spoon to fill the molds), but once I got the hang of it, I ended up with some pretty sick chocolate caramel spiders, if I do say so myself! I stuck them in the freezer and left them there till about an hour or two before the party, so they could thaw, but not too much.

I also had my own idea (not from the website) to do red velvet cake balls that looked like eyeballs. I had some insane notion of trying to drip red food-coloring onto the warm white-chocolate shell and then drawing irises with blue/green and black food coloring, but (fortunately), on my last trip to Michael’s I ran across some sugar cupcake decorations that looked like eyeballs and decided to just press them into the top of my cooling cake balls instead. Thank goodness, because not only would my initial idea have been probably unworkable in and of itself, it turns out I’m kind of terrible at making cake balls, haha. I had done them the year before, so I rigged up my homemade *double boiler* (pan of boiling water with a heat-safe bowl sitting on top) and starting melting the chocolate, but it was not working, and I basically ruined almost an entire bag of white chocolate chips because my chocolate was seizing up. The dipping part hadn’t gone that well the previous year, so I thought if I refrigerated the inside part overnight, that would help, but it also did not. I finally googled how to melt chocolate and realized that I had too much water in my pan (it was hitting the bottom of the bowl), so I started over (good thing I’d bought extra white chocolate…) and managed to at least get my cake balls covered in chocolate. They still looked a mess, and the sugar eyeballs ended up saving the day on this one (also the fact that the bits of red velvet in the white-chocolate coating looks more or less like veins helped). In the end they turned out ok, but I will never try to make cake balls again… (that’s probably not true, but I will hate it). Finally, I had also found this recipe for Winifred's book-shaped s'mores pops that were pretty fun. 

   

Sarah also mentions her “lucky rat tail” when they first come back from the dead, and I was hoping to be a little more creative than black licorice, but in the end, that’s what I used. I also went with apple cider for my second drink, since Allison’s parents’ party is serving that. And I knew I wanted to incorporate Halloween candy—at first I thought “Dani’s Halloween Candy,” but then I realized that “Jay and Ernie (Ice)’s Stash” was a better way to go. I wasn’t sure if the candy would get overlooked among all the other food offerings (and I was hoping not to get stuck with it all, tbh), but it was actually very popular, and mostly consumed by the end of the night.

For the party itself, the only place I could find the Hocus Pocus music to play for background music was YouTube, and the playlist I used has actually since been taken down, but I found mostly instrumental stuff and added a video of “I Put A Spell On You” (couldn’t find an audio version without the dialogue, so went with video) and found an audio of Sarah’s singing “Come Little Children,” as well. For a game, we played Psychiatrist, except with a spell cast over the players instead of a psychosis. Actually, the best part about it was that we sent people into the bathroom to wait while we came up with a *spell,* which meant they all heard my French tape and got to appreciate the joke. :D Our guests were Mario and Luigi (and Toad), Wendy and Peter Pan (and baby), Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Superman, a butterfly, Chewbacca, and a soccer player (who was supposed to be Darth Vader but couldn’t find his jacket). It was so much fun, both to plan and to spend time with friends!

My husband as Billy the zombie: pirate jacket from previous year's costume, a women's blouse that I tore up and styled a little, an 80s mullet wig that I pulled into a messy ponytail, and a bunch of makeup (including zipper lips)