And fighting evil with joy doesn’t make evil any less frightening. But the book never becomes sappy or polemical. Dark’s carnival, Bradbury answers the fears of the ages with the weapons of happiness, friendship, and familial love. As they and their town are preyed upon by Mr. Will’s father Charles embodies the same notions for middle age. Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade represent the yin and yang of many American boys on the cusp of adolescence, with all its terrors, temptations, and opportunities. Green Town, Illinois is at once a slice of idealized Americana and a demented fracturing of that archetype. Bradbury’s writing is often noted for its lyrical quality, and nearly every sentence of Something Wicked drips with a wistful, haunted elegance. Its brilliance is less in the basic premise - evil carnivals weren’t new even in 1962 - than in its structure and presentation. Something Wicked is one of America’s greatest fantasy novels, influencing everyone from Stephen King to R. It began as an unproduced screenplay developed for Gene Kelly, partly based on one of Bradbury’s short stories, “The Black Ferris.” Turning that script into a novel after Kelly failed to raise the money took Bradbury five years, but the effort was well worth it. Ray Bradbury long intended that Something Wicked be a cinematic experience. RELATED: This Is the Disney Movie Based on the Most Gruesome Source Material But as Something Wicked This Way Comes turns 40, what is Bradbury’s story like to revisit on the screen? Like many of its PG brethren, the film lost money and won mixed to negative reviews. But it also had a difficult production and post-production, with backroom rewrites, discarded scores, and extensive (and expensive) reshoots. Something Wicked had a more celebrated literary pedigree than the others, and it had direct input from Bradbury himself. Besides Something Wicked, The Watcher in the Woods, The Black Cauldron, Return to Oz, and Dragonslayer were produced within a five-year period before Miller’s ouster from the studio. Part of his strategy involved backing several darker projects that, if still focused on childhood fantasies and happy endings, put at least one foot over the G-rated line.
The film was made at a time when Walt’s son-in-law, studio president Ron Miller, was trying to pull Disney out of a long rut.
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