Halloweentown

Halloweentown premiered on Disney Channel on October 17, 1998. Director Duwayne Dunham shot it in just 24 days in May and June of 1998, using the small Oregon towns of St. Helens and Scappoose as his backdrop. Debbie Reynolds played Grandma Aggie Cromwell, the warm center of the story; Kimberly J. Brown was Marnie Piper, the 13-year-old who discovers on Halloween that she comes from a family of witches and follows her grandmother home to Halloweentown, where ghouls, goblins, and skeleton cab drivers live ordinary small-town lives.

The film's real cultural moment came not at its premiere but through repetition. Disney Channel brought it back every October, and the ritual stuck. The sequels — Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge in 2001, Halloweentown High in 2004, and Return to Halloweentown in 2006, with Sara Paxton taking over Marnie from Brown — deepened the franchise's hold on autumn, and Reynolds returned as Aggie in every one of them, though with a reduced presence in the finale. The formula never broke: low stakes, high comfort, a grandmother who loved you, and a world where being different was just a different kind of normal.

For kids who found real horror movies genuinely terrifying, Halloweentown was the on-ramp — monsters as neighbors, not threats. A generation grew up treating its October airing as reliably as pulling the Halloween costumes out of the closet. Debbie Reynolds died in 2016, which turned every rewatch into something a little more tender; in 2023, D23 marked the film's 25th anniversary with screenings in St. Helens, the real town where it was shot.