Thoughts on Something Wicked This Way Comes

 Last month for my book club, I read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, his 1962 novel about an eerie carnival that comes to a small town in the 1930s and lures people in with winning prizes and promises of riches and youth, but at the price of their souls. The book focuses on two boys, Jim and Will, who are suspicious of the carnival and the effect it has on the townspeople, and Will's father, Charles Halloway, feels anxiety about his older age at 54 but doesn't trust the carnival either. It's a good book that, while definitely of its time (the book treats being 54 like being 84, Charles keeps acting like he's too old for his young son, and the book sidelines a lot of female characters as less important to the story), was interesting to read for its foreboding sense of dread, especially with the carnival leader, Mr. Dark, who seems more like a vampire feeding on the town's hopes and dreams.

    The book was dedicated to Gene Kelly, and there was an author's note written by Ray Bradbury decades after the book came out, talking about how he became friends with Gene Kelly through a mutual friend, and he wrote a treatment of one of his older short stories and gave it to Gene to shop around his film contacts in the 1950s. No film came of it at the time, but Bradbury decided to make it into a novel, and published it in 1962. In 1983, it became a film directed by Jack Clayton, and produced by Disney, during a time when they were having financial difficulties and experimenting with making darker films for children, like this one, Watcher in the Woods, and The Black Cauldron, none of which did well at the box office.

    At the time of the book club meeting, I said that the film wasn't streaming online, and that it is less accessible now. Then this month, one of my friends told me it's now streaming on Disney Plus, and this is the first time it's been streaming anywhere. So I watched it, to compare with the book. The movie starred Jason Robards as Mr. Halloway, who was made into a librarian instead of a library janitor like the book, and Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark. Jim and Will were played by Shawn Carson and Vidal Peterson. The film is 90 minutes long, and feels more like a TV movie than one in theaters. I like that, since it takes place in October, it has a fitting autumn feeling, with cool, crisp weather, fall leaves, a pumpkin patch, and carnival ghouls that feel very Halloween-y.

    It's mostly faithful to the book, with an adapted screenplay by Bradbury, with some changes, like how Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield) the middle-aged teacher in the book is turned into a child and her fate is unknown, whereas in the movie she is turned into a pretty young woman but made blind (Sharan Lea), and seems to be stuck that way at the end. I liked how the haunted carousel, which can make someone older or younger depending on which direction it rides in, was used to nightmare effects in the finale, with the demise of Mr. Dark in a way that seemed intense for a children's film at the time.

    I figured Jason Robards was older than 54, and I was right, he was 60 at the time of filming, which made it seem even less likely that he'd have a child-aged son. The boys in the book were on the cusp of turning 14, but seem younger in the movie, like around 10 or 11. I really liked Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, he really sank into this quiet but malevolent character where he's very patient but there's a menace underneath his clipped words. And I didn't know until later on that Pam Grier played the Dust Witch, she was unrecognizable under the makeup and veil, but had a seductive voice as she slows down Mr. Halloway's heartbeat to give him a taste of what death will be like.

    I'm not as into this work by Bradbury as I am by "All Summer in a Day," which was my introduction to his writing in junior high that made an impact on me, in both identifying with his outcast lead girl character and getting into sci-fi and speculative fiction, though I can also credit Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time for doing that too. But I enjoyed reading the book and seeing the film adaptation, and making my own compare and contrasts.