After you head in after the trick-or-treating and costume parties are over, will you watch one of these fall classics?
Addams Family Values
In Charles Addams original New Yorker cartoons, the family had no names, so they were created for the Addams Family TV show in the ‘60s. For the dim son, Addams suggested either Pugsley or Pubert. Producers chose Pugsley because Pubert sounded vaguely dirty. So, when the plot of the second Addams Family movie in 1993 called for Morticia to give birth to a new baby, screenwriters used the name Pubert as a nod to the franchise’s history.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Johnny Depp’s first movie role came in this film as the teenager Freddy Krueger terrorizes. Depp got the role when he accompanied his friend, Jackie Earle Haley to his audition. Director Wes Craven selected Depp, and didn’t cast Haley…although Haley would go on to play Freddy Krueger in the 2010 remake of the movie.
Beetlejuice
The film about the “ghost with the most,” portrayed by Michael Keaton, who helps a recently departed couple try to get the humans who bought their house to leave, almost had a different title. Producers almost called it the boring House Ghosts. Director Tim Burton hated that, but thought he’d game his way into getting the title he wanted (Beetlejuice) by suggesting an even worse title: Scared Sheetless. But then the execs like that title even better…before realizing Beetlejuice was the way to go.
The Nightmare Before Christmas Word Search and Coloring Book
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Director Tim Burton adored horror movie icon Vincent Price, and cast him in what would be some the legend’s final two films. He portrays Edward Scissorhands’s “father” in Edward Scissorhands, and he recorded his lines as Santa Claus in Burton’s stop-motion holiday-mashup movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas, just before his death in 1993. However, Price’s voice began to crack and fail after the death of his wife in 1991, and his tracks were unusable. (Edward Ivory re-recorded the part.)
Hocus Pocus
Early ‘90s teen star Omri Katz played the lead role of Max, a kid who accidentally wakes the Sanderson Sisters, actual Salem, Massachusetts ghosts from the 1600s. It’s Katz’s biggest role, but he was producers’ second choice. Max was first offered to then-Growing Pains star Leonardo DiCaprio, who passed on Hocus Pocus to make What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? instead. (Good move: He got an Oscar nomination for his work.)