Terrible Halloween movies that somehow became cult classics
Michael Stephenson figured it out at 12. He’d spent three weeks shooting a movie in a remote Utah town, and it wasn’t going to be the next “Gremlins,” Syfy Wire recalls. The movie was “Troll 2.”
Plenty of Halloween favorites started as disasters. A Greenwich Village midnight crowd. A Disney witch comedy released in July. A “Halloween” sequel with no killer in it.
Six films. Each panned or ignored on release, each a fixture of October now. Box-office numbers vary by source, so we use few.
April 1, 1976, midnight
“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” flopped in the U.S. in September 1975. It made just over $1 million against a $1.5 million budget.
Then two publicists, Bill Quigley and Tom Deegan, talked Fox into a midnight run at the Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village, starting April 1, 1976. Sal Piro, a former seminarian, went that year and led the fan club until he died in 2023. According to Piro, a Staten Island kindergarten teacher, Louis Farese started the callbacks.
Now it’s the longest-running theatrical release in film history.
“Halloween III” had no Michael Myers
October 1982. Fans came for the masked killer and didn’t get him. Director Tommy Lee Wallace says people were “disappointed, even outraged.”
Roger Ebert called the plot “half-baked.” Writer Nigel Kneale had his name pulled from the credits after rewrites, and Wallace says about 60 percent of what he wrote made it to the screen. The film turned a small profit, but not enough, and the series went back to Michael Myers.
Wallace calls the later reappraisal “healing.” And that Silver Shamrock jingle? Wallace is the announcer. It’s still the part everyone remembers.
“The Monster Squad,” PG-13, August 1987
Fred Dekker pitched it to his college friend Shane Black as “The Little Rascals meet Universal Monsters.” It opened in August 1987, a few weeks after “The Lost Boys,” and made $3.8 million on a $14 million budget. The PG-13 rating kept younger kids out.
Dekker has said the failure sort of killed his career for a while. Then a 2006 Alamo Drafthouse screening showed him and his cast how big the cult following had grown. A documentary followed, built around the film’s most-quoted line.
“Killer Klowns” and the pie
The Chiodo brothers, Stephen, Charles, and Edward, made their only feature in 1988. They shot 80 percent of it in Watsonville, California. They added “from Outer Space” to the title so nobody would think it was a slasher.
Leonard Maltin called it a “BOMB” at first. After a second look, he gave it 2.5 stars. Major theater chains had passed on it, and marketing was thin, per TV Tropes.
Nilbog, Utah
“Troll 2” was filmed in Morgan, Utah. It has no trolls. Its Italian director, Claudio Fragasso, had limited English, and the amateur cast came from an open audition.
George Hardy, an Alabama dentist, got the father’s part after shouting the film’s best-known hospitality line at nine cigar-smoking casting agents. Stephenson, who played Joshua, made a 2009 documentary, “Best Worst Movie.” In 2008, Morgan gave Fragasso the keys to the town at a festival called Nilbog Invasion. Patton Oswalt has been a loud fan ever since.
“Hocus Pocus,” July 16, 1993
Bette Midler’s name got “Hocus Pocus” greenlit. Kenny Ortega directed, fresh from “Newsies,” another musical flop turned cult hit, per Yahoo. Disney released it July 16, a month after “Jurassic Park.”
It opened fourth with $8.1 million, and Disney reportedly lost about $16.5 million. Critics were harsh. It holds a 41 percent Tomatometer score, per Reminisce Magazine. Then it aired annually on Disney Channel and Freeform. In 2024, Midler said the audience kept growing “until it became a cult classic.”
In 2022, Disney+ released Hocus Pocus 2.
The bottom line
“Rocky Horror” needed a Greenwich Village theater and two publicists. “Hocus Pocus” needed cable.
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