For many years, Ray Bradbury tried to get his 1962 dark fantasy novel Something Wicked This Way Comes adapted into a film, Gene Kelly, David Lean and Steven Spielberg being just some of the directors he was courting during its long journey to the screen. It was adapted in 1972 by British director Colin Finbow, but it was barely seen and Bradbury continued to go into bat for the book, hoping for a Hollywood version. He finally got his wish when Disney snapped up the right and assigned Jack Clayton, director of The Innocents (1961). The results were met with enthusiasm by the critics, dismay by Disney and indifference by the public.

The opening is deceptive, a folksy, whimsical bit of nostalgia from the narrator (voiced by Arthur Jill) who introduces us to life in Green Town, Illinois and its eccentric inhabitants. The story is that of school friends Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) who, like everyone else in town, is enchanted by the arrival of a travelling carnival run by Mr Dark (Jonathan Pryce). The boys see Dark turning one of his employees, Cooger (Bruce M. Fischer), into a child again using a carousel that runs backwards and begin to fear that the carnival is preying on the people of Green Town using a hall of mirrors that shows visitors their innermost desires, desire that are then made real by Dark – but at a cost. With Will’s father Charles (Jason Robards) on board, the boys try to stop Dark before he can seduce and destroy the whole town.

In the late 1970s/early 1980s, Disney was trying to make more adult-oriented material but with mixed results. They wanted to aim at a more mature audience but could never quite let go of the fact that they were primarily makers of family entertainment, leading to troubled productions like The Black Hole (1979), which couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted to be about goofy robots or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)-style transcendental metaphysics, and the much tinkered with The Watcher in the Woods (1980), a compromised film that ended up pleasing no-one. Though it too has its problems, Something Wicked This Way Comes is probably the best of the batch.

The film we see today doesn’t reflect what Bradbury and Clayton made, Disney stumping up $5 million dollars for reshoots when they saw the initial cut. They took out some of the more outré moments (like a giant hand sent to kidnap the boys) but don’t seem to have found enough money to save the often not very convincing special effects.

After the folksy beginning, the film gets progressively nastier as it goes along but always stops short of being scary. The set-pieces – particularly the spider attacks and the hunt for the boys masquerading as a parade down the town’s hight street – are well done and the film has a nicely off-kilter atmosphere but it’s never as scary as its premise suggests it could have been.

The best aspect of the film is by far and away the performances. Jason Robards is as likable as the resourceful father (though he’s probably too old for the part really) as Jonathan Pryce is sinister as Mr Dark. And Pam Grier, who never utters a single word, manages to be both sexy and deeply unsettling as the mysterious Dust Witch, one of the sideshow attractions in Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival.

But many of their efforts are undermined by Disney’s cowardly decision to “soften” the film in pre-production, to remove many of the scarier scenes that Clayton had shot. They further diminished the film’s potential spookiness by rejecting an original scree that they felt was too gloomy in favour of a very obvious and far intrusive new one by James Horner. Strangely, they later seemed to disown the film completely, demanding that they not be mentioned at all on the Anchor Bay DVD release in the States. Perhaps they were still smarting from the poor showing at the box office – released a full year after it was completed, the film was a huge financial flop for Disney.

It probably deserved better. It’s no masterpiece to be sure but it has atmosphere to spare and the cast are all very good, helping to paper over the cracks in the narrative and distract away from the less than perfect effects. It’s not hard to see what the film could have been and t’s commendable that a Disney film ends with the status quo unrestored – it would seem that the victims of the carnival are still victims. There’s a happy ending of sorts, but not for everyone.

The “novel” had in fact been an adaptation of a 1958 screenplay that Bradbury had written for Gene Kelly but which had become a book when financing fell through. The book has remained a favourite among his legion of fans and in 2014 Disney announced that they were going to have another go at the story, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing and directing. As of Autumn 2020 there’s no sign of it so whether that’s still on the cards is anyone’s guess.