Hocus Pocus's Spellbook Picks Its Witches (the Eye Proves It)

The theory in one line

The spellbook in Hocus Pocus picks its own witches. It picked a sixteen-year-old Winnie Sanderson in the woods in 1653, it picked Becca in Hocus Pocus 2, and both times you can watch the eye move first. Winnie spent two movies calling it her book. The book disagrees.

Think about how both films end if you only follow the witches. Three sisters, a black flame candle, a virgin lights it, they get one night in Salem, they lose, the sun comes up and they turn to dust. Twenty-nine years later they come back and lose again, and Winnie fades away to join her sisters. Case closed, twice. But one thing goes through both films and survives both endings: a spellbook with a stitched cover and a living eye.

Exhibit A: the eye in the credits

Keep watching into the end credits of the 1993 film. All three sisters are gone. Nobody is holding the book and nobody is chanting. Its eye opens by itself and looks around. Back then that looked like a studio leaving the door open for a sequel, a horror sting that says the evil isn't over. Maybe it was only that in 1993.

Here's what makes me think somebody chose it. There's an early draft of the screenplay dated May 1992, and in it two brooms and a vacuum cleaner drop to the ground next to the spell book, which vaporizes in a dusty cloud. The book dies with its witches. In the finished film, the filmmakers opened its eye instead.

Then the sequel shows us what the book was doing for twenty-nine years. Gilbert, the guy who runs the magic shop, tells the witches he chased them to the cemetery on Halloween 1993 and got there too late. So he went to check if the candle was lit, and he found a book. He was awake. He showed me how to make another candle. The witches were dust. The book was awake, and it taught a stranger how to bring its witch home. And when Gilbert hands it back, Winnie doesn't thank him. She praises the book for having a plan to bring mommy back. The man who spent his life on it gets nothing.

Exhibit B: the page it won't open

The sequel opens in 1653 in the forbidden wood outside Salem. A witch who lives alone there takes a liking to a teenage Winnie and gives her a present on her sixteenth birthday. Just before it changes hands, the book's eye opens and the girls scream. Then it floats over to Winnie. Magic has a way of uniting things that ought to be together, the witch says.

A birthday present sounds like ownership settled on day one. But the giver tells us this one has opinions. The girls flip to the Magicae Maxima, the power spell. It makes a witch all-powerful and dooms the witch who uses it. Winnie has to promise never to cast it, and the witch adds one more reason: besides, book does not like it. Winnie turns to the cover, calls it Mr. Book, and gives her word to it directly. From her first minute with it, she talks to it like someone she has to keep happy.

Jump to 2022. The sisters are back and losing, and Winnie decides that promise has expired. The book won't open to the page. Mary says she doesn't think he cares for that spell. They end up wrestling their own spellbook, and Winnie finally zaps it with resistance is futile, show me the power spell. Nobody ever had to say that to a hammer. You say it to something that can tell you no. And even forced open, it lands on a warning first: beware of the power spell, for it is most dangerous. She zaps it again to get past the warning. The book refused, got zapped twice, and still warned her. Everything that goes wrong after that is her call.

Every other hand gets a fight

If the book were just a tool, it would work for anybody. It doesn't. When Becca and Izzy carry it off in 2022, it fights them so hard Becca asks how a book can be this strong. When it's called, it smashes out through the shop window to get back to the witch. In 1993 the lock on its case at the museum is there to keep it from getting out. And when it does help the kids in the first film, the same opening leads the witches straight to them. Witches in Hocus Pocus don't last. The book just changes address.

It had an address before Winnie, too. The museum card Allison reads in 1993 says it was given to her by the devil himself. The sequel shows a woman in the woods who calls them a sacred space for witches, says Salem will one day belong to them, and admits her own coven is long gone. A witch with no coven hands the most powerful book in Salem to a girl with two sisters. Did she lose her coven the way Winnie loses hers? I'd really love to know.

Exhibit C: the birthday girl

Becca turns sixteen on Halloween. Gilbert sells her a candle with a legend attached: it's on the sixteenth birthday that a witch gets her powers. He says he charged it with a very powerful magic just for you. Aiming it at her was Gilbert's idea. But the birthday repeats. The book got Winnie on her sixteenth birthday in the woods, and now a new sixteen-year-old is in those same woods with her best friends.

By the finale the book is floating closed beside Winnie, and Becca stops arguing with the witch. You have a choice. Winnie asks what choice that would be. I'm talking to the book. And the book makes the choice. Its eye looks at Winnie, then at Becca, then back again. Becca says book, and it flies into her hand. That's the same eye that opened in the woods in 1653 before the book went to Winnie. Both times, the eye moved first. Izzy says it out loud: Becca, book chose you.

Then it does something Winnie never let it do. It takes the lead, opens itself on the power spell, and Izzy can tell it wants Becca to read the warning. Power is meant to be shared, and to claim it a price must be paid. Becca turns the power down. Winnie never got that far into the warning, and she's told plainly that her sisters were the price.

The counter-argument: isn't the book just a good guy?

The strongest pushback is that the book simply sides with the nice kid. And at the very end, when Winnie turns back to it for old time's sake, the book cries. A tear runs out of that stitched eye. So it's good now, right?

Look at who it's crying for. The witch who spent the night trying to make all of Salem pay, and the same book helped bring her back that very night. It refused her the spell that ended up costing her her sisters. That's a book protecting its witch from herself, then grieving when she wouldn't be protected. It isn't loyal to good and it isn't loyal to evil. It's loyal to its witch. And you can't grieve or stay loyal without a will of your own.

When it's all over, Gilbert offers to take the book back to the shop. Becca says she thinks she'll keep it, the book could use a new home, and Cassie is pretty sure it smiled. A girl who just turned sixteen is carrying home a book the museum says is bound in human skin. I've watched that shot again and I still can't tell if it smiled.

Verdict

The witches didn't keep a spellbook. The spellbook kept the witches. It picked Winnie, it picked Becca, and it outlived the first one the way it will probably outlive the second. That makes every Hocus Pocus film the book's story and the Sanderson sisters one chapter of it. And it may already be planning past Winnie: after the sequel's credits there's a box on Gilbert's shelf marked BF candle number two, and every black flame candle lit so far has ended with witches coming back from the dead.

Hocus Pocus 3 is in early development and the plot is under wraps, but the pieces are already in place. A second candle in a box, a witch in the woods whose coven is long gone, and a book with one eye living with a teenage witch. So which witch is next? Watch the video above for every moment the eye moves, then put your guess about that second candle in the comments.