Halloweentown: The Movies, the Town, and the Real Spirit of Halloweentown

Halloweentown (1998) is a Disney Channel original about 12-year-old Marnie Piper, who discovers on Halloween that her grandmother Aggie (Debbie Reynolds) is a witch, her mother is a witch who gave up magic, and her family belongs to Halloweentown — a secret parallel town where it's always Halloween and every creature lives openly.

The plot is simple and the effects are charmingly 1998, but the feeling stuck. Halloweentown is the rare Halloween story that treats the holiday as a birthright rather than a threat — where being a witch, a goblin, or a werewolf is normal, and the villain is the one who wants to seal the portal between the human and magical worlds forever. It's why a whole generation still watches it every October.

The franchise ran to four films — Halloweentown (1998), Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge (2001), Halloweentown High (2004), and Return to Halloweentown (2006) — with the first three starring Debbie Reynolds and Kimberly J. Brown as Marnie. The first two are the essential watch.

The Halloweentown films were shot in St. Helens, Oregon, a small Columbia River town whose historic downtown plaza became Halloweentown's town square. Every October, St. Helens leans all the way in: the plaza gets lit with orange lights, a giant pumpkin goes up, and the town hosts the 'Spirit of Halloweentown' festival across the whole month.

Visitors can stand in the real town square from the movie, take photos in front of the city hall that played Halloweentown's municipal building, and walk the same streets Marnie ran down. The festival runs weekends through October with costume contests, haunted attractions, a parade, and appearances that have included Kimberly J. Brown herself, who still returns as an ambassador of the films.

It's a genuine small-town Halloween experience — the kind of thing our Halloween events finder surfaces when you search by zip code or city. If you're in the Pacific Northwest in October, St. Helens is the closest you can get to standing inside a Disney Halloween movie.

The Spirit of Halloweentown is the official name of St. Helens' month-long Halloween celebration. It turns the entire downtown into a walking Halloween set — cobwebs on the lampposts, scarecrows on the corners, a lit pumpkin in the plaza, and storefronts dressed for the season. Events run every weekend in October and include a grand parade, a haunted house, a 5K, live music, a vendor market, and themed photo ops at the locations from the films.

The festival is free to attend and walk through; some ticketed attractions (the haunted house, the tours, some meet-and-greets) cost extra. Hours and the full schedule are on the Spirit of Halloweentown website. Weekends in October get crowded, so arrive early and expect to park outside downtown and walk in.

For the full Halloweentown fan, the festival is the pilgrimage. For a casual visitor, it's a beautifully decorated small town doing Halloween right — and a reminder that the best Halloween events aren't always the biggest ones.

The phrase has outgrown the festival. 'The spirit of Halloweentown' — the idea the films were really about — is the belief that Halloween is a holiday that belongs to everyone: that the strange, the spooky, and the magical aren't something to hide but to celebrate. It's the thesis of the first movie, where the villain's crime is trying to seal the portal between worlds and keep the creatures trapped.

It's also why the films aged better than most 1990s made-for-TV Halloween content. They didn't treat Halloween as a problem to manage; they treated it as the one night a year everyone gets to be themselves. That's the spirit the St. Helens festival bottled, and it's the reason a 1998 Disney Channel movie still starts trending every October.

If you want to watch it for yourself, Halloweentown streams on Disney+ every October — and our guide to the best Halloween movies has it slotted into the family-friendly marathon. Pair it with Hocus Pocus and The Nightmare Before Christmas and you've got the perfect October triple feature.