Kathy Najimy’s Mary Sanderson famously has a nose for children — enough so that she attempted to steal one in a grocery store in a hilarious Hocus Pocus deleted scene, director Kenny Ortega reveals to EW.
The man behind the 1993 Disney classic recalls in an exclusive interview that the actresses who portrayed the evil, resurrected Sanderson Sisters witches (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Najimy) were “improvisational geniuses” during filming, but that also meant he had to make painful cuts in post-production.
“We honored the writing, and then we had a party, and some of that party had to be left behind because of the length and timing,” Ortega remembers.
Everett Collection
When asked about his favorite scene that didn’t make the final film, he references a sequence that saw the sisters stalking a modern Salem grocery store in pursuit of the teens (Omri Katz, Vinessa Shaw, Thora Birch) that brought them back from the dead on Halloween night.
“There was a scene with Kathy in a grocery store, where there was a woman shopping with a cart, and she had her child in the cart,” Ortega says, noting that the witches’ penchant for sucking the souls out of children got the better of Mary as she navigated the store. He continues, “While the woman was shopping, she turned away from her cart for a moment, and Mary steals the cart because there’s a child in it. The woman turns around and her child is gone, and the woman goes chasing after Kathy, who’s trying to beat it with the child.”
The scene was snipped from the movie, but fans have long speculated about it after a decades-old commercial for Hocus Pocus briefly included footage of the Sanderson Sisters inside a grocery store. Hocus Pocus 2 picked up the slack, however, as it included a scene where the Sanderson Sisters (resurrected for a second time by another group of Salem teens) comically attempt to make their way through a Walgreens.
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