The actress played Allison in the 1993 original film.
It's been 28 years since we first heard Winifred Sanderson cry out, "Boook!," and fell in love with Thackery Binx. Original Hocus Pocus star Vinessa Shaw looks back on her time in the Halloween classic fondly, speaking with ET's Leanne Aguilera about the "dream come true" experience.
"It basically was everything I could have dreamed of in a movie like that and especially I also watched The Wizard of Oz over and over again as like a basically five and 6-year-old. So this felt like a modern version of The Wizard of Oz for me," she recalled. "It was [one of] my favorite projects I've worked on."
Shaw has vivid memories of her time on set.
"The cat being one of the first CGI cats and all the breakthrough things -- the witches on the harnesses running after us, and the wind and the smell of the set because it's covered in leaves and it has a dank moldy smell that Thora [Birch] and I love," she recollected.
One fun fact about filming was the involvement of not just one cat but many.
"What was so cool about the cats was there was literally a wall of cats that all could do one thing, so they trained them to do one thing," she explained. "So if they jumped on your shoulder, that was the one thing they could do. Or if they slept on you while you were holding them, that was the best cat for that job. And the cat who like slammed the Book closed when we were trying to figure out a spell, when we were running from the sisters... I just loved the fact that every cat had one thing that they could do and we basically had a buzzer in our pocket when you see the scenes with us and a cat. You press the buzzer and then the cat does whatever it does, so we're hiding these buzzers in our pocket and had to feed them cat food during rehearsals so they would know to follow us, jump on us, sleep with us."
Hocus Pocus 2 is set to come out in 2022 with the original Sanderson sisters, played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy, reprising their roles, but will Shaw be back as Allison?
"I haven't heard anything," she told ET. "I know, it's so disappointing. I would love to do the sequel. It would be so much fun. I think there's just a different storyline with younger people, but why can't we all come back in some way?"
Shaw also speculated on Allison's future.
"I feel like she and Max (Omri Katz) are still together but I think Allison’s from Salem and he always wants to be in California. I think they did some sort of compromise and maybe she's in Salem when the witches come back, you know, visiting her mom or something."
Shaw is now playing Alice Winter in the new horror film, The Blazing World.
"It is a fantastic world to enter into, and what's so great about it is that it is fantastical, it is other-worldly, literally," she said of the film. "But what is wonderful about it and what people can really grasp is that it's grounded in some sort of reality where it is a story of a young woman who has really dealt with a lot of traumas and is revisiting them in a way that's healthy in some ways and not ignoring them anymore."
The Blazing World is in select theaters and everywhere On Demand on Oct. 15.
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