Remember watching Hocus Pocus back in the ’90s and wondering if Allison was a witch herself? Director Kenny Ortega recently admitted that he wondered the same thing. 

Allison, Max Denison’s crush, has been the center of fan theories for years. Sites such as Reddit have been home to several spins on the idea that came from the scene where the character managed to keep Winifred Sanderson away by standing inside a circle of salt. When Winifred couldn’t break through, she called Allison “a clever little white witch.”

While talking to EW, Ortega shared that he believes Allison was most certainly a witch. In fact, he was so close to the theory that he tried making it into the plot of a spinoff. 

“I did feel the whole time that there was a little witch there,” he said. “I even thought there was potential for a spinoff that was about that, and I had conversations about that many years later at the Disney Channel.”

Ortego said that the original script did not directly give Alison a supernatural backstory, and he never asked Alison’s actress, Vanessa Shaw, to fit the idea into her character’s persona. But all the signs were there, and the theory came together seamlessly. 

“I thought she was bewitching as a teenage girl. It was not typical for Max to fall head-over-heels for her,” he continued. “She had a mystical beauty, and she was bewitching.”

‘Hocus Pocus’ Actress Speaks on Alison’s Witchy Background

Shaw even commented on the theory back in 2022, while talking to The Wrap. According to her, her witchy heritage was “intentionally implied” through a piece of jewelry she wore during the film.

“If you notice the necklace I’m wearing, it can kind of look like — because you don’t see it, obviously, when I’m wearing the full ball gown — but later, when I’m just in the normal change of you know, jeans and the turtleneck and the sweater, you can see. And the necklace,” she said, “it has kind of like a pentagram-looking design with the stones. If you look really closely… it’s a gold kind of locket, with white pearls connected to the locket, and it has a kind of design on it that could if you kind of connected it all together, would have looked like a pentagram. But again, it was never explicit.”

Unfortunately, the Alison spinoff never came to fruition, but we did get a reboot in 2022. That story still followed the storyline of white witches, however. Three teens learn they have some magic in them as they fend off a return of the Sanderson sisters. In June, Disney also announced that a third film is currently in production.