In her senior year of high school, Sabrina (Melissa Joan Hart) decides to use Halloween to impress her new boss and work the night shift. This goes against the precedent set by other episodes where witch Halloween is more like Thanksgiving with food and annoying relatives. Seriously, who volunteers to work on a family holiday? Oh wait, anyone who wants to avoid family. But who admits it directly to their family’s face?
Her aunts tell her she can’t “run away” from the holiday, but she’s determined to have a quiet night without the “kid stuff”. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Harvey is running around in a onesie egging houses and she criticizes him. Hey! Let people have their fun! Anyway the main plot is about her being literally haunted because she tries to skip Halloween.
Back at the house (a set I would gladly live on), Aunt Zelda and Aunt Hilda decide to invite Edgar Allan Poe to Halloween dinner using their time travel clock. They hope he can scare them because they have a yen for the shivers. They fangirl hard over the dead poet, holding his cape between them and declaring “no garment could be scarier!” Poe (played by a character actor named Edgar Allan Poe IV who claims to be a descendant of Poe’s family) is portrayed as a very human man who has missed good cooking because “in the afterlife there is no salt”. The actor does a great Virginia accent to go with the role which is something missing from most movie and TV versions of Poe.
The big twist is that Poe no longer write horror because there’s a better market for sappy love poetry. In the end, Salem the cat reads one of his horror stories leaving both aunt and Poe with their hair standing on end in terror.
There are some good jokes in this episodes of late 90s/early 00s fodder. My favorite was Hilda stating that Zelda forgot the one thing that would make Poe feel at home. Salem the cat responds with “An open bar?” I know. I know. It’s not fair to make fun of someone with a problem, but for a kid’s show it was a pretty good burn.
