8 Essential Facts About Ray Bradbury's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'

Ray Bradbury was a remarkably prolific writer, leaving behind over 30 books and hundreds of short stories, as well as stage plays, screenplays, teleplays, audio dramas, essays, and numerous other works.

Spanning a career of seven decades, Bradbury's 1962 horror novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, often gets overshadowed by the academic focus on Fahrenheit 451 or the frequent inclusion of 'The Veldt' in anthologies. However, it is a pivotal story about two boys confronting evil in their small Midwestern town—a tale Bradbury revisited throughout his career. Starting with a story about a “dark carnival” in the mid-1940s to Disney’s 1983 film adaptation, Bradbury spent nearly forty years retelling the story of Jim Nightshade, his best friend Will Halloway, and their harrowing encounter with Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.

From its inspiration rooted in a strange childhood memory to Gene Kelly’s failed attempt to adapt it into a film before Bradbury reimagined it as a novel, here are eight things you might not know about Something Wicked This Way Comes.

1. Something Wicked This Way Comes was partially inspired by Ray Bradbury’s childhood experience with a carnival performer named Mr. Electrico.

The story of Mr. Electrico and the pivotal role he played in Ray Bradbury’s life is a key part of the author’s personal history. In Bradbury’s frequent retelling, the encounter occurred in 1932, when he was just 12 years old. A traveling carnival, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows, had arrived in Bradbury’s hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, bringing with it the enigmatic Mr. Electrico. His act involved sitting in an electric chair while a stagehand threw the switch, electrifying him with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity, causing lightning to flash in his eyes and his hair to stand on end, according to Bradbury.

Bradbury vividly remembered sitting in the front row, mesmerized, when the performer tapped him on both shoulders and the tip of his nose with an electrified sword, telling him to “live, forever!” The following day, Bradbury—who had just attended his beloved uncle’s funeral—returned to the carnival, where Mr. Electrico not only taught him a magic trick but also introduced him to other members of the show, such as “the Tattooed Man,” “the Skeleton,” “the Fat Lady,” and “the Dwarf”—all of whom would later appear in Bradbury’s works, including Something Wicked This Way Comes. (The Tattooed Man would go on to inspire Bradbury’s 1951 short story collection, The Illustrated Man.)

Bradbury often described his encounter with Mr. Electrico as a transformative moment that sparked his decision to become a writer. However, in his 2005 book The Bradbury Chronicles, authorized Bradbury biographer Sam Weller points out that some details Bradbury recalled don’t entirely align with the facts. Bradbury and his relatives insisted the event took place over Labor Day weekend, but official records show that his uncle passed away in October. Despite extensive efforts by Bradbury scholars, fact-checkers, and even Disney’s 1983 adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes, no concrete record of Mr. Electrico has ever been found.

2. Something Wicked This Way Comes has a rich history, and Gene Kelly played a significant role in it.

Although Something Wicked This Way Comes was published in 1962, some of its core ideas can be traced back to Ray Bradbury’s 1948 short story, “The Black Ferris,” in which two boys are haunted by a carnie named Mr. Cooger who uses a magical Ferris wheel to age or de-age himself. (Later, this ability would be transferred to a carousel in Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.) As detailed in Bradbury scholar Jonathan R. Eller’s 2004 book Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, the origins of Something Wicked This Way Comes go back even further to 1945 or 1946, when Bradbury created a series of “fragments, sketches, and chapter openings for a dark carnival novel.” These notes eventually formed a 30-page binder titled “Original Materials ‘Dark Carnival’ which became ‘Something Wicked T.W.C.’”

Bradbury continued to develop his vision of a sinister, soul-stealing carnival in a variety of formats over the years. In 1952, he collaborated with artist Joe Mugnaini to create a wordless graphic novel, which Bradbury described as “an illustrated book with no text.” That version was never completed, and in 1955, Bradbury pivoted to making the story into a feature film. At the time, Bradbury and his wife Maggie were friends with Gene Kelly, the star and co-director of Singin' in the Rain, and had recently attended a special screening of Kelly’s latest film, Invitation to the Dance. On the way home, Bradbury shared his interest in working with Kelly, and Maggie suggested he dig through his files for a project that could be adapted into a screenplay. Bradbury quickly chose his carnival story and wrote a treatment for Kelly, which the actor liked and wanted to pursue. Kelly took the treatment, titled The Dark Carnival, to Europe in hopes of securing backing from foreign investors—but there were no takers.

Bradbury faced similar challenges when he tried to promote the treatment domestically. Disney rejected it in 1955, and according to Eller, Burt Lancaster’s production company dismissed it as “too fantastic for wide audiences.” Bradbury even took The Dark Carnival to London’s Hammer Film Productions, a studio known for producing horror films like 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment and 1956’s X the Unknown. However, Hammer wasn’t interested either. Back in the U.S., Twentieth Century Fox also passed on the project.

It wasn’t until April 1960, after years of struggling to generate interest in his film project, that Bradbury finally sent the first draft of a novel titled Something Wicked This Way Comes to his agent.

3. One iteration of Bradbury’s “dark carnival” story made its way to television years before he wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes—and without his direct involvement.

There’s an interesting footnote to Bradbury’s efforts to bring his eerie carnival tale to the screen. In the early 1950s, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. purchased the rights to “The Black Ferris,” a short story published in the 1948 issue of Weird Tales, and hired screenwriter Mel Dinelli (The Spiral Staircase) to write the script. Dinelli had some insight into Bradbury’s vision for the story; in 1949, he met with Bradbury at his home, where the two discussed Bradbury’s plans to feature a carousel that manipulates age (rather than a Ferris wheel). According to Eller, Dinelli and Goldwyn “developed a parallel evolution [of Bradbury’s story] into a short television script.” The 30-minute show aired in 1954 as part of a local Los Angeles series, Starlight Summer Theatre, and was later re-broadcast in 1956 on NBC’s Sneak Preview. Instead of “The Black Ferris,” it was titled “Merry-Go-Round.”

4. When Bradbury’s long-time publisher didn’t react as positively to Something Wicked This Way Comes as he had hoped, Bradbury decided to take the book elsewhere.

By 1960, Bradbury had become disillusioned with Doubleday, the publisher behind The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine. He felt the terms of his contracts were unfavorable, and that his books weren’t receiving the necessary marketing support. Together with his agent, Don Congdon, Bradbury hoped that Something Wicked This Way Comes would provide the leverage to renegotiate his contract.

However, this didn’t pan out. Doubleday offered only minor concessions, including better marketing for his previous works and some control over promotional copy. But they committed just $3000 to the promotion of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which Bradbury saw as a sign of low confidence—not only in him and his new book, but in the genre he cherished. “I think it is time for me to leave Doubleday and to try to find a new publisher who will see me and this fantastic and exciting new Space Age with the same high-spirits in which I approach it,” he wrote to his editor.

Bradbury left Doubleday amicably, and by the summer of 1960, he was working on a new draft of Something Wicked This Way Comes. That September, he found the right publisher: Robert Gottlieb, an editor at Simon & Schuster, passionately convinced Congdon that the publisher’s advertising director was eager to spread Bradbury’s influence to a much wider audience. By the end of the month, Bradbury had signed with Simon & Schuster, and Something Wicked This Way Comes had found a publisher truly excited about its potential.

5. Sam Peckinpah expressed interest in adapting Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned.

Given that Bradbury had attempted to bring Something Wicked This Way Comes to the screen before he even finished writing it, it’s no surprise that he sent the published book to filmmakers shortly after its release. According to Eller, Bradbury sent a copy to Jack Clayton, director of The Innocents, who nearly agreed to adapt it for Twentieth Century Fox. That deal fell through, though, and in the early 1970s, another director entered the picture: Sam Peckinpah, director of The Wild Bunch.

When Sam Peckinpah first expressed interest in adapting Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury must have been taken aback. Though Peckinpah had long admired Bradbury’s work, his films were famously dark and violent, earning him the moniker “Bloody Sam”—hardly an obvious match for Bradbury’s poetic, nostalgic novel where the forces of evil are vanquished through laughter and love. However, when Peckinpah told Bradbury he planned to “tear the pages out of [the] book and stuff them in the camera,” Bradbury was convinced.

The two men met several times over the following years, with Peckinpah repeatedly claiming he was working to secure the funding to bring the film to life. But after several years with no clear progress, Bradbury decided to pursue the project at Paramount instead.

Peckinpah didn’t take the news well. In a letter from August 1976, he referred to Bradbury as a “shatterer of dreams” and a “bunch quitter” (cowboy slang for a horse or cow that leaves its herd). According to Weller’s The Bradbury Chronicles, Peckinpah also sent Bradbury a cactus and a jar of petroleum jelly, with instructions to cut the cactus into thirds, share it with his director and producer, and “use the Vaseline as directed.”

It’s unclear how upset Peckinpah truly was, but Bradbury was enough concerned to write a two-page letter explaining his decision to move forward with Jack Clayton. If Peckinpah was angry, Bradbury’s letter seemed to help ease the tension. In his response, Peckinpah wrote, “Dreams are dreams. I dream it will go well with you.”

6. Steven Spielberg considered directing Disney’s adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

When Something Wicked hit a standstill at Paramount and eventually made its way to Disney in 1980, the studio initially targeted Steven Spielberg to direct. Spielberg showed interest, but ultimately chose to direct 1941 instead. (Considering how that film was received, one can’t help but wonder if Spielberg ever regretted his decision.) Directorial duties eventually went to Jack Clayton, who came out of retirement to bring Bradbury’s story to the big screen.

7. At one point, Bradbury’s screenplay for the Something Wicked This Way Comes adaptation stretched to 260 pages.

Following the typical screenwriting convention that one page equals one minute of screen time, Bradbury’s hefty script would have resulted in a movie running around four and a half hours. (In his 1994 book Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury estimated the film would have been six hours long.) He worked with Clayton to trim it down to a more manageable 120 pages.

8. Something Wicked This Way Comes forms part of a loosely connected trilogy.

While Something Wicked This Way Comes is a self-contained novel in terms of its plot and characters, it shares the same Green Town, Illinois setting as Dandelion Wine (1957) and Farewell Summer (which was unpublished until 2006). Collectively, these three works are known as “the Green Town trilogy” among Bradbury scholars and fans. Green Town is a thinly veiled representation of Bradbury’s hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, with autobiographical elements woven throughout all three books.