The actresses' performances make light of how evil the Sanderson sisters are. Then you start to think about what they're trying to do, and that before they were caught, they were presumably doing it for a while. Even Mary and Sarah, who are less outwardly dark than Winifred, become creepier when you think about it. Sometimes, especially Mary and Sarah.
Mary is portrayed as the resident Big Eater of the trio and is always eager to eat children. It gives us the stomach-churning implication that she's the fattest member of the trio specifically because she's eaten so many children! Explains how they got rid of the bodies of the children they killed.
Sarah is arguably the scariest of the trio. Winnie has all of the brains and more spellcasting ability, true, and Mary has probably devoured dozens (or hundreds) of children, but Sarah? Sarah's basically a full-grown woman with an eight-year-old's mind. Maybe that's why she has a siren song power: she can call children to her because she's so childlike herself. At the same time, she's obsessed with boys (her first words after being rejuvenated? "I am beautiful! BOYS WILL LOVE ME!"), and is vaguely aware of her sexiness (see: her dance moves during "I Put A Spell On You"), and knows how to work it a bit, but for the most part, she has no idea what she's doing and doesn't care if she does. All she knows is that there are men out there to "play with", and she wants them. Now, imagine if you were a witch with vast magical powers and no impulse control...the results are horrifying.
Three little girls snatch the witches' brooms and fly off with them (the whooshing sound in the background). Those three are never seen again. Let's just hope they weren't still flying around when the Sanderson sisters died.
Maybe you need magic to be able to make the brooms fly - as the sisters make the mop and vacuum fly with their magic. So maybe the brooms were just ordinary ones that only flew because of the sisters' magic. We don't see the girls flying off when they take them, they just keep running as normal.
There's a whooshing sound effect once the girls are off-screen. It indicates that the brooms do fly for them.
When Winifred finds the spell to cast on Thackery, she mutters, "As usual..." How many other people have had to suffer Thackery's fate of being cursed with eternal life in the body of a widely-hated animal, unable to tell anyone what happened to them?
Actually, the way she said it suggested to me that she just meant that, "as usual", the book has given her the perfect spell for the current situation.
Yeah, her exact words were, "Perfect. As usual."
Mr. Binx saw his little girl's dead body in the witches' cottage and had to bury a withered corpse with white hair and a desiccated face. We don't see this, thanks to Offscreen Moment of Awesome and Gory Discretion Shot, but he asks the witches where his son is and not Emily. Small wonder he looks like he's about to burst into angry tears and demands, "Answer me!".
The last time Elijah saw his friend Thackery, the latter was going to rescue his sister from the witches. Then the witches were hung, to avenge Emily. Elijah had to spend the rest of his life not knowing where Thackery was, and knowing Elijah was spared because he came with backup.
At the end, the witches died and Binx moves on to the afterlife with Billy returning to his grave and Book still. The sequel reveals Book was placed under lock and key under the current custodian of the Sanderson sisters' estate, while the spell that reanimated Billy did not end with the witches' death. Besides freaking out the gravedigger who fills back in his resting place, Billy is buried somewhat-alive between the two movies and possibly suffering a curse similar to Binx's or alot worse since a transmogrified human can freely move and be seen as a normal cat compared to a 300-year old zombie.
Despite the Sanderson sisters being real witches, the Salem Witch Trials must have still happened. In this history, the Sanderson sisters caused it to happen. This means that not only had they tormented and lured children to their deaths, but they may also have caused the villagers to turn against each other and execute innocent people before they were discovered to be the culprits.
There exists an alternative (or addition) that isn't much better: the Sanderson sisters effectively traumatized the entire town into being incredibly sensitive about witches, such that accusations would be met with paranoia and lynchings. They don't want to risk another series of abductions.
And then there's the fact that even while they were being hung, the Sanderson sisters (Winifred especially) strongly implied that they could and would come back. Future accusations of witchcraft would be given extra credibility by the implication that the accused could be one of the Sandersons in some form of magical disguise.
There is a 20-year age difference between the actresses playing Winnie and Sarah, yet it's implied they all had the same mother. If their mother was 20 when Winnie was born, that'd mean she was 40 when Sarah was born. It's highly likely that, because of her mother's age when she was born, Sarah could have been born with a mental deficit, explaining her childlike and/or spacey behavior.
According to cut dialogue, Sarah's father was the village idiot.
Binx the cat, when making cat sounds, seems to only make the sound when cats are in distress. Each time, Binx is in distress: trying to get his father to notice him in his new form, or, at the end, when he finally dies for real.
Allison accidentally bumps into an oven while hiding in the alley while the sisters are searching for them. This gives the Main Characters the idea to attempt to bake the witches in the pottery kiln at the high school. Sound familiar?
Near the end of the movie the trio drifts off to sleep thinking that they are victorious and the witches think that all hope is lost because they don't have the book. A lamenting Winifred croons out the window, "Book, would you come home/or make yourself known?" Cut to the book in Max's room opening its eye, looking towards a sleeping Max and Allison, and then quickly shutting it again when the pair suddenly wake up. The two then decide to open the book which shoots out a beam of light alerting the witches to its location. Winnie unknowingly cast a spell and the book responded!
On a related note, this would explain why Allison would say "Nothing unusual seems to be happening" even though the viewers can see the light radiating from the book and shooting out of the cupola—the spell Winifred cast made the book send out a signal only the sisters could see, and it was only made visible to the viewer through a Perception Filter so we'd know it was happening.
During the "I Put a Spell on You" number, Mary and Sarah are using microphones, but Winifred isn't, which seems like the filmmakers defying how acoustics work because letting Bette Midler dance around and move freely about the stage like she's in a music video just looks cooler. However, in a later scene, Sarah's Magic Music spell attracts children all through the town without any need for amplification, so it's likely the sisters can just make their sung spells carry exactly as far as they need them to. Either Winifred is the only one who doesn't need a microphone to be heard over the band because she's the one who started the spell, or none of them need mics, but Mary and Sarah are just standing behind theirs anyway (maybe because they just somehow figured out that's what backup vocalists are supposed to do).
The Puritans in Salem successfully overcome the witches and hang them, while the adults in the modern world can't do a thing. Puritans were "experts" on witchcraft, with men like Cotton Mather writing treatises on black sorcery. With the witches gone, and no magic in Salem, along with the real-life hunts, the Puritans' descendants became more complacent and less willing to maintain the old traditions.
Sarah's singing doesn't affect the main teens, or Thackery and Elijah. By colonial standards, they'd already be adults. That's why Thackery was left to watch over Emily in the Cold Open.
Then why was Mary able to sniff out Thackery and why did the sisters go after Max's bullies? Even if they were adults, Mary's sniff still considered them children, but they weren't "little children", as indicated by the song.
It doesn't affect Dani either. Per the cut scenes, it only affects children who've eaten the candy crows the witches made.
Winifred's spell on the adults seems like nothing more than petty cruelty at first, until you remember their goals and how they were killed off originally. By enchanting all the parents to dance until they die they leave the children of the area completely unguarded while pre-emptively eliminating the most likely form of retribution.
Max, Dani and Allison also leave the party right before Winifred says "dance until you die", so they were able to resist the magic of her song just long enough to escape before she made it worse.
The parents all being at the party explains why the majority of kids lured by Sarah's song are still dressed up. They had no supervision and were either waiting for their parents to come home or still playing.
One of the odder quirks of the movie is how quickly the witches, and especially Winifred, acclimate to the present day; particular umbrage is taken with Winnie's line "Pull over! Lemme see your driver's permit"—when she lived and died centuries before anything like the DMV existed. So how could she possibly know about them? That's when you remember that the first person the Sandersons meet after the main trio is a bus driver. Presumably, while they rode on the bus, he explained the whole notion of "driving" and "cars," and he figured it was part of their act. We even see Sarah playfully steering; it's easy to imagine that he joked "Do you have your license?" to her, and Sarah asked what he meant, with her sisters listening in.
The curse was designed so that it would take a virgin lighting the Black Flame Candle to bring the sisters back - a virgin is likely to be young, meaning Winifred intended for a child to be the most likely one to bring them back. And therefore provide someone to drain right away to ensure they'd be back permanently.
This also explains neatly why Dani's ruse that she was the one to bring the witches back didn't work, despite the fact that they seemed to have no trouble believing she really was a witch and really could have been responsible: that was the plan the entire time!
At first, Winifred being exposition dump feels like the movie is talking down to the audience. But then, one realizes it's a Justified Trope: her sisters are idiots, and they need her to spell it out for them.
Billy going against Winifred may have appeared to be a result of getting fed up with being bossed around by her and enduring painful injuries. However, Billy did cheat on her with her sister Sarah and she retaliated by killing him. What reason did Billy have to be loyal to Winifred after all that?
As of the sequel, Winnie/Billy never actually happened.
"I hate it when that happens!" - says Binx after reviving. The logical assumption is that he refers to the painful manner of death under the bus. But it may also be that he's actually talking not about the death, but about the resurrection - the poor boy's dream is to finally die for good and be reunited with his family...
Max is infamously shamed by pretty much every character who knows he's a virgin but gets the brunt of it from his little sister. Why? Because she's only ever heard that it's something bad, not what it means. It's similar to how some kids will use "gay" as an insult only because their introduction to the word was as an insult, rather than another term for homosexual.
"Every character"? Do you mean that one random guy who was deliberately trolling him? Dani doesn't shame him for being one; she shames him for lighting the Black Flame Candle.
