Zombies Never Die
“I was a zombie before zombies were cool, you know,” character actor Doug Jones quipped about returning to portray Billy Butcherson. “And I was not a brain-eating zombie. That’s a big difference. I just wanted to go back to sleep. That’s all I want. I don’t want to eat anything. I just want to be left alone, really,” he said of playing Winnie’s ill-fated lover in the first Hocus Pocus.
Billy Butcherson has become an iconic spooky figure just like the Sanderson Sisters, something Jones credits to the shared energy among the cast of the original film. “He kind of matches the energy and the floppiness and the fun and the overdone characters of the sisters. I was 32 when I played him the first time. I was 61 playing him the second time,” he reminisced, and elaborated that finding Billy again was easy. “When I looked at myself in the mirror, [I] thought, ‘Oh my gosh, two minutes have passed in the last 29 years.’ He came back right away, voice and everything. I don’t know how that happened. But it was kind of magical.”
