When freshman Lydia Taylor thinks of “Hocus Pocus”, it reminds her of spending time with her stepmom. When junior Riley Wagoner thinks of “Gilmore Girls”, it reminds her of family fall traditions. The fall season houses a lot of popular movies and TV shows that bring nostalgia.

Students voted for their favorite fall movies and TV shows. The results came out to “Hocus Pocus”, “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, and “Coraline” for top movies. As for TV shows, “Gilmore Girls”, “Stranger Things”, and “Goosebumps” received the most votes.

  “‘Gilmore Girls’ feels like the perfect fall show for me because it reminds me of my family and carving pumpkins and all the fall stuff,” Wagoner said.

   “Hocus Pocus” is a film released in 1993 about three witches who were resurrected by a teenage boy. Both movies “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Coraline” were produced by Tim Burton, one film being about the king of Halloween Town planning on taking over the holiday of Christmas Town, and the other about a girl who finds a secret door in her new house which leads to a parallel world. The most popular movie rated among students, “Hocus Pocus”, only received an IMDb rating of 6.9 stars out of 10.

“It should be higher, it’s a good movie, it’s classic,” Taylor said. “It’s the best movie in the world and it’s about witches.”

“Stranger Things” and “Goosebumps” were two TV shows that students chose as their favorite. Both of them are more on the spooky side, while still being somewhat comforting, with “Stranger Things” about a group of friends discovering a parallel dimension and “Goosebumps” about a series of children who deal with scary situations that involve monsters, ghosts, etc. “Gilmore Girls” is very different from those shows. Instead, the show starts off by taking place during the fall season and is a show about a single mother and her gifted daughter who live in a small town taking on the obstacles of life. This show first aired in 2000 and just recently gained popularity through social media platforms.

“I think ‘Gilmore Girls’ continues to connect with new generations of students just because the problems they face in the show are things that real students struggle with,” Wagoner said. “Kids who are high academic achievers can relate to Rory and single parents can relate to Lorelai.”

Two popular holidays take place during the fall season, Halloween and Thanksgiving, and can bring lots of feelings of nostalgia. Consuming fall entertainment during this season becomes a tradition for many families.

 “Me and my stepmom watch [Hocus Pocus] together on the 29,” Taylor said. “We have coffee in the morning and watch it.”

  All of the movies and TV shows voted, with possibly the exception of “Stranger Things,” are known as classics for the fall time. Instructor John Campbell, who teaches popular culture studies, said he isn’t surprised with the students’ voting results.

“I think a lot of it has to do with just childhood nostalgia,” Campbell said. ”We see those [movies and TV shows] when we’re very young. They kind of resonate with us still as we get older. It reminds us of that time when we were a little more optimistic, less jaded.”

Besides “Stranger Things”, all of the movies and TV shows the students ranked the highest were released from 1993 to 2009. On the IMDb website, the top three best autumn movies they ranked all came out from the years 1989 to 2000. The reason behind the popularity of older media, Campbell explains, can be attributed to a lack of originality.

“I think it’s the lack of originality,” Campbell said. “If there’s nothing new good, I will watch old stuff that I used to find good. Not that there’s nothing original out there, but it just seems like we have almost a pension for remaking things or continuing stories instead of coming up with new original material.”