Tower of Terror

Tower of Terror is a 1997 American supernatural horror television film written and directed by D. J. MacHale and starring Steve Guttenberg and Kirsten Dunst. It is based on the theme-park attraction, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, at the Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida, and aired on ABC on October 26, 1997, as a presentation of The Wonderful World of Disney. It is Disney's first film based on one of its theme-park attractions and the only one produced for television. The film, which has no connection to any incarnation of The Twilight Zone, was partly filmed at the actual attraction in Orlando, while the rest was filmed on a stage in Hollywood, Los Angeles. As of 2023, the film is not available on any streaming service or aired on any television channels for unknown reasons but may be related to the films production under a dual studio partnership, MGM is now owned by Amazon, which is in direct streaming competition with Disney's Disney+ service. Plot Journalist Buzzy Crocker writes for a supermarket tabloid, The National Inquisitor, after his termination from the Los Angeles Banner (where his then-girlfriend Jill works as editor) for publishing a fake news story. Helping him in his job is young niece Anna, with whom he is close friends. Sometime later, an elderly woman named Abigail Gregory comes to visit Buzzy, and explains that on Halloween in 1939, she was witness to a bizarre incident in the Hollywood Tower Hotel, when five hotel guests – singer Carolyn Crosson, Crosson's boyfriend: actor Gilbert London, much-loved child star Sally Shine, her nanny Emeline Partridge, and bellhop Dewey Todd, – mysteriously disappeared without a trace when lightning struck the elevator they were in on their way up to a party at the hotel's Tip Top Club. Abigail states that the nanny, Emeline, was a bitter witch who tried to put a curse on Sally, only for the curse to misfire, trapping all of the five people who were in the elevator as ghosts, who haunt the hotel. Buzzy investigates the shuttered hotel and finds a book of spells mentioned in Abigail's story, also discovering the curse can be reversed by its "contrary". Abigail also explains that items belonging to the passengers must be found, and what happened in 1939 must be repeated to break the curse. Buzzy and Anna enlist the help of Chris "Q" Todd, the hotel caretaker and grandson of Dewey Todd.