The Witches

"Witches are women who have subsumed their anger, right?" That's a question Angelica Huston asked her interviewer a few years ago to promote a new film she was starring in. Much of the conversation, it seems, centered on Huston's thoughts on micro-aggressions toward women and the anger that such acts can produce. "Everything about [witches] hurts," she continued, "and every time they look in the mirror they hate what they see. They're so great to play because they're just furious—and everything dreadful happens to them."

That's a nice quote to keep in mind when watching The Witches, the 1990 adaption of Roald Dahl's novel (which was also adapted on HBO this year starring Anne Hatheway and Octavia Spencer) released during a Hollywood crave for such comedy horror. (It was released three years after The Witches of Eastwood and three years before Hocus Pocus.) The witches in this film are indeed angry, but the story doesn't much want us to sympathize with them. They are, after all, out to destroy every child in the world. Huston plays the leader of the witches, and she's disappointed that there are still so many young kids running about in England. (From her name and accent, it sounds like Huston's witch is from Germany.) She devises a plan that gets rid of the children once and for all. It's not clear why they hate kids so much, but they are indeed furious.

Taking place in idyllic locations in Europe (and yet everything is drab at best and hellish at worst), Grandma Helga (played by Swedish actress Mai Zetterling in her final acting role) chomps on cigars as she tells her sweet grandson, Luke (Jasen Fisher), tales of witches. Witches, she tells him, are actually very ordinary, or at least they appear ordinary to everyone else. These are not the witches of the Harry Potter franchise or of The Blair Witch Project, but sort of a hybrid, simultaneously normal and monstrous. They present themselves as regular people, though they all wear wigs; only the pink hue in their pupils can give them away. To add some details to her stories, Helga includes a horrifying anecdote from her youth in Norway in which a witch hunted down a young girl and kidnapped her. What became of the girl is uncertain, even to the audience, but Helga does tell us that her friend started appearing in paintings, getting older as the years went on, until one day she just disappeared. As for the witch, well, "witches never get caught." Despite all the terror Grandma Helga speaks of, Luke seems genuinely entertained by the tales, unfazed as he is inquisitive.  

After a domestic tragedy, Helga decides to move Luke back to the United States. But before they do that, they take a short trip to England, where they'll stay in a hotel on the coast and relax before continuing their journey. The hotel looks straight out of "Mr. Bean in Room 426" from Mr. Bean. Speaking of Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson himself plays the manager of the hotel. He's fairly competent at his job, though he doesn't like children, either, scolding Luke for bringing two mice into the hotel and threatening Helga before she outwits him and turns the tables on him. At any rate, Luke and Helga have far bigger problems that an unsympathetic hotel manager, for a large convention is using the hotel for their conference. And this isn't just any ordinary group; they're actual witches instead, secretly meeting to discuss their plan to eliminate every child from England. 

Their leader is the Grand High Witch, who uses the name Eva Ernst. She's the one played by Huston, not long after winning an Oscar and then appearing as Morticia Addams in two Addams Family films. For her really iconic scenes, in which she is covered in grotesque prosthetic makeup, she endured hours and hours worth of getting the makeup on and another five just to get it off; the prosthetics on her hands also made it problematic (her word) to use the restroom. Despite the misery of such filming conditions, she looks like she is having a blast.   

She's in good company, with Zetterling providing an effective performance and the two young boys, Fisher and Charlie Potter as Bruno, the hungry British boy who also finds himself mixed up in all this toil and trouble, doing as good a job as child actors generally did in the early 1990s. But the production elements of the movie are the most spectacular, with Jim Henson's Creature Shop creating a variety of different-sized puppet mice. They look far more interesting to watch than all the CGI mice in the new adaption, and they elevate the film's humor (like when Helga tries to convince Bruno's spoiled, uninterested parents that he's been turned into a mouse) as well as the adorableness quality. How can you not find it cute when Luke in mouse form says, "One of the cooks tried to cut off my tail with a carving knife"? The puppetry really works. This was the final film Henson supervised before his death the same year The Witches was released. Dahl also died in 1990. 

I don't seem to recall ever having watched The Witches as a child, although part of me wants to say that I vaguely remember the scene of Huston's character disturbingly pulling off her face to reveal her true self. It is a film, though, that apparently has haunted an entire generation of children. The director, Nicolas Roeg, wrote in his autobiography that he screened an early version of the film for his young son, who was so creeped out that he ran out of the room and hid, which convinced Roeg to further edit this children's film. What remains the spookiest moments besides the witches themselves are the scenes of the boys turning into rats (even scarier than when boys turn into donkeys in Pinocchio) and the real-life horror of adults harming children. 

For much of the roughly ninety minutes of the film, I couldn't quite decide if I liked it or not. What harms the film is its over-reliance on "...and then..." aspects to storytelling; that is, one thing constantly leads to another and that's it. It seems like something would cause and complicate another thing (it is a tale, after all, of witches turning children into mice), but it instead feels like the stakes aren't there, or at least the movie doesn't care if you care about such stakes. Another disappointing trait is its denouement, deviating strongly from the novel. I initially wrote in my notes that the film had a "peculiar but un-formulaic ending", and then moments later I crossed it out. "Guess not," I wrote. Apparently, they filmed and tested two versions, but the one they predictably went with deeply angered Dahl. 

This isn't to say that it's a bad film. While I would hesitate showing it to very young children, most kids (and adults) would probably like it, whether in 1990 or 2020. It's good, if perhaps overly creepy, fun. The witches might not gain our sympathy, but even in the most unsightly scenes, you can't look away. 

Happy Halloween