Halloween Horror: The Witches (1990)

Watching Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches today, it’s hard not to think about how much influence it, and Roald Dahl in general, had on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and especially the film adaptations. Roeg’s film combines menace, whimsy, and distinctly British humour with a Spielberg-lite visual approach to tell its story of everyday heroism and domestic magic. The visuals, the humour, the characterizations, the costuming surely influenced the same in Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which is somehow fitting as The Witches came out the same year as Home Alone, which is the film that put Columbus on the map.

Where Roeg's film is distinct from the Harry Potter films it clearly influenced is with the witches themselves. The witches here are not the magical yet still pretty normal folks found in the Harry Potter series. Rather, they are everything we are told witches are as children (and told they’re not as adults): hideous, angry, spiteful, venomous women with magical powers who love nothing more than killing children. And The Witches is one of the rare children’s films that also dovetails with horror, like Beetlejuice before it and Coraline after it. These witches mean business and the visualization of their transformations and monstrous physical forms is nightmare fuel for small children.

Courtesy of the fine effects work from the folks at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, the witches are giant, monstrous muppet-like beasts. When they shed their skin, in a scene which provides the aforementioned nightmare fuel, the monsters that emerge from beneath the human skin are tactile and grotesque and fascinating to look at. When they’re in human form, they’re amusing too, mostly due to Anjelica Huston’s haughty performance as the Grand High Witch, Eva Ernst.

In the film, the Grand High Witch is hosting a conference for witches at a coastal English hotel. The orphan Luke (Jasen Fisher) and his grandmother, Helga (Mai Zetterling), happen to be visiting the hotel at the same time. Helga has tangled with witches in the past, so they set out to thwart these witches during their conference, but not before the witches turn Luke into a mouse.

The concept of The Witches is fanciful, heightened, playful, yet not without real stakes. It’s fun to watch Luke as a mouse run along red carpets in ballrooms and out maneuver witches in kitchens and hallways, but it’s also clear that if they catch the boy, they’ll kill him. The witches are nasty creatures here, even if the overall tone is sentimental.

Most of the characters are caricatures, not only the witches, but also supporting characters like Bruno Jenkins (Charlie Potter), a fat rich boy who’s turned into a mouse as well, but who doesn’t let that dull his insatiable appetite for food. Bruno is a quintessential Dahl character, a funny little grotesque like Augustus Gloop and all the children of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, although with a kinder heart than the kids who visit Willy Wonka’s factory. Bruno’s father (Bill Paterson) is even more of a cartoon, a blustering blowhard of a man, who thinks his money will buy him anything and everything, including the affection of the mysterious, attractive woman who he doesn’t know is a witch. All the moments with Bruno or his father or Rowan Atkinson’s hotel manager are amusing and goofy. While watching these scenes, it’s a bit odd to remember that Roeg directed them, as he’s an arthouse director famous for his conflicted, ambiguous emotionality, as shown in films such as Don’t Look Now or The Man Who Fell to Earth. You wouldn’t think he’d go for uncomplicated, sentimental storytelling like this. But Roeg has a few of his old tricks up his sleeve in The Witches.

Not only do the grotesque reveals of the witches showcase his darker side, but the opening also shows Roeg leaning into his ability to capture loss through editing. The film’s opening almost works like the inverse of the shocking opening of Don’t Look Now. Luke is visiting his grandmother in Bergen, Norway. His parents are going out for the evening, they kiss him goodnight and leave, but they never return. As quick as one shot cuts to the next, Roeg rips these characters from Luke’s life and leaves a gaping hole in his world. There is no moral anguish here, a howl of pure pain and fury like Donald Sutherland’s famous scream from the opening of Don’t Look Now, but there is a similar open wound of pain as we see Luke and his grandmother cuddle together, providing each other the only comfort in this harsh world.

The strangeness of The Witches as a film is how the story sometimes vacillates wildly in tone or approach, even visually. Some scenes with the witches are full of canted angles, distorted close-ups, impressionistic lighting that is more Terry Gilliam than Steven Spielberg. But then most of the other scenes in the film would belong in Home Alone or Hook or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, with a soft glow from the window, loving close-ups of smiling faces, a moving camera that pays careful attention to the geography of a space to set up pratfalls and narrow escapes.

The ending is particularly sentimental, so much so that it annoyed Dahl himself, who thought it spoiled the spirit of his original story. Still, if The Witches is Nicolas Roeg playing nice and cuddly, it remains a somewhat bifurcated work, both homey and loving, while remaining ruthless and creepy. It might’ve only been a minor hit, but its influence is clear in not only the Harry Potter films, but any children’s film that seeks to leave children with both a good scare and a big laugh at the end of the night.

7 out of 10

The Witches (1990, USA)

Directed by Nicolas Roeg; written by Allan Scott, based on the novel by Roald Dahl; starring Anjelica Huston, Mai Zetterling, Jasen Fisher, Rowan Atkinson, Bill Paterson, Brenda Blethyn, Charlie Potter, Anne Lambton, Jane Horrocks.

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