Anne Hathaway Is The Grand High Witch In The Spooky Trailer For A New Version of ‘The Witches’

The original film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, helmed by noted auteur Nicolas Roeg and filled with snakes, rats and hideous transformations, is one of the most upsetting children’s films ever made.

I am still surprised, to be honest, that Roeg and his team weren’t immediately sent to jail as soon as the film came out. It’s just so eerie — the scene where a witch tries to talk a boy down from a tree by offering him a snake is stuck to the back of my eyelids in a way I have never been able to shake. And there’s a whole generation of kids out there who still bear the scars inflicted by that scene in which Angelica Huston first peels off her human mask.

Which is all a long and complicated way of saying that kids these days don’t know how good they’ve got it. Because just today, the trailer for the new adaptation of The Witches dropped, helmed by Back To The Future’s Robert Zemeckis and starring Anne Hathaway, and it looks positively charming.

I mean, just watch:

See? No awful prosthetics; no weird toes; no nothing. Just big performances, warm colour palettes and smiling kids. Seems fake to me, but okay.

Originally set for a cinema release, the film will now hit streaming services on October 22.