I Do Not Understand How The People Who Made ‘The Witches’ Weren’t Immediately Thrown In Jail

From the ages of 5 to 14, Roald Dahl was my entire world.

I poured over every book by the celebrated children’s author that I could find, borrowing Esio Trot from the library and sitting in the corner of a bookstore to fly through Matilda. For my sixth birthday, my parents bought me a Dahl recipe book, and for many years afterwards, my preferred meal of choice was a hideous mashed potato and pea concoction arranged in the shape of Mr. Twit’s face. I wasn’t just a fan. I was an obsessive.

Which means that it was inevitable at some point that I was going to discover the existence of Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 film adaptation of Dahl’s book The Witches. I just immediately wished that I hadn’t.

It was the fault of my parents. They noticed the film in the television guide, and recorded it for me onto a battered VHS tape. I can still picture that old tape, and my dad’s scrawled handwriting on the label. That is because trauma is extremely good at assisting with memory recall.

I don’t know where my parents where when I watched the film for the first time. I just remember the overwhelming sense of being alone; of being trapped in a room with the single most cursed object I had ever encountered. And I remember watching the credits glide up the screen, while the sweat cooled down my back.

The Witches wasn’t just a scary movie. It was a 90-minute nightmare.

Missing Toes And Trapped Young Girls

Some content made for children is scary. We all know this. That dumbass depressed horse who drowns in The Never-Ending Story. The infamous “shoe dip” sequence from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The entire existence of the Teletubbies. This content is everywhere, and it’s mostly instructional in an important way: children need to feel terrified, every once in a while.

After all, shocking scenes enhance the imaginative constitution of youngsters, and teach them about the perils that must lie underneath most great stories. Complain about Coraline all you want, but the only thing that makes that film work is its eerie, haunted feel.

But The Witches exists on another level entirely. It doesn’t even feel right to call it “scary”. It is as nerve-shredding and demented as most art made for adults. That Roeg and his creative team weren’t immediately thrown into jail the second the film was unleashed on the public remains something of a mystery to me. Which studio exec watched a movie about women with no toes planning to crush children by turning them into mice and then rolled the thing out to thousands of theatres?

It’s not just that Roeg leaves intact all of the scariest stuff from Dahl’s novel, though he certainly does that. A haunted girl trapped in a painting; a woman trying to lure a boy down from the tree with a snake; the witches’ habit of scratching at their sore-covered bald scalps; some of the most hideous make-up work this side of The Blob — the film is packed with images eerie enough to traumatise a child for an entire lifetime.

And yet somehow Roeg makes the material even scarier.That’s partly through his expert control on tone. Roeg is probably best known for the “adult” horror film Don’t Look Now — which, for the record, isn’t even half as scary as The Witches — and he spent his entire career honing a dreamlike cinematic vision. The Witches shares that lurching feeling. It is a waking nightmare, filled with a sickened sense of surreality and shot with a clear, unobstructed eye.

The whole film upset me when I was younger. But no scene more than the one in which our young hero, trying to escape the witches, must attempt to save a baby carriage from rolling down a hill. There’s nothing explicitly horrifying about the moment. It contains none of the foul puppetry work riddled throughout the rest of the film. It’s just so uncanny — what Freud would call “unheimlich.” It’s the middle of the day, in a quiet seaside town, and there are witches wondering around the place, unafraid.

The film also has jokes, kind of. At one point, a woman applies some of the witches’ potion, confusing it with perfume, and the moment where she notices she has a little patch of rat on her neck is played like a slapstick reveal in a sitcom. But these jokes are not funny. If anything, they make the film more unnerving. Wes Craven once described The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as feeling like a movie made by a murderer who had stolen a camera. The Witches feels the precise same way.

And that’s somehow even despite the fact that the film tacks on a “happy” ending. Unlike Dahl’s original, which ends with the young hero realising he will die in a matter of years due to the fact that he has been transformed into a mouse (it’s a long story), Roeg’s version has the boy returned to his human state. But no matter. The damage of the film has already been done. After all, ending with a smiling child, given everything we’ve already seen, is like slapping a bandaid on a chainsaw wound.

A Lifetime of Scares

The Witches changed my life — and not just in the very immediate sense that I spent the next few days unable to sleep, wandering around in a cold sweat, convinced I was going to be swooped up by demented supernatural villains. It was a gateway drug. Though I hated the film at first, I found I couldn’t stop watching it. Especially the scary parts — I’d rewind back and forth over the sections that most made my skin break out into gooseflesh, trying to see how terrified I could make myself.

Little wonder that within a few years, I was watching The Exorcist after my parents had gone to bed, and a few years after that had totally dedicated myself to the horror genre. For 20-something years, I’ve gone to the movies for scares and pretty much nothing else. And it’s all Roeg’s fault.

Perhaps you had a different experience. Maybe the film turned you off horror movies forever. But still, weren’t you a little sad when the trailer for the new adaptation of the book was released, and it looked a little… boring? A little colourful? Not quite scary enough?

The Witches is a traumatising work of art. But it’s necessarily traumatising. Cutting the horror from such a thing is like scraping the colour out of The Wizard of Oz. Like it or not, we need The Witches. And more than that, we need it to be evil.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.