The
late and distinguished British director Nicolas Roeg was no stranger to horror,
having dabbled in the genre with his genre masterpiece Don’t Look Now, touching on moments of alien terror with The Man Who Fell to Earth and probing
deep into the dark and disturbing alleyways of dangerous sexual obsession with Bad Timing. What he’s not known for, however, is making
family films for children, which Roeg with puppeteering master Jim Henson
sought to change. The end results of
their collaboration could well be the most frightening children’s movie ever
made!
Adapted
from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author
Roald Dahl’s novel of the same name, The
Witches told the truly terrifying (even harrowing) tale of a young American
boy named Luke (Jasen Fisher) who with his grandmother Helga (Mai Zetterling) in
England stumbles upon a coven of evil witches within a grand seaside hotel who
plan to transform all of the children around the world into mice before
murdering them. Being the last film to
involve Henson’s skillful puppetry and the first film Roeg directed ostensibly
for kids, The Witches touches on
everything from child abduction to attempted child murder and child
endangerment, seemingly in a succession of one terrifying scene after
another.
Though
the film is populated with adorable talking mice and features the comic talents
of Rowan Atkinson as the hotel manager, make no mistake, Roeg’s film pulls no
punches including a truly chilling encounter when a purple-eyed witch tries to
lure Luke down from the safety of his treehouse with a snake (you read that correctly)
and a bar of chocolate. Luke screams in
terror and upset for his grandmother before the witch calmly whispers ‘she
can’t hear you’, a sequence sure to send shivers down the spines of kids and
adults alike in equal measure. Then
there’s the makeup effects work of Henson and crew who provide the Grand High
Witch (Anjelica Huston in and out of heavy makeup) with a visage that might
actually conjure up more blood curdling screams than Freddy Krueger.
From
the get-go, this wasn’t going to be an easy title to go down the family
entertainment pipeline. This was as
scary as anything in Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse
and the finished product proved to be problematic for the novel’s author who
was so incensed over the ending which strayed from the source he tried to have
his name removed from the film before ultimately being convinced otherwise by
Jim Henson. Roeg himself felt he may
have gone too far after seeing how his own child reacted to a rough cut of the
film, with the MPAA censors demanding further cuts to obtain a PG rating.
Family
films and fantasy adventure stories have always been ones to tread a tightrope
walk between enchanting and scary enough to thrill kids without making them
shrivel up. The Witches, however, winds up touching an unspoken nerve within
parents and fears of their own children being snatched up by unknown forces
never to be seen again. As such, it’s a
terrific young adults film with a plucky team of heroes at the epicenter
battling centuries-old forces of darkness that will make a great addition to
anyone’s Halloween viewing. As a
children’s or so-called “family” film, however, this is undiluted nightmare
fuel!
--Andrew Kotwicki
