THE WITCHES (1990 version)
Did you enjoy the Roald Dahl book when you were a kid? Well, I was scared by it. Even the soothing sounds of Emma Thompson reading the audiobook on my Walkman was a thrilling event, as she went into agreeable detail with the nasty things the witches did to kids.
Another person who loved the book was Jim Henson, who bought the rights to the film almost immediately. Henson decided that the best person to film a kids book was Don’t Look Now director Nicolas Roeg, and we get a film full of his usual POV shots, quick cuts and handheld camera. In short, Nicolas Roeg shoots The Witches like a horror film.
“Roald Dahl’s book was rather creepy but it had very simple, sweet, charming drawings in it—so that the children wouldn’t get too frightened. If a parent were reading the story to a child and saw the child getting nervous about it or upset, the could shut the book, but once you take someone to the cinema and put them in a seat, you frighten the bejesus out them.”
Nicolas Roeg, The World is Ever Changing
As with most of Dahl, there is a real life analogy to the dangers he puts into the children’s realm, and so his warnings to be careful of polite strangers who may wish you harm sadly remain as relevant as his disdain for abusive parents and teachers (Matilda). It’s also a real adult fear, the idea of forever losing your own child. A fear Dahl knew only too well, as his daughter Olivia died when she was seven years old, an incident which forever shaped the rest of the writers life. You can see the spectre of Olivia in most of his children's novels – she is Matilda, she has The Magic Finger, she is Sophie in The BFG (dedicated to his dead child). And in The Witches, she is that lingering sense of loss.
In a film with kids, scares, witches, one snake, Rowan Atkinson and Roald Dahl’s world view, the entire show is nearly stolen completely by Bill Patterson, a fussy dad with his demands not to be given cock-a-leekie soup and his love of his Rotary club!
Anjelica Houston is particularly good as the boss witch, and her gambit of forcing the boy out of his hiding place by pushing a baby to its near death is one of the most ghastly things you’ll see on film. Henson’s animatronic mice do not look like the real deal, but are oddly cutsey in such a grim story.
Behind the scenes, the decision was made to soften the end of the film after child audiences reacted badly to it. This infuriated Roald Dahl who felt the ending was crucial to the story. Softening the edges off Roald Dahl has become somewhat of a societal art however. Not just when reading the books to your own children (and casually skipping over a badly dated reference which hurts the moral of the tale) but in how we deal with the artist as a person.
Because Dahl was an anti-Semite. There is no getting away from it. His path was a well-travelled one, from claiming he meant Israel in younger works, to falling into various Jewish stereotypes later on, and then, in the last decade of his life, making some right horribly racist comments in print. This is the same author who wrote Poison, the sterling horror story which warns about the fatal insidiousness of racism. But this is of course not an unusual contradiction of peoples – just to pick on one example alone, Ron Atkinson did more than many white managers to push black football talent in England in the 1970s, yet his career ended with him uttering a racial slur on live TV (and then using the “but some of my friends are black” defence in an excruciating TV interview with the late Darcus Howe). Dahl was also a medical pioneering (his methods for helping Patricia Neal recover from a stroke wound up 20 years ahead of their time) who promoted child vaccinations to the hilt, campaigned on railway safety, and invented the Wade-Dahl-Till shunt, a heart device which has saved thousands of children worldwide.
My point is that you can’t binary shape Roald Dahl into one box of nice or naughty like easy tales we tell kids. He was a complicated and difficult man, and he left a complicated and difficult legacy. His writing has a degree of otherization throughout (stereotypes abound in The Great Glass Elevator, and don’t forget Dahl has his name on the frankly worrisome You Only Live Twice screenplay). They also provide solid lessons and warnings for kids and adults alike. What I’m trying to say, and I think its important, is that neither side can be ignored for Dahl. We should acknowledge he wrote stuff which was inspiring, but also stuff that was hurtful, and that both are part of the same whole.
In other words, you can separate the art from the artist, but I think the flaws of Roald Dahl can be as useful a life lesson and moral for the kids who enjoy his books, as much as the strengths of his writing.
There is also the interpretation of the story that this is about coming out of the closet, and you need to compare the grandmothers acceptance of her grandsons new state, to Bruno’s family. It’s not for me or anyone else to say you are wrong if this is the reading of the text that was important to you. The Witches may have more critique written about it than any other Roald Dahl book, and it suits the multiplicity of the author that it has been referred to both as misogynistic and as empowering, as child endangering and as child protecting, and that you can understand all of those readings from the one text or film.
Anyhow, in the novel, the boy never gets his old body back, and will die at the same time as the grandmother. In the film, Jane Horrocks (who is very good in her role) makes a face turn and transforms the boy (now named Luke) back to normal. Both endings were filmed, and Roald Dahl got to see his original ending kept in one scene, but he was furious to see it cut from the cinema run. Jim Henson convinced him it was for the best.
By this time, however, Roald Dahl was a dying man, and by the time the film premiered in London, Jim Henson was dead. Henson had been feeling ill throughout all of May 1990 (which he put down to stress and tiredness of contract details) but refused to see a doctor until he started coughing up blood and passing out on May 15th, and even then he delayed a few hours. By the time he got to the ICU, the bacterial pneumonia had weakened his vital organs, and he died in a few hours. He was 53.
Dahl followed soon after, dying on 23 November from blood cancer. He was 74.
Two artists contributing to one more film to scare the beejesus out of their audiences one more time.
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