Author Roald Dahl famously hated the 1990 film adaptation of his 1983 novel The Witches, especially the way that the filmmakers changed his dark ending into something more upbeat. And Nicolas Roeg’s film, featuring Jim Henson’s final work before his death, was a box-office failure as well, seemingly confirming Dahl’s objections. But it made a significant impact on the audience that it did reach, specifically children who were mesmerized (and possibly scarred) by its grotesque imagery and dark subject matter (despite the slightly more palatable ending). It’s become such a cult classic that the new remake from Warner Bros. was set to be a major theatrical event, until its release was shifted to HBO Max thanks to ongoing pandemic-related theater closures.
It’s hard to say whether the late Dahl would be more pleased with this new film, which in some ways follows his book more closely but makes other, more substantial changes than Roeg’s movie did. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the new version of The Witches is as CGI-driven as any modern studio blockbuster, in contrast to the detailed practical effects from Jim Henson Productions in the original. It feels less like a unique nightmare vision and more like something plastic and prefabricated, despite its muddled efforts to introduce an element of social commentary into Dahl’s story.
That commentary comes from the shift of the setting from contemporary (at the time of the book’s release) England to 1968 Alabama, where the unnamed main character (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno), an 8-year-old orphan, has moved with his also unnamed grandmother (Octavia Spencer). Making the central characters Black in the South in the 1960s is a pointed choice that the filmmakers never really explore, aside from a handful of vague references to the racial divide in America. As before, the main character’s parents have died in a car crash, and his grandmother passes on her extensive knowledge about witches, vile creatures who disguise themselves as human women and prey on children.
Also as before, the grandmother tells a story of encountering a witch when she was a child, although the disturbing tale of her childhood friend being trapped in a painting has been changed here into a slightly less disturbing tale of that friend being transformed into a chicken. Here, the grandmother is also a little more proactive, with proficiency in folk medicine that helps her ward off witches, although this is another cultural addition to the story that doesn’t really go anywhere. When the boy spots a witch at the local grocery store, his grandmother insists that they leave town, and they decamp to a fancy hotel on the Gulf Coast.
Unfortunately, that same hotel is hosting an annual convention for witches who are disguised as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, led by the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway) herself. The witches are plotting to turn the world’s children into mice, and when he accidentally spies on their meeting, the boy becomes one of their first victims, along with his portly English friend Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick). The two kids-turned-mice must stop the witches’ plan and save their fellow children.
Zemeckis (who co-wrote the screenplay with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and original planned director Guillermo del Toro) spends a lot of time on the early set-up, only to abandon the potential historical angle to closely follow the beats of Dahl’s story, making the pacing a bit lopsided. Not only does the movie give up on its own infusion of progressive ideas, but it also fails to fix some of the regressive aspects of Dahl’s story (there are still plenty of jokes at the expense of Bruno’s weight). Chris Rock narrates the movie as an adult version of the boy, apparently giving a lecture to children about the danger of witches, but he doesn’t add much of a useful perspective, often just describing exactly what’s already shown on screen, and his presence also lessens the sense of peril for the boy.
One of the main reasons that Roeg’s film made such an impact was the presence of Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch, and Hathaway tries way too hard to live up to that iconic performance, delivering every line as if she’s playing to the back rows of a packed theater, with an accent that vacillates between Young Frankenstein’s Frau Blucher and the Swedish Chef. Despite all the extra CGI enhancements that Zemeckis gives her, she’s never half as menacing as Huston was, and her appearance is never nearly as hideous, instead largely retaining her recognizable movie-star looks.
Spencer is warm and likable as the resourceful grandmother, and the child performers are adequate if not exactly memorable (the same was true in the original movie). Stanley Tucci brings some flustered charm to the hotel manager character previously played by Rowan Atkinson, but as in most Zemeckis movies of the last couple of decades, the real star is the special effects. Zemeckis adds new elements to the witches, including three-fingered claw hands and the ability to stretch their arms to uncanny lengths, that allow him to fill the movie with special effects, but as is too often the case in Zemeckis films, the technical wizardry doesn’t add anything to the story.
Zemeckis combined cutting-edge effects with weird dark comedy in his underrated 1992 film Death Becomes Her, which has itself become a cult classic, but here he’s just imitating what Roeg (and Dahl illustrator Quentin Blake before him) created. For a new generation unfamiliar with the previous film, aspects of this version of The Witches may still prove mesmerizing (or scarring). But its smoothed-out blockbuster style, both in the visuals and the storytelling, has nothing on the twisted imaginations of Roald Dahl or Nicolas Roeg.
Starring Jahzir Kadeem Bruno, Octavia Spencer, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, Codie-Lei Eastick, Kristin Chenoweth and Chris Rock, The Witches premieres Thursday, Oct. 22 on HBO Max.