Images via Netflix

I’ve been meaning to do a write up on The Witches for a while since I’ve seen it on so many listicles on Ranker and Buzzfeed as well as on clickbait blogs and articles about scary or traumatizing kids’ movies. When I found it on Netflix and when I heard that HBO was releasing a remake starring Anne Hathaway and directed by Robert Zemeckis with both Zemeckis and Guillermo del Toro contributing to the script I thought it would be a good experiment to see if I could benefit from the SEO surge of people trying to look up The Witches or anything related to it. I know at this point I might be a little late in capitalizing on those search spikes, but I just got so into writing my Tribute to Saturday Morning Cartoons post that I just fell behind. Honestly though, I’m actually glad I’m a little late on this just because if I was on time with it I would have missed out on how people have received The Witches remake. Between the responses from critics as well as the criticisms of how The Witches creates a negative stereotype of people with Ectrodactyly and other limb differences it’s been quite an interesting thing to follow on the internet and social media.

Based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Roald Dahl of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The BFG fame, The Witches follows a young boy named Luke Eveshim, who after his parents are killed in a car accident, is placed in the care of his grandmother, Helga who would entertain Luke with stories about witches, demonic creatures with bald heads, purple eyes, claws, and square feet who disguise themselves as ordinary women and have an unrelenting hatred for children whom they are constantly trying to dispose of in a wide variety of ways.

When Helga’s health begins to deteriorate due to diabetes the doctor recommends that she recuperate by going on vacation. Helga and Luke go to a seaside hotel, there Luke befriends Bruno Jenkins, a crude and gluttonous, but friendly boy his age.

While playing in the hotel ballroom with his pet mice, Luke stumbles upon a convention of witches meeting under the guise of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

There, Luke sees the Grand High Witch, the leader of all witches unveils her latest creation, Formula 86, a potion which can transform people into mice and reveals her plan of mixing the potion in candy and distributing it to children around the world through candy stores the other witches are to purchase using money she provides them.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the potion, the High Witch has Bruno brought in and reveals that she gave him a candy bar laced with the potion. Bruno transforms into a mouse in front of the witches before scurrying off. The witches then discover Luke hiding in the ballroom. Luke manages to escape the witches only to be captured when he returns to his hotel room.

The witches deal with Luke by giving him a large amount of Formula 86, transforming him into a mouse instantly. Luke manages to escape from the witches and in mouse form reunites with Bruno and his grandmother and comes up with a plan to stop the witches by sneaking into the High Witch’s room and stealing a bottle of the potion and putting it in the food of the witches’ special banquet dinner.

Luke’s plan is a success and all the witches including the High Witch are transformed into mice who are all killed by the hotel’s staff and guests.

Luke still in mouse form returns home with his grandmother along with the High Witches secret stash of money and her address book filled with contact information of witches in the United States.

Luke is all set to adjust to his life as a mouse before Miss Susan Irvine, the High Witch’s former assistant who had quit earlier due to the High Witch’s constant mistreatment abuse arrives and transforms Luke back into a human and returns to him his pet mice and glasses before leaving to transform Bruno back to human form.

I do want to say that the movie ends on a happier note when compared to the novel or the 2020 remake. In the original novel Luke is doomed to be a mouse forever and will die in about nine years given the lifespan of mice, however Luke is okay with this because his grandmother reveals that she will probably only live another nine years as well and Luke would hate the idea of outliving her and having somebody else care for him. Also, the novel ends with Luke and his grandmother planning to use the High Witch’s address book, stash of money to eradicate all witches everywhere. Supposedly, Roald Dahl was really upset that the director, Nicolas Roeg changed the ending for the film and as a form of conciliation Roeg had filmed not only his ending but an ending more loyal to the book, and that after seeing this ending Dahl was so touched he started crying. However, Dahl was still upset with Roeg when he found out they were using the alternate ending and tried to have his name taken off the film. It was only with the urging of Jim Henson who produced the film and did the puppeteering that he was dissuaded against doing it.

Before I get into the cast, I just want to get it out there that since The Witches was a UK/US production, most of the cast was from Europe so I’m not that familiar with other works that they’ve been in.

Anjelica Huston played the Grand High Witch who used the name Eva Ernst when checking into the hotel. Huston is probably best known for playing Morticia Addams in the Addams Family movies from the early ’90s as well as her work with Wes Anderson in movies such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

As the leader of the Witches, the Grand High Witch is supposed to be the evilest character in the movie which is represented when the witches remove their disguises and it is revealed that the Grand High Witch is the least human-looking and most monstrous of all of them.

To emphasize her cruelty and evil we see that the Grand High Witch’s disdain and contempt isn’t just focused on children. Throughout the movie we see her constantly mistreating the other witches, including killing one who questioned her plans. We also see her evil and cruelty when a witch asks her what if some of the tainted candy was accidentally eaten by a grown up and she laughs before answering with “That’s just too bad for the grownup.”

I think what really cements the Grand High Witch’s status as the evilest witch is when she and the other witches are chasing Luke and she tries to draw Luke out by pushing a stroller with a baby down a hill towards a cliff.

According to Ranker.com there’s a theory that the witches serve as stand ins for extreme conservatism that parallel the Nazis of the Third Reich. This idea is supposed to be emphasized by the Grand High Witch whose black dress is supposed to be reminiscent of the uniforms worn by the SS and her name Eva Ernst, which are common names in Germany and were shared by multiple members of the Nazi party in the ’30s and ’40s.

Fun fact: At the time of filming Huston was in a relationship with Jack Nicholson who would frequently send her huge bouquets of flowers.

Mai Zetterling played Helga Eveshim, Luke’s grandmother. While in the novel and remake it is said that Helga’s knowledge about witches comes from the fact that when she was younger she was a professional witch hunter, it’s never exactly said where her knowledge of witches comes from, other than that she had a few encounters with witches in the past including an incident that cost her a finger, as well as spending some time when she was younger traveling the world in search of the Grand High Witch, and despite the fact that Helga says she never found the Grand High Witch, the High Witch still referred to her as “an old adversary.”

I found it a bit odd that the movie would show Helga having a penchant for cigars. I know in today’s age a lot of movies and shows aimed at kids are made so they don’t show vices like smoking or drinking, or at the very least are made to vilify these habits and show their down sides. Since Helga is Norwegian and the movie was a collaboration between US and UK studios I’m wondering if this a cultural thing, although in the movie it is acknowledged that smoking is bad for her when a doctor tells her the cigars aren’t good for her diabetes.

Jasen Fisher played Luke Eveshim, the movie’s protagonist.

Rowan Atkinson played Mr. Stringer, the uptight hotel owner/manager. Atkinson is probably best known to most people as Mr. Bean and other than Anjelica Huston is the only other person whose name I recognize.

Charlie Potter played Bruno Jenkins, the gluttonous and crude boy that Luke befriends in the hotel. Bruno’s gluttonous nature is his downfall because that is what gets him to accept the tainted candy from the Grand High Witch. I guess kids in England weren’t taught not to take things from strangers. With a name like Bruno I feel it’s almost expected that he be such an oaf of a boy. I feel that this is because the name Bruno is so close to the word brute/brutish. On a whim I looked up the origin of the name Bruno and it’s derived from the Old High German word Brun which means brown.

Bill Paterson played Mr. Jenkins, Bruno’s father. If you look at the way he acts it’s no surprised why Bruno acts like an annoying piece of crap kid. Mr. Jenkins’ personality matches Bruno quite well as he acts just as entitled and demanding as Bruno does.

Brenda Blethy played Mrs. Jenkins, Bruno’s mother.

Anne Lambton played the Witch in Black, a witch that Luke encounters early in the film while playing in his tree house.

Jane Horrocks played Miss Irvine, the Grand High Witch’s assistant who after getting fed up with the constant mistreatment decides to reform and become a good witch.

It’s never explained in the movie why this happened but Miss Irvine’s reformation and transformation into a good witch is physical as well as ethical as we see her at the end of the film without the purple eyes and deformed hands that witches are known to have. The scene of her looking out the window and watching Luke and his grandmother leave the hotel and you see her ungloved and human-looking hands, at first I thought this might have been a goof on the makers of the movie but after taking a look at it again I’m thinking this was done on purpose to foreshadow her redemption.

Sukie Smith played Marlene, a hotel maid whom Mr. Stringer is having a secret affair with. Marlene role is pretty limited in the film all she does is act scared of mice and accidentally exposes herself to Formula 86, which she found while cleaning the Grand High Witch’s room and confused for perfume. It’s never explained what happened to her after the film, although given how the power of a witch was needed to return Luke and Bruno back to normal there is some implication that she’s still part mouse

As I said earlier, the big reason I decided to do this write-up The Witches because I’ve seen it on so many lists about movies that left kids traumatizing. While most of those lists prefer to focus on all the visuals of the movie that make it traumatizing there are so many more elements in this film that just make it more horrible for children.

Most of those lists like to focus on the unveiling scene where the Witches remove their disguises, culminating with the Grand High Witch pulling her mask off and revealing how demonic and far from human she is.

Then there’s the mouse transformation sequence.

And these are just the visual horrors.

https://youtu.be/oiC54FkzlHU

One of the scariest things I found was when Helga told the story of what happened to Erica, a childhood friend of hers. How a witch trapped her in her father’s painting where she lived out the rest of her life. The flashback is pretty terrifying. I mean you see the girl literally grabbed in an alley by the witch and dragged into a dark corner. Then you have Helga’s telling us about how they knew she was trapped in the painting. How they saw her just appear one day, and everyday they would see her in different positions, feeding the ducks, or in the farmhouse, or on the fence. How they saw her grow old and frail until she faded away, signifying how she died in the painting of old age.

This idea that Erica is trapped in the painting is already terrifying but it gets especially creepy when Helga says that sometimes they’d see Erica staring back at them from the painting. Some people are already scared shitless by some paintings, but the idea that the person in a painting is real and staring back at you just cranks the creepiness level up to 11.

There is some implication that trapping children in paintings is a common tactic of dealing with children which is shown when the Grand High Witch enters the hotel and taps on a painting, taunting a child on it.

Then there’s Luke’s first encounter with the Witch in Black. This entire scene is basically straight out of an ’80s after-school special about talking to strangers which is already creepy. But the whole interaction of her trying to entice Luke with a free snake and candy which is already suggested to be tainted with something but is later implied to be laced with the potion that turns people into mice just makes it even worse.

One of the things that make this scene so creepy is when the woman i black shows off her purple eyes revealing she’s a witch. Just look at that screenshot staring straight at you with her eyes stretched open and her gaze just piercing a hole into your soul. If this image isn’t burned into your brain  then consider yourself lucky.

Then there’s the part when the witches are chasing Luke, and the Grand High Witch just casually pushes a stroller with a baby inside down a hill towards a cliff. I’ve already said that this act right here just makes the Grand High Witch as evil as they come but the fact that she’s so willing to do something so horrible is just so disturbing.

For a kid’s movie The Witches is pretty messed up. While it has been listed or mentioned on many articles and lists about scary or traumatizing kids’ movies, many of those only mention it because of the visual horrors that it contains. The whole stranger-danger theme of the movie, just makes it even scarier. If you needed something to show your kids on the dangers of trusting strangers or accepting gifts from them, then The Witches should be the perfect movie to scare them straight.