The Witches 2000 is a fantasy novel written by Roald Dahl. Published in 1983, it tells the story of a young boy who discovers a secret society of witches and becomes embroiled in their plans to rid the world of children. The novel was adapted into a film in 1990, and a stage play in 2018. The Witches 2000 is set in England and Norway, and follows the adventures of a young boy named Luke. After the untimely death of his parents, Luke goes to live with his Norwegian grandmother. It is during this time that Luke learns about the existence of witches and their hatred for children.
The Witches
The best children's stories are the scariest ones, because to kids they seem most likely to contain the truth. A lot of stories end with everybody living happily ever after, but they're boring stories unless there seems to be a good chance that unspeakable dangers must be survived on the way to the ending. Roald Dahl's children's stories always seem to know that truth, and the best thing about Nicolas Roeg's film of Dahl's book "The Witches" is its dark vision - this is not only a movie about kids who are changed into mice, it's a movie where one of the mice gets its tail chopped off.
AdvertisementThe film opens on an ominous note in Norway, with Luke (Chicago-born Jasen Fisher) being told stories about witches by his old grandmother ( Mai Zetterling). They're real, she says, and they walk among us. But you can spot them if you get a good look at them, because they have square feet. They're also bald and have pointy noses, but the important thing is, they're not imaginary. The grandmother has even heard tell of a Grand High Witch who rules over the others, and is the most terrible of all.
Tragedy strikes. Luke's parents are killed in a car crash. He travels with his grandmother to England on family business, and they end up in a seaside hotel that is hosting a convention of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Somehow when you see the head of the society, Miss Ernst (Anjelica Huston), you don't feel good about your chances of having cruelty prevented to you if you're a child.
Huston, whose energy dominates the film, dresses like a vampire vamp with stiletto heels, a tight black dress, a severe hair style and blazing red lipstick. Roeg often photographs her using lenses that make her leer into the camera, and she's always towering over everybody, especially little boys like Luke. Wandering through the labyrinthine hallways of the old hotel, Luke stumbles upon a private meeting one day, and discovers to his horror that the Society is actually a convention of witches - and that Huston, the fabled Grand High Witch, has plans to turn all of the children in England into mice.
Luke is of course discovered while eavesdropping, and becomes the first child forced to drink a secret potion and become a mouse. And it's here that the genius of the late Jim Henson comes into play, as Henson and his special effects team create a world in which gigantic pieces of furniture tower over the little boy-mouse and some of his friends, as they try to survive cats and extermination and save the children of England.
Some of the sequences are predictable from other movies about people who shrink to microscopic size. Others are fresh, including the way Luke is finally able to convince his grandmother he is her grandson and not a mouse. Lucky for him she believes in witches already. The movie turns into a race against time, good against evil, and Roeg doesn't spare his young audiences the sinister implications of the plot.
AdvertisementThis is the first so-called children's movie from Nicolas Roeg, that most unorthodox of directors, whose credits include "Don't Look Now," "Eureka" and "Insignificance." He almost always expresses a twisted, sinister sensuality in his films, and in this one that sensibility expresses itself in his willingness to let the child-mice face some of the real dangers of their predicament. The result is that the movie might be too intense for smaller viewers (although some of them these days seem hardened to anything). But "The Witches" is an intriguing movie, ambitious and inventive, and almost worth seeing just for Anjelica Huston's obvious delight in playing a completely uncompromised villainess.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
The Witches Will Scare Children, Which Is All That Matters
Children should be scared. Not, like, in an existential way, but once in a while it’s a good thing—a fun thing, a perhaps even character building thing—to be a little frightened, at least when entering a land of make-believe where there are no real-world stakes. I spent much of my movie-watching life as a kid creeped out but fascinated. I couldn’t yet identify that Bette Davis was an iconic kween, but I was certainly rattled by her lurking presence in The Watcher in the Woods. I loved, and kind of hated, the icky, puppet-y gunk of Labyrinth. And then there was The Witches, a 1990 oddity directed by Nicolas Roeg of all people, which didn’t quite capture the true spirit of the beloved Roald Dahl book, but certainly took care to actually be scary.
That movie comes up a lot when my fellow Old Millennial friends and I talk about how kids’ movies just aren’t the same anymore. It’s a tired conversation at this point, one that involves the same confirmation bias at work in, say, the assumption that there are no toy commercials on TV anymore. (In fact you’re just not seeing them because you no longer watch programming that would have toy ads served against it.) But even considering that narrow perspective, I do think children’s movies have slickened and brightened over the years. They’re mostly animated these days, and mostly made by studios with the intent to delight and inspire—not cow children into a sort of worldly nervousness. They just wouldn’t make The Witches in 2020, my friends and I say, shaking our heads.
Except, well, they have. And the new Witches comes from a beloved auteur of the 1980s (and 1990s, and 2000s, to some extent): Robert Zemeckis. The tech-obsessed fabulist has beat a wayward course through his latter day career all the way to an adaptation of Dahl’s book, at a time when Dahl’s legacy is up for serious debate (due to his staunch anti-Semitism, among other things) and when children’s cinema seems less tolerant of a nasty, sad little story of a boy who is turned into a mouse by a witch and stays that way. It’s kind of thrilling that Warner Bros—which has decided to release the film on its HBO Max streaming service (on October 22) rather than wait for movie theaters to return to peak business—bothered to make the movie at all, let alone that they allowed some of the darkness to remain.
Roeg infamously softened the ending of Dahl’s story for his otherwise uncompromising version of The Witches, a surprising choice from the guy who made Walkabout and Don’t Look Now. Zemeckis—who wrote the new adaptation with Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris—finds his own ways to nicen things up, but there is still some discomfort and terror in his alternately wretched and gleaming film. Though I was mostly bored watching the new Witches, there is a sharp, glinting edge to be found and enjoyed here and there—pops of grim life that suggest a broader, more charitable respect for kids’ tolerance and sophistication than has most PG fare.
Perhaps the most significant alteration to the original text is that the fearsome witches who stalk our young hero (Jahzir Bruno) and his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) are known to operate in a targeted way. They prey particularly on poor children and children of color, assuming those kids are less likely to be missed or seriously searched for when they are turned into rodents or chickens or otherwise vanished from human life. Given that the boy and his grandmother are Black, and spend most of the film in 1960s Alabama, and that most of the witches they square off against are white, Zemeckis’s film is adding an entirely new layer of tension to the much smaller scale of the book—one intriguingly reactive to the mores and awarenesses of today. Yet this potentially vast dimension is introduced only to be quickly forgotten. Zemeckis’s Witches has trouble balancing its modernity with its loyalty to Dahl’s original. I respect the struggle to honor both facets, but Zemeckis never finds the right pitch.
The opening stretches of the film—meaning, everything before the boy and his grandmother head to a hotel where, unbeknownst to them, a big witches’ convention is being held—have a grim sense of undertow that ably simulates the troubled coziness of Dahl’s book. Chris Rock narrates the story: the death of the boy’s parents in a car wreck, his grieving, his deepening bond with his firm but kindly grandmother. Spencer and Bruno forge an endearing connection, a warming rapport that seems genuinely violated when the witches come threatening—we want to watch them defend it.
Once the hotel stuff kicks in, though, Zemeckis’s machine starts to move erratically. The pace quickens to a sprint, the digital effects balloon and metastasize, and the film loses much of its pleasing texture. Anne Hathway shows up as the wicked Grand High Witch, lilting and hooting and slurring in a Trondheim by way of Novgorod by way of Zagreb by way of Neptune accent. She takes up a lot of energy when she’s around, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anjelica Huston enjoys her own dominance in the 1990 version, though Huston is still—somehow!—less theatrical than Hathaway is here.
This witch is a lot. And while some of that hamminess plays gamely, too much of Hathaway’s performance must be navigated around Zemeckis’s computer business: a snaky dress that seems alive, a gaping monster’s jaw hidden sometimes with makeup, a constant hovering three feet off the ground. Hathaway tears the scenery down because, it feels like, she wasn’t sure on the day how much work the CGI would be doing when added in post. So we get a lot of acting and a lot of special effects at once, converging storms that blight out any rich minor detail, any mote of creepy credibility, that has managed to sneak its way in and survive up to that point.
The Witches, a once in a Generation Nightmare
Fun fact about Bud, I have three daughters and having daughters means that quite often, there is some happy go lucky, feel good, girly princess movie playing on the television. My daughter’s range in age from 17 to 8 so I’ve had the pleasure of seeing every girly main character heroine from the Cheetah Girls to Cadet Kelly and everything in between. One face I have seen a billion, million times is Anne Hathaway.
It all started with 2001’s The Princess Diaries following Hathaway as young Mia Thermopolis whose life is transformed when she finds out she is the heir to the crown of the small country of Genovia. As modern “Oh snap, I’m awkward and now I need to be a Princess” movies go, The Princess Diaries ranks somewhere between Miss Congeniality and the Drew Barrymore Cinderella movie, Ever After. The Hathaway plague upon my house continued with 2004’s double header of princess films as she returned as Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement and Ella Enchanted. By the time 2020 rolled around, I have seen Anne Hathaway get approximately 1,500 makeovers, fall off of a horse 1,200 times, kiss prince charming to an emotional early ‘2000s pop song 1,000 times and get sweet, sweet revenge on her high school bully played by Mandy Moore enough times that it is no longer satisfying. All these times I have seen Anne Hathaway could not prepare me for seeing her in 2020’s HBO Max exclusive, The Witches.
Anne Hathaway as The Grand High Witch is the absolute most terrifying thing you will ever experience in a movie made for kids. fuck that, maybe the most terrifying thing you will ever experience in a movie period. First there is the wide monstrous smile filled with sharp pointy teeth and the bifurcated tongue, then there’s the bald scabby head that she pulls worms out of and eats. She has weird talons for hands, one long sharp toe and a golden snake broach on her dress that’s alive. If that wasn’t enough to freak you out, she does this crazy shit with her voice that reminds me of Brad Dourif in The Exorcist III. Her normal voice shifts and a teeth gnashing snarl comes out as she speaks about murdering children. We are going to look back 15-20 years from now and people are going to speak about Hathaway in this role the way people talk about Tim Curry in the role of IT in the ‘1990s.
Now The Witches is so much more than just Anne Hathaway as a once in a generation nightmare creature. Basically the only other character in the film with any considerable screen time is Octavia Spencer in the role of Grandma who takes in a young boy (Jahzir Bruno) after his parents die in a car accident. The film is set in ‘1960s Alabama and the soundtrack is full of all kinds of MoTown classics as we see Grandma trying to get the young boy out of his shell when suddenly, the boy comes in close contact with a witch. Grandma then goes full voodoo witch doctor as she reads crystals and burns sage before taking the boy to a fancy hotel to keep him safe from witches.
Once they arrive at the hotel they find it infested with witches led by Anne Hathaway who have a plan to turn all the children in the world into mice by opening up candy stores across the country and selling chocolate bars laced with Formula 86 which can turn a child into a mouse with just 3 drops. The young boy, who goes unnamed throughout the film, overhears this witchy plot and is sniffed out by the Grand High Witch, because to witches, children smell like dog poo. The witches turn him and his friend into mice and the remainder of the movie is CGI mice running through a fancy hotel trying to turn themselves back into human form and combat the witches. In the end they decide it’s not how you look on the outside that’s important, it’s how you feel on the inside that matters most.
The film is directed by Robert Zemeckis, who is well known for Back to the Future and Forrest Gump but is no stranger to horror as he directed the underrated classic What Lies Beneath. It includes some voice over narration by Chris Rock as the boy all grown up, but being honest, all of that is secondary to Anne Hathaway’s freaky face. Without that this is a somewhat standard kid’s movie; some background noise that my girl’s have on TV while I do other stuff, but her performance as the Grand High Witch makes this a horror film that easily will find its way into our family’s annual scary movie watch-a-thon.
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It is during this time that Luke learns about the existence of witches and their hatred for children. Grandmamma recounts her own experiences with witches and warns Luke to be careful around them. She tells him that witches disguise themselves as ordinary women and often target children.
They are known for their bald heads, itchy wigs, and gloves to conceal their witchy features. Throughout the novel, Luke encounters several witches and manages to escape their clutches. He receives help from his grandmother and a mysterious assistant, Mr. Stringer. Together, they devise a plan to thwart the witches' plot and expose their true identities. The Witches 2000 is a captivating read that combines humor, suspense, and Dahl's signature dark storytelling. It explores themes of love, family, and the power of imagination. Dahl's vivid descriptions and imaginative characters create a world that readers can easily get lost in. The novel has been praised for its unique blend of fantasy and realism. Dahl's ability to create characters that are both relatable and fantastical is evident throughout the story. His attention to detail, particularly when describing the witches' appearance and behavior, adds depth to the narrative. Overall, The Witches 2000 is a timeless classic that continues to enchant readers of all ages. It remains a beloved work in Roald Dahl's impressive collection of children's literature. The novel's themes of bravery and resilience resonate with readers, making it a must-read for anyone looking for an unforgettable adventure..
Reviews for "The Witches 2000: A Modern Fairy Tale or a Horror Story?"
- Emily - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with "The witches 2000". The acting was subpar and the storyline felt rushed. I didn't connect with any of the characters and found it hard to care about what was happening. The special effects were also quite outdated and took away from the overall viewing experience. Overall, I would not recommend this movie.
- John - 1 star - "The witches 2000" was a complete waste of time. The plot was confusing and poorly executed, making it difficult to follow along. The acting was also lackluster, with the characters feeling one-dimensional. The overall tone of the movie was inconsistent, leaving me feeling unsatisfied. I would not recommend this movie to anyone.
- Sarah - 2 stars - I had high hopes for "The witches 2000" but was ultimately disappointed. The story lacked depth and felt cliché. The acting was mediocre at best, and I found it hard to connect with any of the characters. The pacing was off, with some scenes feeling drawn out while others were rushed. Overall, I found this movie to be forgettable and would not recommend it.