The Witches (1990)
Roald Dahl's 1983 novel The Witches occupies a particular corner of children's literature: charming on the surface, genuinely alarming underneath. Dahl never much softened his edges for younger readers, and the book, with its bald premise that witches are real, hate children, and walk among us undetected, unsettled a generation of British and Irish kids who read it at primary school. By the time Nicolas Roeg brought it to the screen in 1990, co-produced by Jim Henson Productions and released through Warner Bros. Pictures, it already carried that reputation. Adapting it for cinema, then, was never going to produce something comfortable, and the finished film sits in a curious cultural space: a British-American family production that is, by most reasonable measures, too frightening for a large portion of its intended audience. It arrived the same year as Total Recall, another film whose genre packaging concealed something considerably more visceral than the marketing suggested.
Nicolas Roeg was, by 1990, a director whose career defied easy summary. He had built his reputation on fractured, formally daring films, and The Witches represents something of a departure into more mainstream territory, though Roeg's sensibility never fully disappears. The screenplay was written by Allan Scott, who had previously worked with Roeg on Don't Look Now (1973), and that recurring collaboration gives the film an interesting undercurrent: this is, on paper, a children's story, but the hands shaping it had once produced one of British cinema's great horror films. The production was among the last personally overseen by Jim Henson, who died in May 1990 shortly before the film's release, lending the creature work a particular poignancy in retrospect. Cinematographer Harvey Harrison gives the film a look that moves between the warmly ordinary, cosy English interiors and seaside hotels lit in soft amber, and something more queasy and disorienting when the story demands it. His camera occasionally tilts just slightly off the comfortable, which suits a director who had never quite trusted the straight line. Stanley Myers's score threads through the film with a quality that is deceptively light, lending the children's-film surface a texture that never entirely reassures.
The cast carries a great deal of the film's tonal weight. Jasen Fisher plays Luke, the boy at the centre of events, with the kind of wide-eyed credibility that child performances in this genre often miss. Mai Zetterling, as his grandmother Helga, brings a warmth and authority that grounds the stranger material. Rowan Atkinson appears as the hotel manager Mr Stringer, flustered and peripheral in the best possible way. And then there is Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch, a performance pitched somewhere between theatrical relish and genuine menace, the sort of turn that stays with you. Editor Tony Lawson, who had worked with Roeg as far back as Bad Timing (1980), cuts the film with a rhythm that keeps things moving at a brisk 91 minutes while allowing certain moments, particularly those involving the Henson Creature Shop's prosthetic work, enough space to register fully. The creature effects are a landmark of practical craft, the kind of work that An American Werewolf in London had demonstrated nearly a decade earlier: physical, convincing, and far more enduring than digital alternatives of the period would have been.
My sister was so frightened by The Witches as a child that she was physically, spectacularly sick, right there on the living-room floor. I have never forgotten it, and re-watching Nicolas Roeg's 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl I understand exactly why.
The witches, led by Anjelica Huston's magnificently sinister Grand High Witch, peel away their human faces to reveal something deeply grotesque, and the prosthetics that do it, the work of Jim Henson's Creature Shop in one of the last things Henson ever oversaw, are as horrible as they are impressive.
And there is the puzzle at the heart of reviewing this thing. By every outward measure it is a British children's film: a Dahl story, a plucky boy hero, a wicked-witch plot, a knowing streak of fun. Roeg tells it well, the story holds up nicely, and the acting is decent to good by the standards of the genre, with Rowan Atkinson popping up as the flustered hotel manager a few years before he would fret his way through Four Weddings and a Funeral. But you cannot in good conscience file it under cosy family viewing when it is this disturbing to the very children it is supposedly for.
So where does that leave me? I cannot quite grade it as the kids' film it wants to be, because I would not put it in front of my own children, and that has to weigh something in the reckoning. Yet it is no failure either; it is a well-made, effectively creepy little movie that has simply wandered into the wrong age bracket. Judged on that awkward, in-between footing, three stars is where I land: a good film and a real fright, just not one for a cosy Sunday afternoon with the little ones.
The Witches remains one of those films that prompts genuine disagreement about what it is and who it is for, and that disagreement has followed it across three decades, a 2020 remake, and countless living-room revisits by adults who first saw it through their fingers as children. Roeg and Scott produced something polished but unclassifiable: a film faithful enough to Dahl to preserve his unsettling spirit, yet commercial enough to carry a family certificate. Fans of practical creature work, or of Huston at her most theatrically committed, will find plenty to appreciate. Those who remember it vividly from childhood, one way or another, will not find their memories much exaggerated. It is the kind of film that leaves a mark, which is perhaps exactly what Dahl always intended, even if the living-room carpet pays the price.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1990 | Watched: 2026-08-14
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Witches (1990) on YouTube
Where to watch
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