The Witches (1990)

The Witches arrived in 1990, a Roald Dahl adaptation directed by Nicolas Roeg and shepherded through Jim Henson's Creature Shop, which built the prosthetics that turn Anjelica Huston into something between a society matron and a reptile. It is a dark fantasy for children, which is to say it trusts them with genuine menace. The plot concerns a boy turned into a mouse and a convention of child-hating witches disguised as a charity for the prevention of cruelty to children. There is a trunk of money and a bowl of cress soup. That is the whole of it.

Assessing this film for contemporary social instruction proves a barren exercise. The antagonists are powerful women, yet they are exterminated by a hotel full of guests, which is not an empowerment narrative so much as a pest control narrative. The cast is uniformly white and British or American, assembled for comic timing and menace, not for any representational project. The witches' aversion to clean children is a horror conceit and a running joke about hygiene, not a statement about bodies. No character wrestles with identity, no institution is indicted, no environment is defended. The film has no interest in teaching us anything, which in 1990 was simply called entertainment.

Roeg keeps the tone cruel and brisk, and the film never pauses to explain its morals. The Grand High Witch meets a cleaver. The children remain mice for most of the running time. Dahl himself loathed the softened ending and threatened to campaign against the picture, which is the closest this production comes to a controversy of conscience. What remains is a nasty, well-crafted piece of business with a devoted cult following and a body count of rodents. We classify it, we file it, we move on to the next screening.

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