In the classic tradition of British children’s literature, he represents the world to children as a cold and indifferent place, in which wonders, magic, and human kindness are rare, sought-after treasures.

Roald Dahl, the author of childhood classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda, gave us a body of work that feels almost intrinsically British.

This is where everything quickly goes awry. But Dahl’s novel is really less about a story than it is about a feeling, a sense of things being terribly disordered, unreal, and unfair. The results are calamitous (and genuinely creepy) for the Boy.Īt first, Zemeckis’s version of The Witches appears to be made to order. And it’s, ironically, held at the very same hotel to which he and his grandmother have traveled to try and escape the witch! Because his grandmother has taught him how to recognize a witch, he immediately realizes what he’s stumbled upon. Not long after this revelation, the Boy comes face to face with not only one witch, but an entire huge coven of witches who’ve all assembled - where else? - at a large hotel convention. These witches, unfortunately, look exactly like the typical woman of the ’60s: They always wear wigs and nice shoes, they have giant expanding nostrils, and they always wear gloves. Shortly thereafter, he encounters a witch at the local drug store, and his grandmother, something of a spiritualist herself, initiates him into a world in which child-hating murderous witches are everywhere. The Witches, transplanted from its original Nordic and English setting to 1960s Alabama, recounts the delightfully morbid story of an unnamed Boy (Jahzir Bruno) who moves in with his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) after the death of his parents. The Witches is an oddly literal adaptation, except when it’s a wild departure Despite the film’s quizzical efforts to blend them together, the two halves never cohere into something that makes much sense - or remotely justifies the strange execution. If you’re not sure these two stories go together, you’re not alone : The Witches isn’t sure either. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markĪre they in a story where a young Black boy in the post-Jim Crow South confronts racism and ethnic hatred through the thinly veiled guise of a convention of kid-ocidal witches? Or are they in a macabre, modern-ish cautionary tale, one where boys can meet monsters and be forever altered at the whimsy of a delightfully unpredictable universe?

The grand high witch roald dahl