She also previews the visual facts of witches-gloves to cover their claws, talons instead of feet, a smile that stretches so far that it turns demonic-that Zemeckis then unloads with typically impressive visual acumen. She believes him, and goes into further detail about the history of witches, revealing that her childhood friend was turned into a chicken by one of them years earlier-the image of a scared child literally becoming a giant bird for the rest of her life is the first one here that could have your kids waking you up in the middle of the night. That action doesn’t really get going until Agatha learns that Charlie saw a witch. It’s sadly underdeveloped as an interesting theme to unpack, but the fact that Charlie and Agatha stand out in the action that later unfolds at a high-priced hotel makes them feel like underdogs in a different way. A major change from the source material here is not only transferring the action across the pond to Alabama in the late 1960s but adding a subtext of Southern race relations in that era. Their purpose is to literally destroy as many kids as possible, and our narrator knows this because he had a personal encounter with the Grand High Witch herself, and he’s going to tell you about it.įlashback to our hero Charlie ( Jahzir Bruno) as a boy, orphaned by a car accident and sent to live with his grandma Agatha ( Octavia Spencer). They actually do prowl the shadows of this world, and they hate nothing more than children. Some of the writing gets a bit clunky, the ending is pretty horrible, and there’s a performance at the center that kind of sucks in everything around it like a black hole, but most of that won’t matter to viewers of “The Witches”: They’ll be too scared to care.Ĭhris Rock narrates “The Witches,” introducing viewers to the basic foundational truth of the story that follows: “Witches are REAL!” He explains how all those other stories of monsters and legends are nonsense. To its credit, it has some of the most unapologetically scary imagery in family entertainment in a long time, reminding one of its source material and, at its best, of Zemeckis’ work with twisted visions like "Death Becomes Her" and even the darker edge of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?". A victim of the pandemic, this once-theatrical blockbuster is now landing on HBO Max today, just in time to terrify children into staying up all night on Halloween. That project fell apart but del Toro’s love of challenging scares remains in the 2020 version of “ The Witches,” as he co-produced and co-wrote (with Kenya Barris and the director) this version, now directed by a very different technical master, Robert Zemeckis. Years ago, del Toro started working on a stop-motion film of Dahl’s The Witches, already adapted once in 1990 by Nicholas Roeg. The same could be said for Guillermo del Toro, a craftsman who does not believe in holding your hand, no matter how old you are, and understands the sheer power of fantasy. Roald Dahl did not believe in babying children, often forming images in their heads that pushed from childish vision to surreal terror.