The witches, when unleashed, are terrifying, too, with Joker-esque smiles full of sharp teeth, and arms that stretch endlessly towards their prey in a manner that suggests the bones inside are breaking and re-growing.īut those spine-tingling moments don’t come often enough, and the other traits used to identify witches feel insensitive at best. (It’s the same effect that made The Polar Express unsettling, rather than comforting.) When people transform between human and animal shapes, the intermediary stages are truly frightening. The digital transformations in the new film take advantage of the eerie uncanny-valley effect that re-creating a human in CGI can have. For a few blissfully terrifying scenes, Zemeckis’ version achieves a similar level of ghoulishness. Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation of Dahl’s work made the story terrifying through incredible practical effects, with Anjelica Huston’s version of the Grand High Witch peeling her skin off her own head.
Even the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway) is in attendance, with a brand new plot to wipe all children out of existence by turning them into mice. When Charlie encounters a witch (Josette Simon), Agatha panics and whisks them away to a fancy hotel - only to discover that the hotel is hosting an entire conference of witches. Young Charlie (Jazhir Bruno) goes to live with his grandmother Agatha (Octavia Spencer) after his parents die in a car accident. In a change from the original book, which takes place in England, Zemeckis’ adaptation, which he co-wrote with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro, is set in 1960s Alabama. That makes it all the more disappointing that his latest movie, a new adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s novel The Witches, is almost boring. These films are full of strange, not necessarily successful, but certainly memorable choices. Between more staid films like Allied and The Walk, Zemeckis’ obsession with pushing technology to its limit, as in his 1988 masterpiece Who Framed Roger Rabbit, has resulted in oddities like Beowulf, The Polar Express, and Welcome to Marwen. Director Robert Zemeckis has always had a reputation as a bit of a gonzo tech wonk.
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