On demand: "The Witches"

The family sector had grown so unignorably vast by the end of the 1980s that even Nicolas Roeg - the visionary behind the altogether adult Don't Look Now, Bad Timing, Eureka and Insignificance - was tempted by the offer of a fat Warner Bros. payday. 1990's The Witches, from more or less the same moment as Tim Burton's Batman, at least saw its maker drawn towards a darker hued bedtime story in the form of the Roald Dahl perennial about a global network of witches working overtime to kill children. The adaptation was by Don't Look Now scribe Allan Scott; the results were not exactly A Minecraft Movie. Roeg, for one, took the opportunity to lean back into the Gothic, much as he had in his early days as a cinematographer on Roger Corman's Poe films. After a prologue of ominous warnings passed on by kindly grandma Mia Zetterling to her now American grandson Luke (Jasen Fisher, so expressive Spielberg pinched him for his subsequent Hook), everybody decamps to the Hotel Excelsior, a seafront art deco hostelry run by Rowan Atkinson's hapless manager Mr. Stringer; there, granny and Luke's fellow travellers include the patrons of a conference staged by the so-called Royal Society for the Protection of Children, where keynote speaker Anjelica Huston proposes the mass extermination of all kiddiwinks in a thick Germanic accent. The ambience is not unlike that of any Tory party conference of the 1980s - Mrs. T would have found herself right at home amid the curling cucumber sandwiches - but you can tell this was a production with American money to spend from its disproportionately spacious idea of coastal British hotel rooms.

For a while, you could be forgiven for thinking Roeg has simply bedded down in these environs to gaze, with much the same mix of awe and fear displayed by young Luke, upon large groups of witchy and bewitching women. Huston wafts into shot, peers disdainfully at the British character actors wibbling and bibbling several feet beneath her (primetime favourites one and all: Atkinson, Bill Paterson, Brenda Blethyn, Jane Horrocks, Jim Carter) and clinches the Morticia gig in the following year's The Addams Family, if she hadn't already. (She also, in passing, peels off her own scalp with a flourish, a sequence pushing at the upper limits of the PG certificate.) As Dahl's byzantine narrative unfolds, however, one starts to wonder whether Roeg the visionary was drawn this way by the prospect of a hero who spends much of the film transformed into a talking mouse, and whether The Witches had any influence on another visionary, George Miller, determining to adapt Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig as Babe a few years later. Though initially a little clunky and rough-hewn in comparison with the matinee delights that followed it, this Witches soon starts to beguile: anecdotal evidence would suggest kids everywhere continue to thrill to the mouse (and mouse-eye) photography, while accompanying adults can savour Roeg's slyer allusions to the idea this hotel isn't as above board as it first seems, not least Stanley Myers' score, with its pronounced echoes of The Shining. Remade - or, rather, retold - by Robert Zemeckis, an Eighties graduate with no particular flair for the Gothic, in 2020; I haven't seen the official statistics, but I should imagine its predecessor scared an entire generation out of accepting sweets from strangers.

The Witches is currently streaming via HBO Max and NOW, available to rent via Prime Video, and on DVD via Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.