The Witches
One of my favourite podcasts, Too Scary; Didn’t Watch recently discussed this 1990 “kiddie horror” film. It’s one of those movies that I had taped on VHS from a TV broadcast, and I have certain scenes burned into my memory because I rewatched it so much. I haven’t really thought about the movie in a long time, but as soon as I listened the TS;DW episode, everything came rushing back.
To me, the centrepiece of the movie is when Anjelica Huston’s Grand High Witch character gives a seminar to a conference room full of other witches. In the film’s lore, witches appear to be regular women, but it’s just a disguise—when their masks and wigs and gloves come off, they’re hideous monsters, especially the Grand High Witch. The make-up effects (by Jim Henson’s workshop) are delightfully gross.
During this seminar scene, the Grand High Witch announces her plan to rid the world of children by disseminating a magic potion with a transformation effect. The way she says the line “The child is no longer a child… the child is a mouse!” has stuck in my head for 30 years.
Watching it as an adult, I was noticing the somewhat cheap production value of the film, which looks kind of like a TV movie1. It’s also oddly paced, with a first act that involves the main characters moving between locations twice, with no real story function, before the main plot kicks in. These are not flaws I would have perceived as a kid, and mostly, I spent my rewatch with a big smile on my face.
Footnotes
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I realize that criticizing a movie for “looking like TV” doesn’t mean much anymore as digital cinematography has levelled the playing field between cinema and television. But back then, the disparity was much more obvious. ↩