Like all witches, she hates children and is on a never-ending mission to turn them into mice, using a secret potion which she can put into these kids’ beloved chocolate.
She has freaky Joker-style scars at the corners of her mouth that open out at moments of stress into CGI-style horror.
She is played by Anne Hathaway, doing a comedy accent that at first sounds eastern European or Russian but later becomes more obviously Scandinavian or Norwegian, closer to the story’s origins. But it is at this very place that all the witches are going to convene, disguised as grand society ladies hosting a charity event for the prevention of cruelty to children, led by the awful Grand High Witch. This turns out to be a very fancy seaside hotel with an oleaginous manager, Mr Stringer, played by Stanley Tucci. But while they are out grocery shopping one day, a creepy green-clad witch ( Josette Simon) sidles up to Charlie with a proffered sweet in the quasi-paedophile manner that signals witchy horror, and the grandma realises that with witches about, they must remove themselves to a place of safety. His grandma, played with an easy charm by Octavia Spencer that rescues the film a bit, now has to look after him, and she takes the boy to her house in Atlanta. We are now in late-60s America, and a little kid called Charlie (played by Jahzir Bruno) is orphaned when his mum and dad are killed in a car crash: he was wearing his seat belt and they weren’t – although evidently that lesson is unlearned, judging by a car journey later in the action. (The boldest reimagining of Dahl was surely Wes Anderson’s animated version of Fantastic Mr Fox.) Apart from a few shifts in period and location, and narrative tweaks bringing it slightly closer to the book than Roeg, it’s a pretty conventional adaptation.
Now Zemeckis has collaborated with Guillermo Del Toro and Kenya Barris on the screenplay for another version, absorbing some of the earlier film, although why exactly this process has to have the grand label of “reimagining” isn’t clear. W ho did Roald Dahl hate more: grownups or children? Kingsley Amis says that Dahl once told him to try writing for children and when Amis said his heart wouldn’t be in it, Dahl replied: “Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it.” The issue of Dahl’s attitude towards his readership is revived once again with director Robert Zemeckis’s “reimagining” of Dahl’s story The Witches, first published in 1983 and filmed by Nicolas Roeg in 1990 with Anjelica Huston as the incognito Grand High Witch who convenes a sinister children’s charity event in a hotel ballroom.
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