Kritiken

Deliriously upsetting and violent, with Anjelica Huston’s frightening performance at its center. . . . This is what a Nicolas Roeg movie “made for kids” looks like.

His instincts were right. The Witches contains gruesome images, but it's the way Roeg presents them that makes it a genuine horror film. While most children's films restrict their visual language to familiar stable camera shots, Roeg uses a combination of classic cinematic horror techniques—handheld camera, POV shots, extreme close-ups, and low angles and Dutch tilts—to create an atmosphere of chaos and terror.

Aside from its misbegotten coda, The Witches beautifully captures the surreal grotesqueness of Roald Dahl's 1983 children's book. The violence, menace, and food-related nastiness of Dahl's tome are brought to the screen in all their horrific glory by director Nicholas Roeg, whose preponderance of cockeyed camera angles and extreme close-ups lend a fittingly bizarre quality to the fantastical tale.