“Appalled”: The adaptation Roald Dahl despised
Roald Dahl once wrote that “having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.” When it comes to Jim Henson’s adaptation of The Witches, he seemed to think that The Muppets creator had turned his throne atop the children’s entertainment world into a tyrannical rule of “terror” like a bastard king of old.
Dahl’s 1983 children’s novel of the same name comes with the following quirky synopsis: “This is a story about real witches. Real witches dress in ordinary clothes, have ordinary jobs and look very much like ordinary people. But they are far from ordinary… The Grand High Witch, leader of all the witches, has a plan to make each and every child disappear. That is, unless one boy and his grandmother can stop her.” And yet, he wondered how someone could’ve possibly made that seem sinister?
With lines like, “One child a week is fifty-two a year. Squish them and squiggle them and make them disappear”, you would have thought the author wasn’t averse to a bit of darkness, but in his view, Henson was a little bit too devilish inn his delighting picture. So much so that Dahl decided to state his opinions in the brutal medium of ink and mail the creator a grisly letter.
Not content with merely condemning the film, Dahl wanted Henson to know personally that he loathed his dastardly creation. He wanted the puppeteer to feel his wrath and come to an awareness that he had changed his view on how he wanted his copyrighted work to be handled. It mattered not that, as it happens, millions of kids actually loved Henson’s adaptation.
After purchasing the film rights, Henson set about tasking his Creature Shop production team with anthropomorphising children into mice. Not an easy task by anyone’s measure, thus, he hired Nicolas Roeg to helm the picture as director. Both men enjoyed a touch of the macabre so the film, starring Anjelica Huston, followed suit. Using Dutch Tilts and other techniques from horror cinema, Roeg ensured that the feature would give children the occasional shudder.
Dahl saw the production before it was released and quickly moved to condemn it. He said he was “appalled”, and his letter decreed the “vulgarity, the bad taste and the actual terror displayed”. Dahl demanded that his name be removed from the film and that the title of the picture be changed in order to distance himself further from it.
He apparently even threatened to front a boycott of the forthcoming motion picture. Meanwhile, film executives also penned letters questioning why the ending had been tweaked, a point that Dahl was barely calm enough to notice, having been scared out of his wits for a couple of hours.
However, after Henson responded by saying, “I hope you will forgive us for falling short of your expectations,” and proceeded to showcase his admiration for the esteemed author, Dahl begrudgingly withdrew this demand—but stuck by his position that what he had seen had appalled him.
Nevertheless, Dahl didn’t forcibly change a single frame of the feature that he was shown, and Henson and Roeg’s timeless effort continues to shock and enthral kids in equal measure to this day. This agency over creation and Dahl’s lack of interference with something he disagreed with raises a pertinent point in an era where talk of editing the troublesome elements of his books is continually touted. As the viewing masses soon agreed, it was for the best that the movie remained unedited. The vulgarity was a hit. Sadly, Henson died two weeks before the film was released. But he was buoyed by the high praise that critics gave it despite battling a rare form of severe pneumonia in his final days. The cult status of the macabre now seems like a fitting send-off for the man who subverted the usual standards of children’s humour and the author who inspired him along the way.
