Remembering Roald Dahl’s vicious letter to Jim Henson attacking his adaptation of ‘The Witches’
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 thrown 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.”
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 devilish. So much so, in fact, that Dahl decided to cast his opinions in the brutal medium of ink upon a mailed letter. Not content with merely condemning the film, Dahl wanted Henson to know personally that he loathed his dastardly creation—which, as it happens, was loved by millions of kids.
After purchasing the film rights, Henson set about tasking his Creature Shop with anthropomorphising children into mice. Not an easy task by anyone’s measure, thus, he hired Nicholas 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.
However, after Henson responded by saying, “I hope you will forgive us for falling short of your expectations,” and eulogised the author, Dahl begrudgingly withdrew this demand. Nevertheless, Dahl didn’t change a single frame of the feature that Dahl was shown, and his timeless effort continues to shock and enthral kids in equal measure to this day.
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.