'The Witches' on HBO Max: Why was Roald Dahl's fantasy novel banned? Here's how the movie is true to the book
A children's dark fantasy novel, did you know ‘The Witches’ — an HBO Max movie starring Anne Hathaway and Octavia Spencer — was first penned by Roald Dahl? Set partly in Norway and partly in the United Kingdom, the original story revolved around a young British boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world filled with secret child-hating societies of witches.
In the book, the seven-year-old boy goes to live with his grandma after the death of his parents and gets swayed into her bedtime tales, especially about the witches. Originally published in 1983 by Jonathan Cape in London, the book featured illustrations by Quentin Blake. Later, it was adapted into an unabridged audio reading by Lynn Redgrave, a stage play and a two-part radio dramatization for BBC. As per the boy's grandma, a real witch looks exactly like an ordinary woman but there are a few signs that can reveal her true identity.
Real witches hide their claws by wearing gloves, they wear wigs to hide their bald head, have square feet with no toes which they hide by wearing uncomfortable pointy shoes, their pupils change colors, they sniff children with their large nostrils and say that a child smells of fresh dog poop. A fascinating fable, indeed.
As peculiar as it may seem, the book was banned in those days by some libraries. The reason? Critics deemed it misogynistic and sexist and the book soon made to number 22 on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990 to 1999. "I do not wish to speak badly about women," the author wrote. "Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women. There is no such thing as a male witch. On the other hand, a ghoul is always a male... both are dangerous. But neither of them is half as dangerous as a REAL WITCH."
In his seventies, Dahl told an interviewer, "There's one group of spiders where the female is so fierce that the male has to weave a web around her and wrap her up and handcuff her before he can mate her — which is wonderful, I think. You could apply that to some females of the human species."
Back in 2017, author Will Self pointed out in a Guardian article: "The misogyny that haunts Dahl's adult writing is also short-circuited in his sexless children's fiction.” Not just that, in an article titled 'Angry Man', Alex Carnevale wrote: “Despite changes to tone down that aspect of the final manuscript, feminists saw ‘The Witches’ as a complete disaster. Catherine Itzin reported that the book is an example of ‘how boys learn to become men who hate women’.”
Now, how different is the book from the film? In the book, the narrator is a young unnamed boy and Bruno Jenkins appears later when the witch tricks him into eating a chocolate bar laced with Formula 86, which turns children into mice. In the movie, the main character is named Charlie Hansen. The boy first spots a witch while working on the roof of his tree-house, but in the movie, he spots her at a shop.
In the book, the boy and his grandma go to the luxury hotel as she becomes ill with pneumonia and they have to cancel a planned holiday in Norway. In the movie, the grandma takes him to the hotel saying they might face the witches' threat if they stayed back at home.
The highlight of the movie is that it ends the same way as the book. In the end, the boy remains a mouse and says he will probably only live about another nine years. Back in 1990, when the book was adapted into a film starring Anjelica Huston and Rowan Atkinson, the boy was restored into human form and Dahl then remarked that the film was “utterly appalling".
‘The Witches’ premieres on HBO Max this October 22, 2020.
