Nightmare Fuel / The Witches

The novel

There are times when something is so frightful you become mesmerised by it and can't look away. I was like that now. I was transfixed. I was numbed. I was magnetised by the sheer horror of this woman's features. But there was more to it than that. There was a look of serpents in those eyes of hers as they flashed around the audience.

• The Grand High Witch's appearance is horrifying. The Boy goes into great detail about the Witch's horrifying visage, which he recalls made him "nearly scream out loud".
  It was so crumpled and wizened, so shrunken and shrivelled, it looked as though it had been pickled in vinegar. It was a fearsome and ghastly sight. There was something terribly wrong with it, something foul and putrid and decayed. It seemed quite literally to be rotting away at the edges, and in the middle of the face, around the mouth and cheeks, I could see the skin all cankered and worm-eaten, as though maggots were working away in there.
• The book invites the young readers or listeners to consider that their female teacher — who could be reading the book to them — might be a Witch. It also points out that nice ladies are more likely than nasty ones to be Witches, because they depend on deceit.
• The various anecdotes about how children are disposed of by the other witches, such as trapping them inside oil paintings or transforming them. One boy turned into marble and his family used him as an umbrella stand, another boy turned into a porpoise after jumping into a river and one girl turned into a hen that laid brown eggs.
  • One of them simply tells of a little girl who walks off with a smiling lady and is never seen again.
• Dahl's witches' appearance: they are magical female creatures with no hair, no toes, claws for fingernails, flaring nostrils, eyes that look as though fire and ice are dancing in them and blue spit which they use for ink. They hide their claws by wearing gloves. They hide their baldness by wearing wigs which, given their rough underside, causes a very uncomfortable rash. And they have to hide their toeless feet by wearing either plain, sensible shoes or pointed, pretty shoes, the latter of which is very uncomfortable since they have to squeeze their feet into them. Their big nostrils help them sniff out a child. A child, to a witch, smells like fresh dog's droppings, which is why they hate children. The dirtier a child, the less a witch smells a child.
• The young narrator asks if his Grandmother has herself ever met a witch.
  Grandmother: Once. Only once.
  Narrator: What happened?
  Grandmother: I'm not going to tell you. It would frighten you out of your skin and give you bad dreams.
  Narrator: Please tell me.
  Grandmother: No. Certain things are too horrible to talk about.
  Narrator: Does it have something to do with your missing thumb?
• The protagonist, while building his treehouse, suddenly sees a witch down below who tries to offer him a live snake as a present. He climbs as high as he can into the tree and stays there for hours until he's sure the witch is gone.
• The protagonist tries to find a private room in the hotel where he can practice his mouse-training, and accidentally ends up in the room reserved for all the witches of England to have their annual meeting in!
  • One bit of nightmare fuel that has nothing to do with the witches: when the protagonist sees all the witches (who he doesn't yet know are witches) scratching at their scalps because of their itchy wigs, he wonders if it's nits. He remembers a boy named Ashton at his school who had nits and the matron made him dip his entire head in turpentine. Half the skin peeled away from his scalp.
• The Grand High's Witch's plan to murder all the children in England: transform them all into mice and expect all the adults to kill their own children. The protagonist's grandmother outright refers to them as demons, and it's not hard to see why.
• How does the Grand High Witch deal with witches who express doubt about her plan? Incinerating them alive.
  • The little poem she recites just before doing so, delivered to delightfully chilling effect by Anjelica Huston in the film:
    Witch: We can't possibly wipe out all of [the children in England]...
    Grand High Witch: ... Who spoke?
    (A hush falls upon the crowd)
    Grand High Witch: WHO DARES TO ARGUE WITH ME!? (notices the witch in question) IT WAS YOU!?
    Witch: (terrified) I didn't mean to argue, your grandness...
    Grand High Witch: YOU DARE TO ARGUE WITH ME!?
    Witch: No, honestly! I-It just was a—
    Grand High Witch: A stupid witch who answers back, must BURN UNTIL HER BONES ARE BLACK!
    Witch: No! No!
    Grand High Witch: A foolish witch without a brain, must sizzle in the fiery flame! (the witches sitting next to the unfortunate arguer start running out of the way) An idiotic witch like you, must roast upon the barbecue! A witch who dares to say I'm wrong, will not be with us... VERY LONG!
    (unleashes horrible Eye Beams at the unfortunate witch, who proceeds to scream in terrified agony as she's incinerated by the flames)
  • According to the Grandmother, the Grand High Witch does this at every meeting just to keep the other witches in their place.
• When the protagonist is caught by the witches. Throughout the scene, he managed to stay hidden and the reader is lured into a feeling of security that he might just get away. Then, suddenly, one witch catches a whiff of him and the rest of the group turns the room upside-down until they catch him. From there, you know it's just a matter of time until something horrible is done to the poor kid.
• The protagonist's transformation. Since the book was written in first person, we get to hear firsthand what it feels like to turn into a mouse. It's not pretty.
• Dahl mentions offhandedly that American witches have been known to transmogrify children into hot dogs and feed them to unsuspecting parents. It was more of a Take That! to hot dogs, though.
• The idea that a witch can smell a child more easily if he/she/they have had a bath. Way to make children terrified of baths, Dahl!

The graphic novel

• In the graphic novel adaptation by Penelope Bagieu, the Grand High Witch's true face resembles a purple goblin with a hideously deformed mouth, but that manages to be less creepy than her disguise. While all the other characters - witches included - look organic enough, the Grand High Witch's mask looks doll-like in the worst way. And then there's the drawings of her tearing the mask off in a way that looks like it's causing her pain.

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