Robert Zemeckis will remake fantasy film “The Witches”

A new film adaptation for Roald Dahl’s children’s dark fantasy novel The Witches has been rumored on the offices of Hollywood for a while. Since 2008, Guillermo del Toro has been expressing his interest in directing a stop-motion version of the story, together with his fellow Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, but, you know, Del Toro wants to pretty much do everything and at the end not all his projects have the time or budget to become a reality.

At least, now the new adaptation for The Witches seem to be able to see the light soon, regarding THR, because Warner Bros. has greenlit the project and chosen Robert Zemeckis to be in charge of the movie. Information says Zemeckis will also write the script together with his frequent collaborator Jack Rapke, and Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón remain as executive producers.

Published in 1983, the story of The Witches is set partly in Norway and partly in the United Kingdom, and features the experiences of a young British boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world where child-hating evil witches secretly exist. The recently orphan boy loves all the stories, but he is especially enthralled by the one about witches, which grandma she says are horrific creatures who seek to kill human children. She tells the boy that she knows of five children who were cursed by witches and tells him how to recognize them. She also tells about “witchophiles“, who hunt witches, which she is retired from, telling of an encounter with a witch which cost the grandmother her left thumb and which is so horrible she cannot bear to speak of it. While witches can look and act like human women, they are actually demons in human shape.

The story already had a first film adaptation, The Witches (1990), directed by Nicolas Roeg, better known for horror classic Don’t Look Now (1973), and starred by Anjelica Huston, Mai Zetterling, Jasen Fisher and Rowan Atkinson. The original novel author Roald Dahl publicly expressed his disconformity with the resulting movie, which was released the year he passed away. The happy ending of the adaptation didn’t appeal very much to Dahl. Now, Robert Zemeckis, take good note of that. Although having in consideration his work, with titles like Romancing the Stone (1984), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992) or the Back to the Future trilogy, no one is going to expect Zemeckis to sign a very dark and bitter-ending children story, right? And even less nowadays…