Everything we know about the new version of The Witches

Recently, HBO announced that its remake of the now classic The Witches would skip its theatrical premiere. Due to the Coronavirus crisis, this is the model that many production companies have adopted: premiere their films on streaming services. So Warner Bros. has decided to release its new feature film on October 22 through this streaming platform. With this, comes a new version of a classic from literature, and already from cinema, just in time to see on Halloween. Here we tell you everything you need to know.

The multiple The Witches

It is the classic of literature imagined by Roald Dahl. The novel, published in 1983, tells the adventures of a little boy and his grandmother, who try to fight the witch societies that live in each country and who hate the children who have organized to exterminate them. This new classic of children's and youth literature was published in the United Kingdom (where the plot takes place) with illustrations by Quetin Blake. Dahl is one of the authors most loved by children and his books have already been made into several film adaptations.

Roald Dahl died in 1990 and in that year the first film version of this children's novel was released. Warner Bros. was also the one in charge of distributing it. In this feature film its Angelica Huston, Morticia Adams herself, who plays the leading witch, whose main mission is to exterminate the children. The film, because it belongs to the family horror genre, changed the end of the story for a happier one. Quickly this first adaptation was successful and managed to be scary and fun.

Other adaptations of Roald Dahl's novel were released: one in 2008 in the form of a radio drama broadcast by BBC in two chapters of the dramatized story; another in the same year in the form of an opera adapted by the Norwegian composer Marcus Paus.

Also read: October special: the best witch movies

All about the new version

This time it will be again Warner Bros who distributes this new version and it can be seen on HBO MAX from October 22. Here the story is reimagined by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) and Guillermo del toro (Pan's Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) and Kenya Barris (Black-ish) also collaborated in its writing. This new film features Anne Hathaway as the lead witch, Octavia Spencer as the boy's grandmother, and the fabulous Stanley Tucci, who will play a seemingly minor but crucially influential role in the story.

In this new version, the boy and his grandmother are African American and the witches are foreign. The child, in addition to being an orphan, is usually a sad child. We will see how he and his grandmother fight against this organized society of child-hating witches that tries to turn them all into mice and thus exterminate them in one go. The film will be seen in the characteristic style of Zemeckis, who likes a colorful visual proposal with many contrasts between light and dark. The witches we see may not be as grotesque as the ones in the 1990 version, but they may be scarier in other ways. We can't wait to see it.