Movies
‘The Witches’ Holds Rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is on blast this week for hiding saving the reveal of their score for Warner Bros. Justice League, which is allegedly looming around the 43% mark. It’s performing better than the likes of Suicide Squad and Batman V. Superman, yet far from the 98% that Wonder Woman holds. On the opposite spectrum is Nicolas Roeg‘s little film from 1990 called The Witches, Jim Henson‘s final film starring Angelica Huston as a witch intent on turning the world’s children into mice.
It’s a little-known fact that this children’s horror fantasy holds a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews from 33 critics with an average rating of 7.7/10. Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, calling the film “an intriguing movie, ambitious and inventive, and almost worth seeing just for Anjelica Huston’s obvious delight in playing a completely uncompromised villainess.” Even though The Witches was well received by critics and audiences alike, it performed poorly at the box office ($10M worldwide).
Ironically, the book’s author, Roald Dahl, regarded the film as “utterly appalling” because of the ending that “contrasted with the book.”
I’d also like to think this proves some sort of point about Rotten Tomatoes, although I just like living in a world where The Witches performed better than a studio’s $350M nightmare project. Ha.
Other horror films with 100% on RT include 1931’s Frankenstein and 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
You must be logged in to post a comment.