Things that go ‘bump’ in the night:Childhood Horrors in Roald Dahl’s The Witches
By Juliana Jackson
Monday 2nd November 2009
Monday 2nd November 2009
When I was a little girl, I scared easily. Admittedly, I’m still a little afraid of the dark – but that has less to do with my romantic imaginings and more to do with crime statistics.
I’m not a natural fan of horror, in any form. I’m well known for talking my way through scary movies (a means of reassuring myself of reality), and Agatha Christie gives me the chills. Harry Potter brought the adult dimension of children’s fiction into the public consciousness, so with Halloween fast approaching I turned to the books of my childhood for some good old-fashioned thrills, and found Roald Dahl at the front of the bookshelf. An unconventional choice, you may think, especially with more obviously spine chilling and murderous plots out there; however, it was Dahl’s unusual, yet believable imaginings and threat to the child as the reader that made him haunt my early years.
The Witches is famous for its depiction of those be-wigged, child murdering witches: they have remained with me through numerous re-readings and a film which was harshly evocative. Quentin Blake’s spiky illustrations danced across my dreams, giving equal ground to what seemed like images of my own concoction; dreamt up by Roald Dahl and placed in my head, it seemed to terrorise me.
Dahl himself is renowned for his descriptive talents, as much as for his sheer inventiveness, and the image of the witches’ blue spittle smeared over their teeth lingers in my memory. Indeed, the very idea of the witches corrupting the sacred temple of childhood – the sweet shop, in order to realise their evil plan was enough to convince me of the sheer horror of the tale. Later, I began to appreciate the subtler themes, seeing the novel as a certain kind of fairytale, conjured from a mixture of myth and folklore, stock characters and very much more modern and striking themes. The suggestion of paedophilia is underlined by Dahl’s reliance on the notion of the Adult as villainous: such an idea resonated in my childhood mind, as the undertones resonate in my adult’s one.
But the one thing that really chilled me when I first read the story was the idea of a child having a certain kind of smell. The suggestion that something as fundamental as a human scent, really quite indistinct to common man, could be used as a means of hunting me out like an animal with their exaggerated nostrils was what made The Witches truly horrific. The idea that I had an innate smell which no number of baths in scented soap could disguise was utterly terrifying to me: naturally, I entirely believed that witches existed in some guise and Dahl’s image was petrifying enough to be utterly convincing. (Indeed, I was in many senses convinced that my primary school headmistress bore some resemblance to the Grand High Witch, the ‘most evil woman in creation’).
With the passing years I have outgrown these childhood fears, but Dahl’s ability to conjure a scene of such realistic horror has remained with me, and despite having grown up still manages to chill me.
I’m not a natural fan of horror, in any form. I’m well known for talking my way through scary movies (a means of reassuring myself of reality), and Agatha Christie gives me the chills. Harry Potter brought the adult dimension of children’s fiction into the public consciousness, so with Halloween fast approaching I turned to the books of my childhood for some good old-fashioned thrills, and found Roald Dahl at the front of the bookshelf. An unconventional choice, you may think, especially with more obviously spine chilling and murderous plots out there; however, it was Dahl’s unusual, yet believable imaginings and threat to the child as the reader that made him haunt my early years.
The Witches is famous for its depiction of those be-wigged, child murdering witches: they have remained with me through numerous re-readings and a film which was harshly evocative. Quentin Blake’s spiky illustrations danced across my dreams, giving equal ground to what seemed like images of my own concoction; dreamt up by Roald Dahl and placed in my head, it seemed to terrorise me.
Dahl himself is renowned for his descriptive talents, as much as for his sheer inventiveness, and the image of the witches’ blue spittle smeared over their teeth lingers in my memory. Indeed, the very idea of the witches corrupting the sacred temple of childhood – the sweet shop, in order to realise their evil plan was enough to convince me of the sheer horror of the tale. Later, I began to appreciate the subtler themes, seeing the novel as a certain kind of fairytale, conjured from a mixture of myth and folklore, stock characters and very much more modern and striking themes. The suggestion of paedophilia is underlined by Dahl’s reliance on the notion of the Adult as villainous: such an idea resonated in my childhood mind, as the undertones resonate in my adult’s one.
But the one thing that really chilled me when I first read the story was the idea of a child having a certain kind of smell. The suggestion that something as fundamental as a human scent, really quite indistinct to common man, could be used as a means of hunting me out like an animal with their exaggerated nostrils was what made The Witches truly horrific. The idea that I had an innate smell which no number of baths in scented soap could disguise was utterly terrifying to me: naturally, I entirely believed that witches existed in some guise and Dahl’s image was petrifying enough to be utterly convincing. (Indeed, I was in many senses convinced that my primary school headmistress bore some resemblance to the Grand High Witch, the ‘most evil woman in creation’).
With the passing years I have outgrown these childhood fears, but Dahl’s ability to conjure a scene of such realistic horror has remained with me, and despite having grown up still manages to chill me.