Witches as Uncanny

For my final paper, I chose to write about representations of witches in film.  During my research, I found that many representations were more uncanny than outright monstrous.  Witches were never totally inhuman creatures--they were slightly tweaked women, akin to Medusa with her snake-hair.

In The Witches, the adaptation of the Roald Dahl book, the titular witches roam among non-magic humans inconspicuously except for one tiny note: they have bright purple eyes.  In an early scene, the protagonist, a young boy, is up in a tree, and a woman tries to lure him down with candy.  She almost succeeds--she looks proper, clean, and beautiful--until the boy notices her purple eyes, which he has been taught to look out for.  The eyes are so bright and radiant that, despite being a pleasant color, create an aura of uncanniness around an otherwise ordinary, pretty woman.

Without their "pretty lady" disguises, the witches are terrifying creatures, with exaggeratedly ugly features: huge hooked noses, wrinkles, hunched backs, wisps of gray hair on otherwise bald heads...the list goes on.  These witches are disgusting, and the way the ugliness draws upon actual human features makes it all the more effective.

I found, though, that I almost thought the witches in beautiful disguises to be more frightening, for their creepy uncanniness, all focused into their bright purple eyes.  These witches were the sneakiest, the most likely to convince you that they were good, and the most able to blend into society.  The ugly, witches, with their true visages, were by all means scary, but almost too monstrous to seem realistic, despite drawing on the human face as a model.

Such uncanniness reminds me of movies like Chucky, which poses a toy as the horrific villain partly through changes to its image, and any movie with vampires, in which just pale skin and pointy teeth are uncanny and unsettling enough to spark fear.