Return to Oz
Dir. Walter Murch
I never really likedThe Wizard of Oz. Yeah, it’s a classic. Yeah, it’s iconic. But something about it—the grating music, the overly saccharine tone, the artificiality of it all—never really sat right with me. Sure, it had dark moments (the Flying Monkeys, the Wicked Witch’s terrifying cackle), but those were outliers in an otherwise treacly Technicolor musical.
Then I saw Return to Oz. This was my kind of Oz.
Released in 1985, Return to Oz was not the lavish, sing-songy spectacle that people expected from a follow-up to MGM’s 1939 classic. In fact, it wasn’t even a sequel to that movie at all—it was a far more faithful adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, particularly The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz. Gone were the musical numbers, the warm-and-fuzzy sentimentality, and the dreamlike ambiguity of Dorothy’s adventure. Instead, director Walter Murch (yes, the legendary film editor and sound designer behind Apocalypse Now and The English Patient) gave us something darker, stranger, and far more haunting.
This was Oz by way of a fever dream.
For most cinephiles, Walter Murch is the name in film editing and sound design. He helped revolutionize modern film sound with Apocalypse Now (1979), where he literally invented the concept of 5.1 surround sound. He shaped The Godfather trilogy in the editing bay. He won Oscars for The English Patient and was nominated for Cold Mountain and Julia. But somehow, Return to Oz became his only directing credit.
And it almost didn’t happen.
During production, Disney executives were reportedly so unhappy with the dailies that they fired Murch—only to rehire him a week later after some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, vouched for him. That alone should tell you Return to Oz wasn’t your typical Disney film.
The film looks unlike anything Disney has ever done. Shot by David Watkin, an Oscar-winning cinematographer best known for Chariots of Fire (1981) and Out of Africa (1985), Return to Oz bathes its world in moody, painterly lighting. Instead of the candy-colored hues of MGM’s Oz, we get misty, overcast skies and eerie, desaturated landscapes. Emerald City isn’t glowing—it’s a ruined ghost town. The whole film has this sense of vast emptiness, reinforcing how alone Dorothy is.
And then there’s the stop-motion animation.
Created by Will Vinton Studios (the same team behind The California Raisins and The PJs), the Claymation effects in Return to Oz are as fascinating as they are unsettling. The Gnome King, played by Nicol Williamson, is a terrifying marvel of shifting rock textures and uncanny expressions. His transformation from a looming, menacing figure into a grotesque, screaming giant near the end of the film is one of the most impressively animated sequences of the 1980s.
Then, of course, we have The Wheelers.
Every kid who saw this movie remembers The Wheelers.
These gangly, shrieking creatures—who roll around Oz on all fours, with wheels instead of hands and feet—are pure nightmare material. They don’t walk, they glide in a disturbingly unnatural way, cackling like demented hyenas. Their faces are painted onto their helmets, so when they tilt their heads back, they reveal a completely blank human face. It’s the kind of deeply weird, uncanny imagery that worms its way into your brain and never leaves.
The Wheelers are not campy. They’re not played for laughs. They are predators, and for a kid watching this, that realization is bone-chilling.
And if The Wheelers didn’t permanently mess you up, Mombi surely did.
Played by Jean Marsh (Doctor Who, Willow), Mombi is a head-swapping sorceress who keeps a gallery of different heads in glass cases. When Dorothy stumbles into her chamber of horrors, the heads wake up and start screaming. The sequence is shot like something straight out of The Exorcist, and it’s genuinely one of the most frightening moments in Disney history.
Mombi isn’t just a generic wicked witch—she’s cold, detached, and disturbingly casual about her collection of severed-but-still-living heads. She even tries to steal Dorothy’s head when she gets older. For a villain, that’s next-level creepy.
Despite all the terror, Return to Oz isn’t just dark for darkness’ sake. It’s a story about trauma and resilience. The film opens with Dorothy (a young Fairuza Balk) being sent to a psychiatric hospital because she cannot sleep and won’t stop talking about Oz. That’s right—Dorothy is an insomniac and her family thinks she’s mentally ill, and their solution is electroshock therapy.
It’s a shockingly bleak premise for a kids’ movie. But it sets the stage for what makes Return to Oz so compelling: Dorothy isn’t just escaping to a magical world—she’s fighting for her sanity.
Unlike the passive, sing-songy Dorothy of 1939, Balk’s Dorothy is proactive, resourceful, and unshakable. She builds her own companions (Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, The Gump), she outsmarts the villains, and she ultimately saves herself.
That said, the climax is a bit underwhelming—defeating the Gnome King by guessing which random objects used to be people isn’t exactly riveting. But honestly, the rest of the movie is so strong that it barely matters.
Return to Oz flopped hard when it came out, largely because audiences expected something lighter, more musical, and more like The Wizard of Oz. But over time, it has developed a dedicated cult following, and rightfully so. It’s bold. It’s weird. It’s a fantasy film that doesn’t condescend to kids.
It’s not perfect, but damn, it’s fascinating. And unlike MGM’s saccharine classic, this Oz feels dangerous, mysterious, and truly magical.
Disney may have tried to bury Return to Oz, but for those of us who actually saw it? We never forgot.
Bottom Five Childhood Movie Traumas
The Dark Crystal (1982)
Dir. Jim Henson and Frank Oz
Creature Design by Brian Fround
There are a ton of moments throughout this Jim Henson dark adventure fantasy flick that probably had the children of Generation X stressed. I mean, at one point they take the cutest creatures in the flick – the gentle, adorable Podlings who resemble turtles without shells – and drain the life force until they’re shriveled husks with white eyes. So yeah, they were not messing around with this one. And if that’s not enough, let’s just mention Augra, the centuries-old woman with a removable eyeball.
But one moment stands out for me more than any other. And maybe it’s not the same for everyone, but oh, how it still unnerves me.
The story is about a fantasy world filled with wild creatures that’s been split in two. And, as always, there’s a single hope to restore order: a boyish creature named Jen that’s the last of his line. Raised by the benevolent, gentle mystics, Jen is feared by the creatures in power, the malevolent, greedy and horrifying-looking Skekses, who have lost their Emperor at the start of the film and now have a battle for the throne.
When The Chamberlain has his finery violently removed by the rest of the Skekses after he loses the “Trial by Stone”to the General, I think I went into a kind of frozen shock. I’m sure many have noted what an emotive, versatile voice performer Frank Oz is – considering how many beloved characters he brought to life including Miss Piggy, Grover and Yoda – but here he REALLY went for broke, shrieking and whining with nails-on-chalkboard-level dissonance. The Chamberlain sounds like he is being torn to pieces, when really it’s just his clothes being ripped away, as well as any shred of dignity he may have had left. When he is revealed after the attack, the site is like that of a vulture plucked of all its feathers, shivering in its nakedness. I simply wasn’t ready for THAT.
The Black Hole (1979)
Dir. Gary Nelson
Ask my mother what my favorite movie was when I was a kid, and without hesitation she will answer “The Black Hole.” Long maligned as a nonsensical space opera that was produced by Disney on the heels of the success of Star Wars, “The Black Hole” was a brooding, uneven mess of a film with a wildly uneven tone that vacillated between earnest science-fiction, gothic mystery and cheeky kiddo fantasy with cutesy robots. Yet there was one big-bad henchman in the movie, and when he was finally given an opportunity to show what a true threat he was, he delivered. In the film, a small crew of space explorers stumble upon a ship thought lost many years prior that’s sitting at the edge of a giant black hole. At first they believe the ship is derelict, but soon they discover the crew – and the ships narcissistic captain, Dr. Reinhart – are alive, along with a host of robot soldiers and Maximillian, a flying, giant, red second-in-command that looks exactly like what you’d imagine if I said to you “crimson robot demon,” only this thing has interchangeable arms that include a laser blaster and what looks like a spinning blender blade.
One of the more naive passengers on the visiting spacecraft is Alex, played by Anthony Perkins. He’s fascinated by Reinhart’s mission to go in and through the Black Hole. But when Reinhart starts threatening other members of Alex’s crew, he stands up to Reinhart, and incurs the wrath of Maximillian who swoops down with his spinning blades. Alex holds up a huge book of important scientific notes to defend himself and Maximillian shred through it and then – though it’s out of frame – digs into Alex’s torso. There’s no blood, but Perkins sells the pain and brutality of his character’s death and let me tell you, it had me both fascinated and horrified as a kid. I would have to hide my eyes from the scene, which in retrospect probably made it all the worse!
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
dir. Jack Clayton
I’m convinced that anyone who claims Something Wicked This Way Comes is a children’s movie either never saw it or has a much darker definition of “family-friendly” than I do. Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel and produced by Disney (yes, Disney), this is less whimsical fantasy and more nightmare fuel disguised as a coming-of-age tale.
The story follows two boys, Will and Jim, in a small town visited by the mysterious and extremely sinister Mr. Dark, played with eerie charm by Jonathan Pryce (Brazil, Pirates of the Caribbean). His traveling carnival offers people their deepest desires—at a terrible cost. The film’s shadowy, gothic atmosphere owes much to Stephen H. Burum, a cinematographer who would go on to become Brian De Palma’s go-to DP, lensing everything from the neon-drenched Body Double (1984) to the gangster epic The Untouchables (1987) and even the sci-fi oddity Mission to Mars (2000). The eerie, painterly visuals Burum crafted for Something Wicked—especially in the carnival sequences, with their rich blacks, deep reds, and swirling fog—are arguably a perfect precursor to the dreamlike, voyeuristic style he’d bring to De Palma’s thrillers.
But the scene that destroyed me? The carousel of doom.
At the film’s climax, Mr. Dark, who up until this point has been a smooth-talking, malevolent presence, is forced onto the cursed carousel. As it spins, he rapidly ages into a shriveled, crumbling husk, his once-commanding presence reduced to a writhing corpse in a scene that feels more at home in a full-blown horror movie than a Disney production. The grotesque makeup effects and his final, agonized cries were so much for my young brain to handle that I think I aged a few years just watching it.
Who at Disney greenlit this?! This was a studio that gave us The Rescuers, not elderly men being torn apart by time itself. I thought I was getting a Goonies-style adventure. Instead, I got existential terror wrapped in carnival music.
Heartbeeps (1981)
dir. Allan Arkush
Most kids were terrified by ghosts, monsters, or aliens. Me? I was paralyzed by Andy Kaufman in a robot suit.
Let me explain.
Heartbeeps is a bizarre, miscalculated attempt at a sci-fi romantic comedy where Kaufman and Bernadette Peters play two androids, Val and Aqua, who fall in love, escape their programming, and try to start a family. Sounds cute, right? It is not cute. It is deeply unsettling.
First off, the character designs are straight-up nightmare fuel. Picture mannequins with dead, glassy eyes, frozen expressions, and stiff, jerky movements—like Westworld but somehow worse. The makeup and prosthetics (courtesy of the legendary Stan Winston!) might have been impressive for the time, but they have not aged well. Instead of making Kaufman and Peters look endearing, they look trapped in their own faces. It’s pure, undiluted uncanny valley before we even had a name for it.
And then there’s the tone. The movie wants to be quirky and heartwarming, but everything about it feels wrong. The robotic mannerisms are too stilted to be charming, the humor is flat, and the whole film has this off-putting artificiality that made my young brain deeply uncomfortable. Even the adorable little “child” robot they build, a tin can with a face named “Phil,” somehow makes things worse.
The weirdest part? This came from Allan Arkush, the same director who made the delightfully anarchic Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and the cult classic Get Crazy. How he went from directing the Ramones to making Andy Kaufman as an emotionless cyborg is one of Hollywood’s greatest mysteries. Even Kaufman himself famously hated the movie, reportedly watching it once and refusing to ever discuss it again. I envy his ability to move on. I, on the other hand, have had Heartbeeps lurking in the darkest corners of my subconscious for decades.
The Amityville Horror (1979)
dir. Stuart Rosenberg
My mom, perhaps not the best at maternal decision making as she was still a teenage when she had me, took me to see this at the drive-in when I was four years-old, and the nightmares it gave me are among my oldest memories.
For those unfamiliar, The Amityville Horror is based on the (allegedly) true story of the Lutz family, who moved into a house where a grisly mass murder had taken place—only to find themselves tormented by malevolent supernatural forces. If you’ve ever seen a horror movie about a haunted house, this is the one that basically wrote the playbook.
At that age, everything about it scared me: the unnervingly symmetrical house with its attic windows that looked like glowing eyes, the eerie red lighting of the opening titles, the whispery voices in the night… but the scene that broke me? The window that slammed on one of the son’s hands.
At one point, a little kid’s hand gets crushed to the point by a window that comes down on its own and then won’t open. There’s something about the sheer real-world plausibility of it—no ghosts materializing, no CGI nonsense, just a hand-crushing nightmare—that made it feel worse than any jump scare ever could.
And then there’s Lalo Schifrin’s unbelievably creepy score. Schifrin, known for his work on Mission: Impossible and Dirty Harry, originally composed an entire score for The Exorcist, which was so disturbing that the brass at Warner Brothers allegedly told director William Friedkin that it needed toning down. Instead, Friedkin told Schifrin it wasn’t right at all for the film and reportedly threw the recording tapes into a parking lot. In the Amityville Horror? He lets the dread simmer, layering eerie choral voices – like a child’s chorus – with shrieking strings that make your skin crawl. His music doesn’t just accompany the horror—it is the horror.
There was no recovering from this. I spent years convinced that any window could suddenly turn against me, possessed by some unseen force hellbent on breaking my fingers. And when I didn’t think of that, I’d think there was a demonic pig running alongside our car as my mom used to joke that “Jodie was coming for me if I was bad.” Jesus. Thanks, Mom.