'It has the appeal of an actual horror': How Return to Oz became one of the darkest children's films ever made

Back in the 1980s, Disney commissioned a sequel to The Wizard of Oz which was as scary as it was unconventional. Released 40 years ago this week, it was a box office failure, but has since become a cult classic.

The films we watch as children often leave the deepest marks. Walter Murch's Return to Oz (1985) has a reputation as being one of the scariest children's films of the 1980s. A sequel to the beloved 1939 musical starring Judy Garland, which was released in the US 40 years ago this week, it is notorious for traumatising young audiences and is jam-packed with creepy images, from Dorothy Gale getting trapped inside villainess Princess Mombi's chamber of disembodied heads  to the Wheelers, a pack of cackling creatures with wheels for feet – and that's just the Oz scenes. Shockingly, the opening sequence has young Dorothy being sent to a psychiatric clinic to have her memories of Oz obliterated by a sinister doctor. While the initial critical reception was mixed, and the film flopped at the box office, it has become a cult favourite over the years, arguably because of this surfeit of nightmare fuel.

An Academy award-winning sound designer and respected editor, Murch had worked on some of the most notable films of the 1970s including THX 1138, which he co-wrote with George Lucas, American Graffiti, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, but had yet to direct his own feature, when Disney – which was undergoing significant changes in management in the 1980s – approached him to make something with them.

Murch already had an idea in mind: a sequel to the MGM classic The Wizard of Oz, but one more faithful to L Frank Baum's books. Murch had grown up on the Oz books. His mother loved them, and they were the first novels he can remember reading. Disney, it transpired, had the rights to them, which came as a surprise to Murch – but they expired in five years, which meant they needed to move quickly.

The script, which Murch co-wrote with Gil Dennis, is a composite of two of Baum's books, Ozma of Oz and The Magical Land of Oz. Instead of 16-year-old Garland, they cast the nine-year old Fairuza Balk – who as an adult would go on to star in the likes of The Craft and American History X; she was the same age as Dorothy in the books. The film would not have the vaudevillian sheen of the original. Crucially, it would not be a musical, but rather something more grounded. The look of Dorothy's famous travelling companions the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, who spend most of the movie turned to stone until they're brought back to life at the end,  is inspired by the original illustrations rather than the 1939 film, while the only notable holdover from that production would be Dorothy's iconic ruby slippers – the slippers are silver in the books – which they had to pay for the rights to use. "Of course, I knew this was a risky endeavour, because people had such a strong feeling about that film," Murch tells the BBC. "I didn't want to tread on its toes. When you say, here's a sequel to that film, certain expectations pop up."

Much has been made over the years of the film's darkness. Murch combines elements of 19th-Century fairy tales with a more realistic vision of life in rural Kansas in 1890 – though as he points out, if you strip away the songs from the original, it's pretty dark in itself. For a time, Murch was in conversation with Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, to do the production design for Return to Oz and Sendak talked about how the 1930s film terrified him as a child.

The film picks up where the original left off. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are trying to repair the damage the tornado did to their farm, while Dorothy has become an insomniac who keeps talking about her journey to Oz. 

For many viewers, the early scenes, in which Dorothy is taken to a clinic to receive electroconvulsive therapy from the sinister Dr Worley, played by renowned Shakespearean actor Nicol Williamson, are the most disturbing. Murch was inspired by the 1890s mania for electro-therapies. On the cusp of the 20th Century, electricity was transforming the way people lived. It was a source of awe – and quackery – with the newspapers stuffed with adverts for electrical corsets and electrical belts promising to alleviate all manner of ailments and restore the wearer's vigour. Baum was also fascinated with electricity, says Murch, "so it all fit together". However, the treatment Dorothy is about to receive, as she is strapped to a gurney while "damaged patients" can be heard screaming in the basement, feels more like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

For British actor Sophie Ward, who played one of the incarnations of head-switching witch Princess Mombi alongside Jean Marsh and Fiona Victory, the power of these scenes lies in the fact they are trying to silence Dorothy, to obliterate her memories of Oz. "Culturally, that really strikes a chord, about treatments being misused and misapplied, and women not being believed." The creepiness of the scene is amplified by the fact that Aunt Em, saddled with her own troubles, leaves Dorothy behind without looking back, tapping into every child's fear of abandonment, explains Murch. "Sometimes even the most well-meaning of parents, for their own reasons, make choices that put their kids in jeopardy, and you have to make your own friends and find your own way. That's what happens in life."

Escaping during a thunderstorm, Dorothy floats down a river and wakes up in Oz, only to find the Emerald City destroyed and her old friends turned to stone. She doesn't even have Toto for company. Gradually, she pieces together a found family made up of Billina the talking chicken, spherical robot soldier Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, a figure with wooden limbs and a carved jack-o'-lantern head, and The Gump, who consists of a moose-head which Dorothy reanimates with magic powder and then ropes to a sofa to create a rather ungainly flying machine.  

"These themes of memory erasure and trying to hold on to the memories that you have run throughout the book," says Murch, "and we emphasise those in the film." All of the characters Dorothy encounters are "under the gun in some way". Bellina's life will be in jeopardy if she doesn't lay an egg, Jack worries about his head spoiling, and if Tik-Tok isn't regularly wound up, his speech, action and even his capacity to think can all wind down. The Gump is held together with twine and in constant danger of coming apart.

The film abounds with inventive visual effects. Claymation is used to bring the Nome King, the tyrannical rock monster who has taken over the Emerald City, to life. Murch and his young family were fans of Sesame Street, and a young Brian Henson, son of the show's puppet maestro Jim Henson, is both the lead puppeteer and voice of the gangly Jack Pumpkinhead, while Michael Sundin, a British trampolining champion and Blue Peter presenter, had the unenviable task of bringing Tik-Tok to life. To do this he had to be strapped into the shell of the costume with his head between his legs, bent double and facing backwards. A small monitor allowed him to see where he was going. There was also limited air, explains Murch. "Once he was clamped inside Tik-Tok, he had two minutes and 45 seconds before we had to say cut." Despite this, he was able to master this "unbelievably complicated geometric re-constitution" to the point that Tik-Tok was able to walk up and down stairs. 

Unlike Garland in the original, Balk was often interacting with puppets or people encased in costumes rather than human beings, making her performance of quiet resilience all the more impressive.

It was not an easy production process. There was initial friction between original producer Gary Kurtz and Disney regarding the budget. Kurtz ended up being promoted to an executive role, essentially taking him off the film, and Paul Maslansky was assigned in his place. Murch was told he needed to cut $5 million (£3.7m) from the budget for the film to go ahead. "I made one of those decisions that you make when things are existentially on the line. I buckled down for two weeks and produced a screenplay that was 15 pages shorter."

Once shooting started, it quickly started falling behind. While Murch puts some of this down to his inexperience as a director, it was also an extremely challenging shoot, featuring puppetry and complex visual effects and a lead, who at nine years of age, could only work a set number of hours a day. The original director of photography quit, and after five weeks Murch says he was informed by Disney that "we are letting you go for the good of the film and for your own good".

When George Lucas, who was in Japan at the time, heard about this, he flew straight to London, says Murch, and "used some kind of Jedi mind trick to convince them to rehire me". Murch found himself reinstated. Even when he wasn't on the set, he had maintained contact with his associate producer, and when he came back, he says "things took off, and we actually finished on schedule".

Despite all these issues, Murch remained a calm presence on set, says Ward. "He and his incredible wife, Aggie, were so nurturing. Sometimes outside pressures from the studio can't help but infiltrate the set, but it didn't feel like that at all, and that's testament to them. They were this big heart at the centre of things." 

Return to Oz had its world premiere in the United States on 21 June 1985. The critical reception was decidedly mixed, with famous double-act reviewers Siskel and Ebert being particularly sniffy about it, labelling it "trashy" and saying it was likely to terrify children. Commercially, it was also a flop, grossing $11.1m domestically. According to Aaron Pacentine, who authored the 2021 documentary Remembering Return to Oz, Disney didn't really know what to do with it or how to market it, although it did well in Japan. Murch attributes this initial reaction to the "sugar-salt phenomenon". As in: if people expect a cup of sweet tea and end up with something salty, they will recoil. After Return to Oz, Murch found himself in "Hollywood jail", he says, and didn't direct again. 

Maybe audiences at the time just weren't ready for something that deviated so significantly from the original. The appetite for sequels, prequels, universe building and dark re-imaginings wasn't there yet. "It was so much ahead of its time in that respect," says Ward. "I think people now are more familiar with the idea that there are other interpretations [of classics]."

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Since Return to Oz was released there has been a made-for-television Muppets' Wizard of Oz and 2013's Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi, not to mention Gregory Macguire's prequel novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which has spawned a hit stage show and a major two-part film adaption, the second part of which is released later this year. Despite this, it's hard to imagine anyone making an Oz film – or any children's film – quite so wilfully strange and dark these days. In that sense it stands apart, and Pacentine maintains that Disney still treats it like the black sheep of the Oz universe. "They don't seem to care about certain films, if they're not box office successes in America."

However, for many who watched it in childhood, the things that bemused the critics – the bleakness and creepiness, the disembodied heads and watchful rocks – are exactly what made it lodge in their memories. For Pacentine, the darkness is an integral part of the film's enduring appeal. "A lot of people compare Return to Oz to an actual horror film," he says, "and I think it appeals in that way to me." The themes of the film – the suppression of imagination, the anxiety of being forced to fend for yourself in the world – have clearly resonated with many.

Despite the bumpy production process, Murch is proud of the film and the work that went into it. For him, all film-making is a product of collective intelligence, and the craft and care that went into the film is one of the things that has sustained it for 40 years. "Films should be smarter than the people who make them," Murch says, and together he and his cast and crew created a film that has seeped into children's dreams over the decades. If Return to Oz had been sunnier, smoother and safer, we might not be talking about it today.

Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design by Walter Murch is published by Faber and Faber.

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