Tim Curry’s Scene-Stealing Turn in The Worst Witch Is the Halloween Watch to Revisit This Year

Every October, a certain corner of the internet resurfaces the same grainy clip: a robed, golden-eyed sorcerer descending a staircase to belt out a showstopper about pumpkins and broomsticks like his life depends on it. That clip is Tim Curry in The Worst Witch, and following his passing this week at 80, it feels like exactly the right moment to pull the whole film back into the spotlight.

Released in 1986 and based on Jill Murphy’s beloved book series, The Worst Witch follows Mildred Hubble, an endearingly hapless student at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches, played with scrappy charm by a young Fairuza Balk. Diana Rigg anchors the film as the imperious Miss Hardbroom, and the whole thing has the low budget, high heart quality of a British children’s television special that somehow became a Halloween institution. But it is Curry, as the Grand Wizard presiding over the school’s Halloween celebration, who turns a modest TV movie into something people still talk about four decades later.

Curry’s Grand Wizard is on screen for only a handful of minutes, and he makes every second count. He glides in wrapped in robes and theatrical menace, then flips instantly into gleeful camp, leading the cast through the musical number “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” with the kind of full-bodied commitment that made him a legend. It is a performance built entirely out of relish, the sense that Curry knows exactly how silly the material is and has decided to meet it with total sincerity anyway. That combination, equal parts wicked and warm, is the throughline of his whole career, but here it is distilled into its purest, most concentrated form.

Most tributes this week understandably lead with Curry’s more towering credits, and rightly so. But The Worst Witch deserves its own moment, precisely because it shows a different side of what made him so good at this. There is no irony to hide behind, no big budget spectacle propping him up. It is one actor, a school gymnasium dressed up as a Halloween party, and a song that has no business being as catchy as it is, and he simply commits all the way through. Generations of kids who grew up on British television in the late eighties and early nineties have that number burned into memory, and it has aged into one of those clips that gets rediscovered by a new audience every autumn.

With Halloween approaching, The Worst Witch is worth seeking out this year for reasons beyond nostalgia alone. It is a genuinely charming piece of low key movie magic, short enough for a weeknight watch, weird enough to feel like a discovery even if you somehow missed it growing up, and anchored by a performance that captures exactly why Tim Curry was so irreplaceable. He could walk into five minutes of a children’s Halloween movie and leave behind something people would still be sharing forty years on. That is a rare gift, and this October is as good a time as any to revisit it.