How Creepy Is 'Return to Oz?' We've Got the Visual Proof
Did you ever watch The Wizard of Oz and feel it was missing something? Like post-apocalyptic rubble, primitive electroshock machines, or screaming disembodied heads? You’ll find all of these and more in Return to Oz, Disney’s 1985 film based loosely on author L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz sequels.
Directed by longtime editor Walter Murch, Return to Oz finds Dorothy (Fairuza Balk, in her film debut) journeying back to that magical land over the rainbow, only to discover that the yellow brick road is in ruins, her friends have been turned to stone, and an evil tyrant called the Nome King has pillaged the Emerald City. While today’s moviegoers are accustomed to seeing their fairy tales draped in shadow, the relentlessly dark tone of Return to Oz was a serious gamble in 1985, a major departure from both the whimsical satire of the books and the lush fantasy of MGM’s 1939 musical. It didn’t pay off: Return to Oz was a critical and box office failure. But for a young generation who watched the film on VHS, Return to Oz was a formative, nightmare-inducing experience. Thirty years later, the film retains a certain charm, but is still a jarring contrast to cheerful Munchkin-filled Oz embedded in our collective consciousness. Here, in GIF form, are the 10 most terrifying moments from Return to Oz. (If you want to fully freak yourself out, the film is available to stream on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, and Xbox.)
Like the classic film The Wizard of Oz, Return to Oz begins with a framing device set in Kansas. This time, however, instead of staying on the farm, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry take Dorothy to a creepy hospital where the nurses dress like this…
… and the doctor promises to erase her pesky fantasies about Oz with this friendly electrocution machine. Look, it has a face!
Dorothy escapes from the hospital during a thunderstorm and finds herself back in Oz, which now resembles New York City in The Warriors. She is quickly accosted by a gang of Wheelers, terrifying creatures with bedazzled jackets and wheels at the ends of their limbs.
Soon Dorothy is imprisoned by the witch Mombi (Jean Marsh, who would play a similarly terrifying enchantress in Willow three years later). Mombi has taken to collecting the heads of beautiful women, which she wears interchangeably with her own. In the film’s single most traumatizing scene, Dorothy flees from the decapitated witch as all of her heads scream in helpless terror.
The bright side of Dorothy’s imprisonment in Mombi’s castle is that she makes a new friend, Jack Pumpkinhead. He’s funny and nice. In the next scene, his head falls off and flies into a terrifying abyss.
And then there’s this guy, the Gump. He’s made of a taxidermied moose head tied to two sofas with some rope. The moment when he comes to life is… unnerving.
Finally, Dorothy and her friends arrive at the cave of the Nome King. He can control rocks, which is why all the decorative granite in Oz appears to be possessed by toothy demons.
The Nome King’s cave can only be entered by falling through somebody’s bad trip from 1977.
At one point, apropos of pretty much nothing, the Nome King shouts “Perhaps you’d like to visit my fiery furnace!” and the camera cuts to this. Dorothy does not, in fact, visit his fiery furnace.
However, she does outsmart him in the end, causing the Nome King to get really angry and turn into this giant, terrifying rock monstrosity. He then attempts to eat her friends. Thankfully, he’s thwarted by the chicken Dorothy brought with her from Kansas. There’s no place like home!
Image credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Everett Collection
