Get the latest gossip

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

Released 40 years ago this week, The Wizard of Oz sequel Return to Oz was as scary as it was unconventional. It was a box office failure, but has since become a cult classic.

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. 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. 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.

Get the Android app