There are about six layers of interpretation separating the new “Wicked” movie from its original text, the L. Frank Baum fantasy book series that began in 1900 with “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
“Wicked” is an adaptation of a Broadway musical based on a novel, published as a revisionist prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” the classic 1939 film that was itself inspired by a 1902 stage version of the original book.
Almost every “Oz” story, “Wicked” included, has been an attempt to recapture the brightness and whimsy of the Victor Fleming MGM film rather than Baum’s much darker source material.
Every version, that is, except “Return to Oz.” Generally described as an “unofficial” sequel to the beloved movie, “Return to Oz” flopped on its release in 1985 and has since acquired a reputation as either a lost classic or nightmare fuel for a generation of children unwittingly traumatized by their viewing experience.
“Return to Oz,” directed by Walter Murch, picks up six months after the tornado whisked Dorothy (played here by Fairuza Balk) from Kansas to the magical realm where she met her misfit friends and defeated the Wicked Witch of the West.
Online, there are a lot of amusing firsthand accounts about kids coming home from video stores eager to watch the next chapter of the story that had enchanted them, only to be permanently disturbed by what they saw instead.
It would be hard to identify the single most unsettling aspect of “Return to Oz.” Is it the fact that Dorothy is sent to a creepy mental institution for electroshock therapy when she can’t stop talking about Oz?
Maybe it’s when she gets back there and discovers the Emerald City in ruins, its residents turned to stone and its streets roamed by freakish creatures called Wheelers, who have wheels for hands and feet and serve the sinister rock-demon Nome King (Nicol Williamson).
Actually though? It’s the heads. In Dorothy’s absence, the once-grand city is ruled by the evil Princess Mombi (Jean Marsh), who keeps in her palace a collection of decapitated, still-conscious heads whose origin is never explained.
As Dorothy makes this macabre discovery, Mombi’s body rises, attaches her head of choice and attacks — a wild scene even during a peak decade for inadvertently horrific entertainment marketed to families.
“The Wizard of Oz” features its share of unpleasantness. Many viewers can’t handle the flying monkeys. There’s also the part where a woman is crushed by a house that randomly falls from the sky, and whose occupant proceeds to steal the shoes off her still-warm corpse.
But in most other versions of the story, the darkness is ancillary. By foregrounding the surreal bleakness, “Return to Oz” is truer Baum’s vision than “The Wizard of Oz,” “Wicked,” “The Wiz,” “Oz the Great and Powerful” or any of the countless other adaptations.
Balk, several years younger than Judy Garland when she portrayed Dorothy, was nearer in age to the girl described in the books. Her friends the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion only faintly resemble the familiar characters from “The Wizard of Oz” but closely match the original illustrations.
“Return to Oz” also engages with the tropes of fantasy more seriously than franchise movies typically attempt — or at least the ones streaming alongside it on Disney+, many of which are sanitized takes on fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. (Look up the original ending to “The Little Mermaid” sometime.)
The frightening dreamscape of Baum’s mirror world is never far out of frame, never able to be subdued with a heartfelt song about a rainbow or a benevolent wizard. This feels like a more honest way to engage with fantasy literature and the childhood fears that the best works in this genre evoke.
And decades removed from my own disquieting first encounter with “Return to Oz,” the lesson still feels valuable: Sometimes the yellow brick road leads to a roomful of terrifying heads.