“If you loved The Wizard of Oz,” the back of the DVD case informs me, “you’ll love accompanying Dorothy on this second thrilling adventure.”

Well, I don’t love The Wizard of Oz. I saw it on TV as a kid, and it left me cold. Sure, the transition from sepia to color must have been amazing in the ’30s, and the “it was all a dream–or was it?” ending hadn’t become a trope yet, but like Citizen Kane, it’s one of those movies that’s remarkable for its time, but is actually not that impressive.

Luckily, however, the box for Return to Oz is straight-up lying. If you loved The Wizard of Oz, this thing will probably strike you as a bizarre perversion; a downright nightmare. But if you’re like me… well, you can at least approach it with an open mind.

And of course, Wizard of Oz is based on a series of books, and the translation from page to screen altered the story a good deal. Return to Oz aimed to be more faithful to the source material, while still incorporating a few elements from the first film.

We start off with Dorothy back in Kansas, telling her aunt and uncle about her adventures in Oz. They of course don’t believe a word of it, and are concerned by her obsession with her imaginary friends. So they do what any concerned guardians would do: take her to get electroshock therapy from a smooth-talking doctor and his sinister nurse assistant at a Gothic asylum in the middle of nowhere.

And so Dorothy finds herself alone in a room–little more than a cell, really–at night, during a thunderstorm, waiting for the doctors to begin the treatment. While she waits, a mysterious blonde girl appears, ghost-like, and gives her a jack-o’-lantern to keep her company, before vanishing again as suddenly as she came.

The first 20 minutes of this film are pretty much a horror movie, culminating in the scene were she’s wheeled on a gurney to the electro-therapy room, hearing muffled screams of other patients as she goes. But just before the treatment can begin, lightning flashes, the power goes out, and the blonde girl reappears and releases Dorothy. They both flee into the stormy night, pursued by the furious nurse, finally plunging into a raging river to escape. Dorothy’s new friend disappears beneath the water, and Dorothy clings to a floating box for safety before finally falling asleep.

She awakens again in the land of Oz, accompanied now by her pet chicken Billina, who, like all animals in Oz, can talk. But Oz is much changed from when she last visited–the yellow brick road is in ruins, the Emerald City looks like Thomas Cole’s Desolation, its inhabitants turned to stone, and its streets patrolled by monstrous creatures known as “Wheelers,” which cackle insanely and threaten Dorothy and Billina. With the help of a clockwork automaton named Tik-Tok, Dorothy escapes the Wheelers and gets them to take her to the ruling power in the Emerald City, Princess Mombi.

Mombi lives in an ornate tower of gold and mirrors. She is a very beautiful woman. Actually, she is dozens of beautiful women, because she is a witch who keeps a collection of heads in glass cases, swapping them out as her whim dictates, like a fashion plate would switch her hats.

The scene where Mombi leads Dorothy through the winding hall of disembodied heads, all awake and staring back at her, might be even more disturbing than the earlier asylum scenes. It’s hard to say.

I’ve only described about half the film so far, but I don’t want to give everything away. While this is still a family-friendly picture, the ending, like all the best horror, is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. See if you can figure out what I mean!

But I hope what I’ve described above is enough to convince you that this is not your typical Disney movie. It has dark fantasy elements that feel distinctly unlike the lighthearted fare we normally get from the Mickey Mouse studio.

At the same time, it is also not simply a lazy conversion of a children’s story into a schlocky slasher film. Nowadays, if you hear they’ve made a “darker” sequel to a beloved story, you probably shudder–and you are right to do so! Cinema today has none of the craft displayed in Return to Oz, which is why it’s worthwhile to take a little time to discuss who made it.

Walter Murch is perhaps one of the greatest film editors of all time. (The only competitor I can think of would be Anne V. Coates.) He worked on such films as THX 1138, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient. Return to Oz was his one and only directorial effort, and that’s a pity, because he clearly had a talent for filmmaking. In his short book, In The Blink of an Eye, he makes many noteworthy observations on the cinematic art, such as that seeing things in a discontinuous order, as opposed to one continuous “shot”, is a relatively new phenomenon for humans, who were used to seeing things strictly in order until the advent of film technology in the early 20th century.

And yet, our minds took to this new experience rather easily, Murch observes, probably because it is similar to the process of dreaming, which is the one other state apart from watching a film in which we see disconnected images presented one after another. Murch specifically likens the experience of viewing a film in the theater to that of dreaming, suggesting we must first enter the proper state in order to experience films properly.

Also interesting is Murch’s article, “A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could Be”, included as a sort of appendix to In The Blink of an Eye. Written in 1999, it contains some very curious ideas:

So let’s suppose a technical apotheosis some time in the middle of the 21st century, when it somehow becomes possible for one person to make an entire feature film, with virtual actors. Would this be a good thing?

…Let’s go even further, and force the issue to its ultimate conclusion by supposing the diabolical invention of a black box that could directly convert a single person’s thoughts into a viewable cinematic reality. You would attach a series of electrodes to various points on your skull and simply think the film into existence.

Does this remind you of anything? Anything at all?

But, Murch optimistically predicts, cinema will never die off as an art form, because it is fundamentally a communal, collaborative experience:

The midcentury pessimism about the future of cinema, which foresaw a future ruled by television, overlooked the perennial human urge — at least as old as language itself — to leave the home and assemble in the fire-lit dark with like-minded strangers to listen to stories.

The cinematic experience is a recreation of this ancient practice of theatrical renewal and bonding in modern terms, except that the flames of the Stone Age campfire have been replaced by the shifting images that are telling the story itself. Flames that dance the same way every time the film is projected, but that kindle different dreams in the mind of each beholder, fuse the permanency of literature with the spontaneity of theater.

But I would like to emphasize the leaving of familiar surroundings. The theatrical-cinematic experience is really born the moment someone says, “Let’s go out.” Implicit in this phrase is a dissatisfaction with one’s familiar surroundings and the corresponding need to open oneself up in an uncontrolled way to something “other.” 

In his essays, we start to get an idea of why Murch’s Return to Oz works so well: it feels fundamentally like a dream. (Indeed, one possible interpretation is that the Oz parts are Dorothy’s dream.) And because Murch recognized that film is itself a kind of dreaming, he was able to wed his subject matter to his medium quite beautifully.

If you loved The Wizard of Oz, you may not like this darker, more eerie and ambiguous sequel. But if you enjoy an escape into the realm of dark fantasy, hearkening back to the days when fairy tales were anything but saccharine, you will find much to enjoy in Murch’s take on L. Frank Baum’s world.