“It was the Witching Hour…”

So says our young hero Sophie at the start of the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG. The rest of the teaser certainly backs these words up, trading in a sense of light and dark, wonder and fear, that can be best described as typifying ‘The Witching Hour’.

They’re words that also perfectly describe the work of the film’s creator. Through five decades, Spielberg has mastered The Art of Awe - that delicate mood that exists between the amazing and the terrifying. It’s the mood that inspires young Barry Guiler to open the door to the mysterious lights in Close Encounters; the mood that Elliott investigates in his back garden in E.T., the mood that descends on Isla Nublar as the T-Rex stomps out of its paddock in Jurassic Park.

It is, in short, a perfect Spielbergian mood.

It’s for this reason I’ve gone about re-editing the trailer for The BFG, keeping the audio but replacing the visuals with images from some of Spielberg’s greatest films. Included are Close Encounters, E.T., Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Empire of the Sun, Poltergeist, Hook and War of the Worlds. They’re all films that are quintessentially Spielbergian, and which capture The Witching Hour perfectly.

Though the picture quality isn’t brilliant here (this is my first attempt at creating a video) I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think - good or bad - and if nothing else, I hope it gets you as excited as I am for this summer’s journey into Sophie’s (and Spielberg’s) Witching Hour.