The 6 Strangest Characters of Roald Dahl

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Roald Dahl is widely known as one of the best author of children’s literature of the twentieth century, but readers don’t often stop and think about how truly bizarre his characters are. Many are macabre, darkly comic, or just downright creepy, which is something that draws many to his work. His strange characters stick with readers for years—ask most people which children’s books they remember the most, and it’s likely that Dahl’s work will come up.

Some are stranger than others. From the ambiguously murderous Willy Wonka to the the worm-eating Twits, Dahl’s characters run the spectrum of fascinatingly weird. But Dahl uses these odd creations to great effect, delighting readers everywhere, young and old, and keeping us interested by tapping into our dreams and nightmares at the same time, and forging both into adventure. In celebration of Dahl’s imagination, let’s take a look at 6 of his strangest characters.

The Twits

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Ah, the Twits. A lovely couple.

Any character whose creation stems from a desire to “do something against beards,” as Dahl put it, is surely going to be interesting.

The Twits live in a brick house with no windows with a family of pet monkeys—these are the most normal aspects of their lives. Mr. Twit’s enormous beard covers everything except for his forehead, nose, and eyes, and has hardened from years of skipping showers. He, quite literally, never washes. But it gets better! This lovely beard holds pieces of food that Mr. Twit constantly drops there, including sardines, cheese, and corn flakes. Dahl writes that “Because of this, Mr. Twit never really went hungry. By sticking out his tongue and curling it sideways…”. While that’s a sentence that should never be completed, you get the idea.

Yummy.

Mrs. Twit is just as great. She has a glass eye which she places in Mr. Twit’s water glass so that he knows that she has her eye on him. She was once beautiful, but years of ugly thoughts have twisted her visage into hideousness, and one of her chief hobbies is attacking innocent animals and children with her walking cane. Oh, and she also serves earthworms to her husband, disguised as spaghetti.

Dahl must have really hated beards.

Willy Wonka

Warner Bros.

Dahl’s most famous character is, arguably, his most frightening. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” features Willy Wonka, the curiously dressed owner of a candy-making factory. While Wonka may simply seem a zany children’s character, at first glance, a closer look reveals his macabre strangeness.

In the book, Wonka invites five children for a tour of his factory, which is locked down and closed off to the public. Wonka seemingly designs his tour to tempt each of the children—each of them has a weakness or character flaw that he exploits.

One very hungry child is tempted by a river of chocolate, falls in, and is sucked into a pipe—a suspiciously human sized pipe. Does Wonka routinely put humans through his chocolate-making system?

And when another child is sucked into some sort of television-based teleportation system, Wonka comments that it’s possible that, when the child comes out, only half of him will appear. Only half of him. If this possibility weren’t horrifying enough, when the kid does appear, he’s been shrunk down to an inch tall. To cure this, Wonka sticks the boy in a machine meant to test the stretchiness of chewing-gum, which leaves him ten feet tall, stick-thin, and barely able to walk.

Another child gets turned into a blueberry and is promptly “juiced,” and another is thrown into an incinerator, which just happened to not be lit that day—thrown in by squirrels that happen to be trained on how to throw people into an incinerator.

While all of the children are depicted, in the end, leaving the factory in more-or-less good condition, one can’t help thinking that they only just barely made it out of a factory designed to off them with the things they loved the most.

A strange man, indeed.

The Strange Old Man

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A minor character in Dahl’s novel, “James and the Giant Peach,” the strange old man is exactly what he sounds like. When the story’s protagonist, James, stops to have a cry about his decidedly terrible life, a "funny old man in a dark green suit” emerges from a bush behind him, beckoning to James, claiming that he has something wonderful to show him.

He produces a “small, white paper bag” filled with tiny green crystals the size of grains of rice, and offers it to James.

What’s in the bag, you might ask? Well, James asked, too.

And the old man flips out.

He jumps backward and starts madly waving a stick in the air, excitedly exclaiming that the crystals are crocodile tongues boiled in the skull of a witch. Not only this, but also a part of this recipe: eyeballs of a lizard, the gizzard of a pig, the beak of a green parrot, the juice of a porcupine, and three spoonfulls of sugar. The old man confides that, after this, you let it “Stew for a week, and let the moon do the rest”.

Now, when an old man offers a child a bag of crystals, that’s weird enough. But when he proclaims that these crystals were forged as part of a pagan ritual involving some decidedly not-so-vegan ingredients, well, that’s weirder. But it keeps going.

The old man shoves the paper bag into James’s hands, urging him to pour the crystals into a jug of water and slowly add ten of his hairs. This will make the whole mixture start to bubble and froth, and which point James is to chug the whole affair. Afterwards, the old man promises, steam will start coming out of your mouth, and marvelous things will start happening to you.

“Don’t tell your aunts!” He adds.

Yep. That's a Dahl character.

The Magic Finger

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Strictly speaking, the magic finger isn’t a character, and is merely attached to one. But since it seems to have a mind of its own and is strange and somewhat scary, it’s going on the list.

The unnamed narrator of Dahl’s book, “The Magic Finger,” is a young girl who lives next door to a family that is obsessed with hunting. This is very upsetting to the girl, who can’t stand hunting.

Fortunately, this particular girl is blessed with a finger that is capable of magically disfiguring people when she’s angry.

The girl explains to us, the readers, why her magic finger is so dangerous. When her teacher, Mrs. Winter, calls her stupid, the girl sees red, and the finger attacks, cursing the teacher, who turns into a cat.

The girl promptly tells readers, “If any of you are wondering whether Mrs. Winter is quite alright again now, the answer is No. And she never will be.”

After the cat incident, the girl vows to never allow her finger to curse anyone ever again. But, of course, it wouldn’t be a very exciting story if she didn’t.

Her hunting-crazed neighbors soon make her angry enough to see red again, and her finger zaps them into bird-sized people with wings. Who are then hunted by ducks with human arms and guns.

So, for the rest of her life, anyone who crosses this girl is going to be transmogrified by a terrifyingly powerful, sentient, magic finger over which she has no control.

"Unique" doesn't quite cover it.

The Witches

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The witches, collectively, are pretty weirdly frightening for antagonists in a children’s book.

Dahl’s story, “The Witches,” concerns a seven-year-old boy who goes to live with his grandmother after the death of his parents. Sometime later, his grandmother reveals the existence of witches to the boy, and kindly lets him know that they’re “demons in human shape,” who have bald heads that they hide with wigs, clawed hands, large nostrils and toeless feet.

And what is the mission of these toeless witches, you might ask?

Well, destroying children by turning them into hot dogs and mice, of course, so that their parents and teachers will kill or eat them. Remember who we’re reading?

And they carry out this mission, no less, under the guise of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

These witches also go on to transform the child protagonist of the story into a mouse, permanently, after which he is reminded that he has exactly nine years, as a mouse, left to live.

Again, weirdly frightening.

Red Riding Hood

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While not Roald Dahl’s original character, the writer adapted the character for his poem, “The Three Little Pigs”.

In Dahl’s version, after the wolf tries to blow down the homes of the three little pigs, one of them picks up the phone and dials red Riding Hood.

As interesting as it is to imagine dialing with a hoof, things get weirder from here.

When she arrives, after riding through the wood, she finds the wolf, looking terrifying. In the span of a blink, she pulls out a gun and shoots him.

The pig, happy that Riding Hood has saved him, cheers from his little brick house.

Later on, in the ending of the poem, the narrator notes that, in addition to two wolfskin coats, Miss Riding Hood also has a pigskin traveling case.

This version of Riding Hood isn’t quite as sweet and innocent as many of us remember, and, quite literally, wears our favorite nursery rhymes as clothing accessories.

Thanks, Roald.