See Anne Hathaway and Octavia Spencer Teach How to Spot a Witch in New Featurette for The Witches

Anne Hathaway and Octavia Spencer are experts at spotting a witch.

In a PEOPLE exclusive look at the new featurette for their upcoming adventure comedy The Witches, the two actresses along with Stanley Tucci and Jahzir Bruno give their tips and tricks on how to identifying a witch before they can execute their evil plot to kill all children.

"Here’s the thing you need to know about witches: They’re here, they’re real and they live amongst us," Hathaway, 37, says in the clip. "They have elongated mouths that stretch to their ears."

In the movie based on Roald Dahl's classic 1983 book of the same name, Hathaway plays the Grand High Witch, the feared and diabolical leader of the world's witches, who concocts a plan to get rid of the world's children in one fell swoop.

"Witches wear long gloves up to their elbows, they don’t have hands they have claws," Spencer, 50, says. "And they all wear wigs, and when they take the wigs off they're bald."

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The Witches, which will skip theaters and head straight to HBO Max later this month, follows a young boy (Bruno, with an adult narration from Chris Rock) who stumbles upon a secret group of witches and, with the help of his loving grandmother (Spencer), tries to stop their evil plan to turn all the world’s children into mice.

When the town's hotel manager, played by 59-year-old Tucci, unwittingly hosts a group of spooky-yet-glamorous witches for a convention, the young boy and his sweet but persistent grandma have to stop them before their conniving scheme to get rid of all children can go any further.

Hathaway recently told PEOPLE that playing an evil witch in the Robert Zemeckis-directed film required a lot of prep work.

"The Grand High Witch was a total collaboration between costumes, hair and make-up, the writers, my dialect coach, the effects department, stunts, [director] Bob Zemeckis and myself," she said. "She is such a weirdo - so silly and over the top - and everyone had to work together to be on the same page so it felt big and entertaining but never too much."

The Witches debuts on HBO Max on Oct. 22.

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