WITCHES!!!
Witches have been around almost as long as movies have been around, and long before movies existed they had already occupied one of the strangest, darkest and most complicated places in human history.
Depending on where you were, when you were born and what somebody believed, a witch could be a healer, a wise woman, a seer, a spiritual figure, a dangerous outsider, a servant of the Devil, a misunderstood woman, a political scapegoat, a feminist symbol or somebody who simply scared the hell out of everybody in town.
And movies have used pretty much every one of those versions.
With Practical Magic 2 arriving in theaters 28 years after the original Practical Magic, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, I thought this would be a good time to go back through the history of witches, witchcraft and witch movies and pick ten of my favorites.
I should probably say right up front that I don't particularly like the original Practical Magic, and unfortunately I thought Practical Magic 2 was terrible, but I do love witch movies.
I have a real weakness for them, especially when filmmakers use witchcraft as something mysterious, dangerous, sensual, frightening, ancient or completely insane.
And the actual history of witchcraft is much more complicated than the pointy hat, broomstick and cauldron image most of us were handed as kids. Belief in magic goes back thousands of years, and in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and many other cultures, spells, charms and rituals were part of everyday life.
People used them for healing, protection, agriculture, luck and all kinds of things that would have been considered completely normal within those societies. The people practicing them were often healers, seers, village wise women or other important members of the community, not cartoon villains with green faces and flying monkeys.
The darker idea of the witch evolved over time. In medieval Europe, folk magic and beliefs about witches existed alongside Christianity, and the Church itself didn't always treat stories of flying witches and supernatural powers as literal reality.
That changed dramatically during the late Middle Ages and early modern period, when religious and secular authorities increasingly connected witchcraft with Satan, demonic influence and heresy. The infamous Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, published in 1486, helped reinforce the idea of witchcraft as an organized and deeply evil threat.
What followed was genuinely horrifying, and not in the fun horror-movie sense. Between roughly the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, witch hunts and trials swept through parts of Europe. Tens of thousands of people were executed after being accused of witchcraft, and the majority were women, often poor, elderly, socially isolated or otherwise vulnerable.
Torture was used to extract confessions, neighbors accused neighbors, personal grudges suddenly became evidence of supernatural evil, and entire communities participated in mass hysteria.
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 are the most famous American example, but they were one relatively brief chapter in a much larger history of fear, superstition, religious fanaticism and persecution.
Arthur Miller would later turn Salem into one of the great American theatrical metaphors with The Crucible, using those historical events to explore hysteria, accusation and political persecution in his own time.
That's one of the fascinating things about witches as cultural figures: they keep changing depending on what society happens to be afraid of.
Sometimes the witch represents evil. Sometimes she represents female independence. Sometimes she's an outsider who refuses to obey the rules. Sometimes she's the victim of the people calling her a witch. Sometimes she's genuinely supernatural and dangerous, and sometimes the real monsters are the supposedly righteous people trying to destroy her.
As the Enlightenment spread and science and reason began replacing supernatural explanations for disease, crop failures, death and misfortune, belief in traditional witchcraft declined throughout much of Europe. But the witch never disappeared culturally. By the twentieth century, witchcraft had taken on entirely new meanings.
England repealed its final witchcraft laws in 1951, and figures such as Gerald Gardner helped popularize Wicca, a modern pagan religion centered much more around nature, spirituality and ritual than anything resembling the old Christian idea of devil worship.
Today the word "witch" can mean completely different things to different people. It can refer to historic accusations of harmful magic, modern pagan religious practice, occult traditions, feminist imagery, fantasy characters or simply somebody wearing a cheap black hat at a Halloween party.
The movies, naturally, grabbed all of it.
Cinema was using witches almost immediately. Early filmmakers were fascinated by magic because movies themselves looked like magic. Things could disappear. People could transform. Ghosts could materialize. Bodies could fly.
Georges Méliès and other pioneers realized almost instantly that editing and trick photography allowed movies to show things that could never happen on a stage in front of a live audience, so supernatural stories and magical characters became natural subjects.
By the time The Wizard of Oz arrived in 1939, Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West basically burned one particular image of the witch into popular culture forever. Green skin, black clothes, pointed hat, broomstick, cackle. You can show almost anybody that silhouette today and they know immediately what it represents.
Disney reinforced those images too. The Evil Queen transforming into the old hag in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is one of the great frightening images in animation, and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty is one of Disney's most powerful villains. Shakespeare, of course, had already given us the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, so cinema had centuries of mythology, literature, folklore and theater to steal from, and thank God it did.
But Hollywood gradually began loosening up the image.
Movies like I Married a Witch from 1942, starring the wonderful Veronica Lake, and Bell, Book and Candle from 1958 with Kim Novak treated witchcraft romantically and comedically.
Then television gave us Bewitched, where the witch wasn't some horrifying creature hiding in the woods. She was living in the suburbs trying to deal with her husband, her mother and household problems while occasionally twitching her nose and making something disappear.
That shift is interesting because witches gradually moved from being purely threatening figures to characters who could be charming, funny, sympathetic and even aspirational. By the 1980s, '90s and beyond, the witch increasingly became associated with independence, female power, rebellion, teenage alienation and outsiders creating their own communities.
You can see that all over something like The Craft.
I think The Craft is one of the great witch movies and one of the best horror movies of the 1990s, period. It's also one of the best movies about being a teenage girl during that era.
These aren't simply witches standing around casting spells because the screenplay needs something supernatural to happen. Witchcraft becomes part of adolescence, friendship, anger, sexuality, insecurity, revenge and the desire to have some control over your life when you feel completely powerless.
And Fairuza Balk is magnificent in that movie.
She doesn't simply play Nancy as evil. She plays her as somebody who gets access to power and becomes intoxicated by it, which makes the movie much more interesting. The entire group works beautifully together, and underneath all the supernatural stuff is a very recognizable movie about lonely teenagers finding one another and then discovering that friendship and power can both turn toxic.
The '90s also gave us Hocus Pocus, which obviously became this enormous cult phenomenon. People absolutely adore that movie. Every Halloween it comes back like the flu. Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy became Halloween icons because of it.
I am not one of those people.
I don't hate the fact that everybody loves it. Enjoy yourself. Wear the costumes. Sing the songs. Have your annual Hocus Pocus party. Knock yourself out. But it's not making my list.
Neither is The Witches of Eastwick, which is based on John Updike's novel and directed by George Miller. George Miller is one of my favorite filmmakers, and somehow The Witches of Eastwick is the one George Miller movie I really don't like. You've got Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson playing the Devil, which sounds absolutely unbeatable on paper, and yet for me the movie is a complete mess. I know people who love it. I'm not one of them.
There are plenty of other terrific or interesting witch movies that won't make my final ten.
Into the Woods has Meryl Streep having a great time playing the Witch in Stephen Sondheim's musical.
Hayao Miyazaki has explored witches and magic beautifully in films like Kiki's Delivery Service and Spirited Away. The Crucible deals with witch accusations rather than actual witchcraft. The Wizard of Oz and Wicked have made witches central to some of the most famous stories in popular culture.
And then there are the really dark ones, which, naturally, are the ones I tend to love the most.
Mario Bava's Black Sunday is one of the essential ones. Barbara Steele, one of the great faces in the history of Gothic horror, plays a witch who is brutally executed and returns centuries later. That movie is gorgeous, creepy, violent, atmospheric and absolutely foundational to Italian Gothic horror. The imagery in Black Sunday still looks incredible.
Then there's Witchfinder General from 1968, also known in the United States as The Conqueror Worm, starring Vincent Price. What's interesting about that movie is that the horror isn't really supernatural at all. Price plays Matthew Hopkins, a historical figure who traveled through seventeenth-century England accusing people of witchcraft and profiting from their persecution. The movie is brutal because the evil comes from fanaticism, opportunism and human cruelty.
Then there's Nicolas Roeg's The Witches, based on Roald Dahl, with Anjelica Huston giving one of the great witch performances in movie history as the Grand High Witch.
That movie is wonderfully strange and genuinely frightening in ways children's movies aren't usually allowed to be anymore. Huston's transformation is disgusting and fantastic, and Roeg treats the material with enough darkness that you really do believe children are in danger.
I love Halloween III: Season of the Witch too, although we're stretching the definition of a traditional witch movie considerably with that one. It's about paganism, ancient ritual, Stonehenge, masks, computers, snakes, bugs and an evil Halloween novelty company trying to murder children across America.
It's completely nuts. And I adore it.
It has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Myers, which is one of the reasons people hated it when it came out, but over the years people finally began appreciating what a wonderfully bizarre movie it is. That ending is also one of the best horror endings ever made.
You can't discuss modern witch movies without The Blair Witch Project, even though we never really see the Blair Witch. The entire movie is built around the legend, and that's precisely why it works.
The witch exists in stories, symbols, strange noises, things hanging from trees and the terror growing between the three people lost in the woods. What you imagine is much scarier than anything the filmmakers could have shown you.
And beyond being scary, The Blair Witch Project is simply one of the most important horror movies ever made. It changed independent horror, helped revolutionize found footage and demonstrated how the internet could become part of a movie's mythology and marketing. Whatever you think of the movie, its impact is enormous.
Robert Eggers took the opposite approach with The Witch, his extraordinary New England folktale. Everything about that film is rooted in the language, religious beliefs, folklore and fears of its historical period. It's about a family destroying itself through religious paranoia, guilt, repression and suspicion, while something genuinely supernatural may also be waiting in the woods.
And then there's Black Phillip. Black Phillip is one of the great horror characters. It's a goat. And he's terrifying.
Eggers understands that witchcraft works best in that movie when it feels ancient, unknowable and completely connected to the landscape. By the time Thomasin reaches that extraordinary final sequence and the movie fully embraces what has been waiting for her, the result is weird, sad, liberating and horrifying all at once.
One of the most beautiful recent witch movies is Goran Stolevski's You Won't Be Alone from 2022, which I think is a remarkable film. It was Stolevski's feature debut, and it's a poetic, dreamlike, existential body-horror movie set in nineteenth-century Macedonia about a young witch who can assume different bodies and gradually experiences human existence from different perspectives.
The easiest way I can describe it is: imagine Terrence Malick making a body-horror movie about witches. That's basically You Won't Be Alone.
It's violent and disturbing, but it's also incredibly beautiful and compassionate. It's about identity, loneliness, humanity and what it actually means to live inside another person's body and experience the world through them. Of the witch movies made in recent years, I think it's one of the very best.
But if we're talking about the crowning achievement in witch movies, for me it comes down to one filmmaker, one dance academy and one absolutely insane Goblin score.
Suspiria.
Dario Argento's 1977 masterpiece is not simply my favorite movie about witches. It's one of my favorite horror movies, period.
The colors alone are overwhelming. The reds, blues, greens and impossible lighting turn the movie into some kind of fever dream. Jessica Harper is wonderful as Suzy Bannion, the young American student who arrives at a German dance academy and gradually discovers that something very wrong is happening there.
People die horribly, strange things happen inside the building, maggots fall from ceilings and eventually we discover that the academy is controlled by a coven led by the ancient witch Helena Markos.
And then there's Goblin's score. That score doesn't accompany the movie. It attacks you. The music pounds, shrieks, whispers and practically screams the word "witch" at you. Argento doesn't care about subtlety. He wants color, blood, music, murder, magic and sensory overload, and the movie becomes this incredibly beautiful nightmare.
Technically, Suspiria is often connected to the Italian giallo tradition because Argento was one of the masters of that form, but this movie goes much further into supernatural horror. It has the violence and stylized murder sequences associated with giallo, but underneath everything is a fairy-tale world of witches and dark magic.
I also love Luca Guadagnino's 2018 Suspiria, which is on my list as well, and one of the smartest things Guadagnino did was refuse to imitate Argento.
Because why would you? Trying to copy the visual style of Dario Argento's Suspiria would be suicide. You would lose before you started.
So Guadagnino made an entirely different movie. His version is longer, colder, more political, more explicitly connected to German history and much more interested in the internal structure and politics of the coven.
The colors are muted instead of exploding off the screen, the pacing is completely different, and the violence eventually becomes grotesque in ways even Argento probably would have appreciated.
They're two completely different interpretations of essentially the same central idea, and I love both of them.
That's another reason the witch movie remains such a rich little corner of cinema. There isn't one kind of witch story.
A witch can be terrifying or funny. She can be young or old. She can be the villain, the hero, the victim or all three simultaneously. Witchcraft can represent evil, spirituality, sexuality, repression, liberation, revenge, adolescence, religious hysteria, political persecution or female power.
Depending on who's making the movie, the witch can represent whatever that particular filmmaker or culture happens to fear or admire.
And over the last century of cinema, our relationship with witches has changed enormously. Early popular culture often depicted them as grotesque embodiments of evil. Later movies and television made them charming and domestic.
By the 1990s, things like The Craft, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed increasingly connected witchcraft with sisterhood, outsider identity and young women discovering their power. More recent movies and television have pushed that idea further, often using the witch as a symbol of resistance against religious, patriarchal or social control.
That's quite a journey from the old woman with a wart stirring a cauldron.
And obviously this little essay barely scratches the surface. The history of witchcraft, paganism, witch trials, religious persecution and modern witchcraft is enormous, and if the subject interests you, go read more about it.
Because once you start reading about this stuff, you realize that witches aren't simply horror-movie characters. They tell us an enormous amount about history, religion, superstition, gender, fear and the human need to find an explanation when something terrible happens.
But they're also really great horror-movie characters. And I happen to love them.
So even though Practical Magic 2 didn't do much for me, its arrival gives me the perfect excuse to celebrate a subgenre that has produced some absolutely terrific movies for more than a century.
Here, in no particular order:
MY 10 FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT:
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