For reasons better explored in another discussion entirely, certain monsters have been stable favorites in the horror genre. The vampire has never truly gone out of style, merely shifting form and presentation throughout the decade. And yet other creatures have remained on the outskirts, only now getting the black eye of the camera turned towards them (Bigfoot comes to mind, or mermaids). The figure of the witch is neither, straddling the middle area in what is one of the most interesting and complicated histories within horror cinema. The recent fascination with witchcraft in horror films began with The Witch (2015) but is just the latest in a cycle of occult-centric films that ebb and flow with the times. In this post, I'll be taking a look at a history of witchcraft in horror film, trying to tease out what our relationship with these films has been as viewer, and what makes them so spellbinding. For a larger discussion, check out Episode 43 of the podcast over on iTunes or SoundCloud where Miss Mel and I dig deep into these and other witchy films.
Benjamin Christensen's Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) is the first film in movie history to deal with the subject of witches, and it's a curious place for this sub-genre's history to begin. The film is framed as a documentary, with re-enactments and voiceovers recounting the history and depictions of witches in art, culture, and religion. As such, its main goal is to understand and de-mystify witchcraft and to explore the psychological and sociological implications of what it meant to be an accused witch, and what the lore and legends surrounding witches might tell us about our own internal fears and prejudices. Interestingly, this film received a great deal of controversy and was banned in several states and countries. One wonders if they missed the point of the film or if that's exactly why they wanted it banned. Regardless, it's worth noting that the first depictions of witches in film weren't meant to terrify, but to enlighten.
On a less philosophical scale, the sixties also provided us with great witch-revenge in Black Sunday (1960), Master of Horror Mario Bava's first feature film, wherein a condemned witch (scream queen Barbara Steele) is executed by her brother and returns 200 years later for payback against the descendants of those who destroyed her. Bava's debut sensationalizes gore and the gruesome side of witchcraft. He depicts his witches as pseudo-vampiric, their rituals and power not only stemming and revolving around blood and blood sacrifice but in the consuming of blood as well. All of this is wrapped in a morbid fascination with witchery and the notion that the past will always arise to taint the present.
The great witchcraft films of the 1970's were almost all in direct response to the films of the previous decades, in particular, the three explored above. Witchfinder General had a heavy influence on both Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Devils (1971). Both films were all about confronting the evil society had now been made aware of thanks to the witchcraft films of the 60's and finding ways to rid the world of that evil. Satan's Claw explores this through the story of a small town that falls under demonic possession and the townsfolk banding together to cast out the beastly party who has placed them under this spell. The Devils also focuses on a small, isolated town as they respond to rumors of a priest being accused of witchcraft and the uproar that surrounds the accusation.
But of course, no other film from the 1970's concerning witches can ever match Suspiria (1977). Capturing the attention of critics and horror-loving audiences alike at the time, and still maintaining its reputation today as one of the definitive films about witches and one of the scariest films of the decade, Suspiria was directed by rising auteur Dario Argento and was set in a German ballet academy. Unconcerned with suspicion and accusation, Argento's film sees students and townsfolk alike getting slaughtered, often brutally, by a secret coven of witches. But it's still concerned with dragging darkness out into the light and as such is the perfect close to the decade and transitional film to bring us into the 1980's.
We now enter the era of the witch film where the secret shroud of mysticism is replaced with a violent power to be both feared, desired, and reckoned with. At the same time, thanks in large part to Suspiria but also to The Devils, motherhood and witches become closely intertwined and a common theme moving forward in the sub-genre. The idea and the concept of the witch became firmly planted in this decade, and it's here in the 1980's that we see the first attempts at subverting the idea of the witch and examine witchcraft not just as a metaphor for social issues, but as a more individualized form of terror and mayhem.
And yet curiously, it's also at this time that a less serious, quasi-reflexive way of looking at the witch emerges, likely because society had become so comfortable with the idea of the witch and her figure in pop culture. An interesting narrative tool begins to be used in this decade and carries over to the 1990's wherein humor and camp are used coax the audience into letting their guard down before being frightened, and in some cases terrified, by the reemergence of the witch. The Nicolas Roeg helmed adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic The Witches (1990) comes to mind as an example of this particular strategy. In fact, it's easy to argue that The Witches encapsulated the standard for the slightly comedic, toned down, and very much desensitized vision of the witch utilized in the late 80's and early 90's. This period gave us The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Pumpkinhead (1988), Warlock (1989), Hocus Pocus (1993), and The Craft (1996), all of them slightly frightening in their own right, but still parodical in nature. Long-running TV fantasy soap Charmed (1998-2006) was also born out of this pop-friendly version of the witch.
In a sense, this era is where creators and audiences alike really begin to have fun with the witch and experiment with the form now that no one needs to be told where a witch comes from or what she is or even what she symbolizes. It's why we get a witch summoning a pumpkin-headed revenge demon in one film and a seventeenth-century-male witch time-traveling to twentieth-century Los Angeles, only to be pursued by his archnemesis witch-hunter in another film. And while the films of the 1960's and 1970's were trying to educate viewers about witches, the witchcraft films of the 1980's and 1990's were about playing with, bucking, and re-evaluating the stereotypes of witches previously settled upon by society at large.Following this line of thinking, there's a logic to how witches in film ended the millennium. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's The Blair Witch Project (1999) was a reclamation of the witch, turning its back on the witchcraft films of the two prior decades and striving to once again make the witch terrifying. Three campers set out to investigate the local legend of a witch in the woods and through their peril the witch is re-mystified. As has been discussed on the Splatter Chatter podcast at length, what makes The Blair Witch Project so successful is that we're only shown hints of the true terror and must do our own work to fig together the pieces of the puzzle. It's in the blind spots that the fear creeps in, shattering the image of the non-threatening witch that had so dominated the 90's until this point. After seeing everything a witch was capable of, a sense of mystery was exactly what horror viewers needed.
Now that the witch was reinvigorated, creators and filmmakers could both use the fearful fuel of The Blair Witch Project and combine that with all the great witchy imagery of decades past to produce sophisticated stories with new angles and interesting themes. Beginning in 2001, and lasting until 2011, the Harry Potter films also did great concurrent work to popularize witches with a mass audience. This helped audiences to become savvy with witches and allowed filmmakers new and old alike to satirize, subvert, and honor the figure of the witch and a new batch of films. Films worth noting would be Lucky McKee's The Woods (2006), Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell (2009), and Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem (2012). Each of these explores the historical roots of witches in their own ways while also incorporating some new-age flair.Then came the Paranormal Activity franchise (2007 - 2015), six films that wrapped self-reflexivity, entertainment, and narrative innovation into one giant ball. Though they didn't market themselves as being about witchcraft or the occult, the continued references and importance of witches in the overarching mythology that developed as the series progressed placed the witch (and the secret coven once more) as the inadvertent central figure of the entire franchise and the last two films directly. Of course, as is often the case in prolonged film series, and horror series in particular, each installment of Paranormal Activity declined in both frights and returns, leaving audiences disinterested and worn out by the release of the final film. And if that wasn't enough to sap audience interest, season three of American Horror Story, subtitled Coven, would surely have finished the job.
