How witch­es reclaimed their right­ful place in pop­u­lar culture

Think of a witch and a warty, green-skinned crone will doubt­less spring to mind, bring­ing with it almost a cen­tu­ry of cin­e­mat­ic bag­gage. Though the hor­ror genre in par­tic­u­lar has long enter­tained the prac­tice of mag­ic, it wasn’t until the 1990s that tan­gi­ble, empath­ic witch­es began to sur­face in pop­u­lar cul­ture in the likes of The Craft, Buffy and Charmed. Now, with covens con­ven­ing to cast bind­ing spells on Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, it’s clear that we’ve entered a new era of the witch.

Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Anna Biller’s The Love Witch both cel­e­brate the inher­ent pow­er of fem­i­nin­i­ty. Rather than falling in line with the patri­ar­chal pow­er fan­ta­sy, this witchy new wave urges us to lay claim to that pow­er for our­selves. With The Love Witch, Biller sought to con­struct a fan­ta­sy of fem­i­nine beau­ty made for the gaze of women. In a cul­ture where aspir­ing to beau­ty is deemed shal­low, her hero­ine Elaine (Saman­tha Robin­son) uses her glam­our – its own kind of enchant­ment – as a weapon. With it, she takes revenge against the lin­ger­ing right­eous­ness of men who attempt to tame her sex­u­al­i­ty. Even as she bleeds – a tam­pon wrap­per strik­ing in her Tech­ni­col­or world – Elaine mod­ernises the lin­ger­ing fear of female sexuality.

Biller’s film holds a cer­tain long­ing for the sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion of the 1930s, when women in movies could be both pow­er­ful and allur­ing at a time when Hol­ly­wood was yet to come under the strict cen­sor­ship of the Hays Code. What fol­lowed was akin to an artis­tic witch hunt, a trep­i­da­tion towards women’s plea­sure that went on to under­write the new anti-domme, anti-peri­od British pornog­ra­phy laws passed in 2014.

The Love Witch warns of the con­se­quences of such a shack­led cre­ative cli­mate. With nowhere to process her roman­tic frus­tra­tion out­side of her own art, the vio­lence of years keen­ly sub­mit­ting to an ex-husband’s fan­tasies is unleashed, with sure­ly no more than par­tial inten­tion. Elaine’s anguish on dis­cov­er­ing Wayne – a one-night lover – dead in the dou­ble bed of his seclud­ed cab­in, fol­low­ing a dead­ly dose of her home­made love potion, doesn’t seem to be a per­for­mance. And yet, she does appear to acknowl­edge that we are watching.

The melo­dra­mat­ic dia­logue demands a spe­cif­ic inter­pre­ta­tion of its forth­right tone, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Robinson’s per­for­mance. Despite deny­ing The Love Witch is a pas­tiche, Biller’s film plays out as homage to when the scripts of the stage bled into ear­ly talkies. Elaine is suit­ably poised and delib­er­ate, smirk­ing through a crack in the fourth wall; her lovers all bliss­ful­ly igno­rant. Insipid to the point of farce, they don’t even reg­is­ter the detached, almost sar­cas­tic tone in which she soothes their pet­ty insecurities.

There’s a sim­i­lar weight to the archa­ic lan­guage used in The Witch (sub­ti­tled: A New-Eng­land Folk­tale), a peri­od piece in which even the grungy sets were con­struct­ed using 17^th cen­tu­ry meth­ods. It’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion, with so much of witch­craft charged by the spo­ken word, that both exam­ples should set them­selves apart with dialogue.

In stark con­trast to The Love Witch, Eggers’ debut fea­ture com­pris­es a palette of moody blues and greys. It fol­lows a Puri­tan fam­i­ly ostracised from their plan­ta­tion and forced to fend for them­selves at the edge of a dark for­est. Con­tent that God is on his side, patri­arch William (Ralph Ine­son) begins till­ing the land, iso­lat­ed through his own inter­pre­ta­tion of the New Tes­ta­ment. After new­born Samuel goes miss­ing, it becomes evi­dent that this fam­i­ly will not find God in the wilds.

The witch­es are first glimpsed mash­ing the baby’s body into pulp to smear all over their gnarled bod­ies. Eggers repur­pos­es the tra­di­tion­al image of a witch in order to sub­vert our expec­ta­tions, using teenage daugh­ter Thomasin (Anya Tay­lor-Joy) to explore the jour­ney into the occult. It is, of course, one mired by death and sus­pi­cion as Thomasin’s fam­i­ly grow increas­ing­ly wary of her, after her younger sib­lings decry her a witch before she rel­ish­es the role.

Elaine and Thomasin each learn that this is the only way they can be lib­er­at­ed. In part, Elaine’s sto­ry is one of extrem­ism, as hers is a vicious inter­pre­ta­tion of the means of witch­craft. Vengeance, for­bid­den in Wic­ca, is rev­elled in by Elaine who is estranged from her for­mer coven. She begins to emu­late the stereo­type born from fear mon­ger­ing and pro­pa­gan­da dur­ing the infa­mous witch hunts helmed by Matthew Hop­kins, and which retains much of its hold in pop­u­lar cul­ture. The police inves­ti­gat­ing Wayne’s death refer to such pro­pa­gan­da as a kind of ​‘alt-fact’ because it can be found in his­to­ry books. They accept the idea of the dance with the Dev­il because it makes her eas­i­er to incrim­i­nate as a woman, some­one they would oth­er­wise be seduced by.

The Witch uses this sen­sa­tion­alised ori­gin myth to full effect, its cli­mac­tic scene show­ing the witch­es rise up from the woods. We are con­front­ed head on by their will­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty; a bar­ing of flesh that dis­plays faith and self-recog­ni­tion. All that is expect­ed of women, a sex­u­al avail­abil­i­ty, help­less­ness and humil­i­ty, is amped up to a lev­el of inver­sion, becom­ing hor­rif­ic to patri­ar­chal val­ues, but empow­er­ing to those who want to be liberated.

Seduc­tion is pow­er in a world where sub­mit­ting to that seduc­tion is seen as a sign of weak­ness. Sweet­ness and kind­ness become a force of nature when woven with sex­u­al­i­ty and the pri­mal life source that, in its being, holds all mor­tal pow­er under its control.