Hex appeal: how witches charmed the cinema

In pre-60s cinema, before free love and first-wave feminism untangled norms around sex and gender, witches were a guilty pleasure: subversive and sensual but naturally flawed; women who would forfeit their powers when they fell in love with mortal men. It’s possible that this was a mandatory plot caveat, inserted to comply with the Hollywood Production Code. Until its demise in 1968, the code had policed all representations of ‘evil’ on film – an umbrella that included the deep taboo of (gasp) female sexuality. “No plot should present evil alluringly,” decreed the code – something Novak and Lake did in a major way. They got away with it because magic, these films preached, was intrinsically incompatible with heterosexual love, the latter powerfully cancelling out the former.

Thankfully, this narrative disappeared post-Bewitched. By the 1990s, witches could have it all, as the delightfully eldritch femmes of Barry Sonnenfeld’s Addams Family diptych proved with their arsenic and BDSM and ghoulish, unrepentant happiness: Morticia, with Gomez (“Don’t torture yourself darling – that’s my job”); Wednesday, with her awkward, feeble beau in Addams Family Values; Granny, a cheerful, gummy spinster married to her meat cleaver and spell books; and even Joan Cusack’s marvelous, murderous would-be widow, Debbie Jellinsky: “So I killed. So I maimed. So I destroyed one innocent life after another. Aren’t I a human being? Don’t I yearn and ache and shop? Don’t I deserve love… and jewellery?”

In Practical Magic, witchiness is boon rather than blight, not something to be ‘cured’ by romance or the nuclear family, but rather a precious and innate quality that requires nurturing. It’s what makes the sweetly imperfect Owens sisters (Bullock and Nicole Kidman) and their liberated, cackling aunts (Stockard Channing, Dianne Wiest) so marvelous. These are women who eat brownies for breakfast, throw midnight margarita parties and always have each other’s backs.

The film was marketed as a romance, but the male love interests in Practical Magic are secondary plot devices. The relationship at the heart of this film is sororal, a love letter to blood and family and Craft. The sisters save each other, and through that, themselves – a motif that has proliferated in recent years, particularly in YA cinema, from Frozen (which gave us the best coming-out anthem since Calamity Jane’s Secret Love) to Maleficent, where Sleeping Beauty’s saviour isn’t the usual steed-riding fop but rather her horned, winged, sorceress gothmother. Even ABC’s Once Upon a Time, with its porridge-slow arcs and high-camp aesthetics, has contributed to this queering of the witch, this unknotting of the good/bad binary that leaves no room for anything in between.

Slowly but surely, we are sloughing off the supernatural stereotypes that have smothered the witch, dissolving archaic and obsolete ideas of what she can be and do and offer, in order to portray something more authentic, more extraordinary. This is a necessary shift – one that reflects both the Craft’s growth and the rising role of identity politics. It resonates with those of us whose childhoods – real and extended – continue to be coloured by uncanny women: the daring spell-casters and mighty hex-breakers who fill the mundane with magic, or at very least the possibility of it. We’re learning to honour the witch – and about time too. As Jean Marsh’s Princess Mombi laments in Return to Oz: a witch denied her powers is a miserable creature indeed.