The season is upon us. As the leaves fall off their trees, the weather whooshes in a welcomed cold breeze, the accustomed costumes come out of their storage, and the pumpkins, along with the scented candles, beers, lattes and what-have-you, make their way into the public’s affection, it swiftly becomes none other than the season of the witch. And what a glorious time of the year that can be — particularly for us horror fans.
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Yes, Halloween is here. Thankfully, this ever-changing autumn season provides us with a wonderful opportunity to look back at our favorite sorceress, enchantresses, brewmasters, and necromancers of cinematic yore, as well as recent history, and pay our tributes, offerings and appreciations for the spells they put upon us. In many ways, these bewitching ladies — in more ways than one, of course — have still captivated us, sometimes for decades at a time. A witch either wicked or whimsical (or, perhaps, both) can terrify, intrigue, delight, invigorate, or, yes, spellbound us with their unholy powers.
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If you shall allow us, let us put a spell on you with the ladies that have put spells on us, as the magic of the movies has been seen as its fullest capacities through these beguiling screen personalities. Here are the witches that leave us mesmerized.
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“The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
If you’ve ever been perturbed by a shakycam aesthetic or scared out of your wits by a well-timed POV jump scare, you must pay homage to one of modern horrors greatest foremothers, “The Blair Witch Project.” This film pioneered viral marketing and exploded indie horror, as tall tales about its in-film lore crept out into the real world and caused curious viewers to catapult its meager $60,000 budget into nearly $250 million in box office earnings. The film’s unique blend of supernatural horror and “The Real World“-esque cinema verite (complete with brilliant amateur actors) sold audiences on its not-so-true story of three film students eager to make a documentary about a Maryland urban legend. “The Blair Witch Project” quickly became a genre staple, spurring the found-footage subgenre. If the Sundance Film Festival hadn’t taken a chance on this sleeper hit nearly two decades ago, we might not have “Paranormal Activity,” “Cloverfield,” “District 9,” “REC,” or countless other genre favorites. If that’s not enough to make you grateful for this bags-of-teeth-bearing, wooden-effigy-crafting work of Wicca, I don’t know what is. –Lena Wilson
“The Witch” (Robert Eggers, 2015)
Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Look no further than the super low-budget, gorgeously staged, colonial American tale of “The Witch.” Not only did this film wake everybody up to the tremendous talent that is Anya Taylor-Joy, but it also delivered one of the best rehashings of old-timey witchcraft terror. Set in 1630s New England, “The Witch” follows Thomasin (Joy) and her family as, after their community banishes them for not being Puritan enough, they try to make a new home out in the wilderness. Spookiness ensues when their young baby goes missing, a very expressive goat shows up, and Thomasin gets testy. (One thing that’s true of horror movies across all subgenres: Never mess with a teenage girl.) More expressive than it is out-and-out scary (at least in the traditional sense, à la fellow A24 release “It Comes at Night”) “The Witch” realizes the full artistic potential of horror and pushes the genre to its aesthetic extremes. The results are, simply put, delicious. – LW
“The Witches” (Nicolas Roeg, 1990)
In what would prove to be his last great movie, Nicolas Roeg — the auteur behind psychosexual horror shows “Don’t Look Now,” “Bad Timing,” and “The Man Who Fell To Earth” — adapted the Roald Dahl novel about an evil coven of witches and the little boy that runs afoul of their evil scheme (they turn him into an adorable mouse). One of the last movies personally overseen by Jim Henson (the other was the MuppetVision 3D movie for Orlando’s Walt Disney World), “The Witches” is genuinely frightening and exhilaratingly weird, thanks mostly to a show-stopping lead performance by Anjelica Huston as The Grand High Witch (yes, that’s actually her name), who, in her witchy form, is absolutely a triumph of makeup wizardry and maybe the most indelible cinematic witch (at least from a design standpoint) this side of “Wizard of Oz” (more on that in a minute). Our favorite feature? The witches’ square feet. The embellishment is such a bizarre Dahl-ism, it could only be brought to life by the brilliantly fearless Roeg. – Drew Taylor
