Something Witched This Way Comes: Movie Recommendations for Scare-athon Week 6
Sorry for the pun.
As you might have guessed by the title above, all of this week’s film recommendations feature witches in one form or another. Some of the earlier weeks have already included some of my favorite witch themed films like Burn Witch Burn, The Witches, The Last Witch Hunter, and I Married a Witch, but there are so many great films featuring these practitioners of the dark arts that they deserve a week dedicated to them. You can read read my prior recommendations at the links below.
Witches have long been a part of societies darkest fears. The concept exists in almost every human society and the societal fears they embody can vary wildly and include things like fear of aging (particularly of women) in a phenomenon
called Hagsploitation. There’s more to it than just aging, but the ways that aging alters the body can be quite frightening to the young and to those about to begin aging in earnest. Witches can also represent society’s struggles with sexual liberation, with women’s empowerment as they gain more formal political authority, and grapple with our concepts of femininity and care taking. Think for a minute how many witch tales involve people going for some kind of medical aid, only to find that the Hag of the Woods has cursed us instead. Then there are the tales of witches and missing children. From Baba Yaga’s chicken footed hut that wanders from place to place enabling her to steal children to the witches of Roald Dahl’s tale (not to mention Jack and Jill) witches stealing and eating children is a common trope that combines many of the fears above.Here’s a list of seven witch related films that I think you might enjoy watching. Some of them are classics that have received high praise, but at least one is a personal choice where I think I might just be the only fan the film has.
The Witch
Sometimes a film manages to perfectly capture the classic tropes of a horror mythology while updating it in a way that makes it salient for new audiences. Robert Eggers’ The Witch is one of those films. In The Witch, Eggers doesn’t try to update or shift the mythology of witches and witchcraft, but instead goes straight to the historical sources and pulls no stops in pushing them to their natural conclusion. From the inclusion of the material components necessary to craft a witch’s flying ointment, to the focus on faith and isolation and how doubt and separation from the community can empower evil. It’s a complex movie that touches on so many more themes, that draws deeply from the lore of witchcraft, and it may well be the best witch related horror film ever made.
Warlock
Prior to seeing Robert Egger’s film, my personal favorite witch related film was Steve Miner’s Warlock which is an exploration of a witch who travels through time from 1691 to modern day Boston. A similar time travel conceit was used in I Married a Witch, but that tale was played for humorous effect. Miner’s film, with a screenplay by David Twohy (Waterworld, Pitch Black), has humorous moments, but it takes its subject matter very seriously. Julian Sands is charming and disturbing as the eponymous warlock who has made a pact with the Devil in pursuit of power and the destruction of the Earth.
The witch (warlock) in this film is entirely nihilistic and seeks to unmake creation in the ultimate act of evil. Like Eggers’ film, the movie draws heavily on real lore, right down to the flying ointment’s necessary ingredients, and uses the folklore beautifully. Richard E. Grant is perfect as the witch hunter in the film. He has been in many comedies and could have played his role up for camp, but he plays the role straight and it elevates the film.
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project was released my Junior year of college and I remember all of the promotional materials that aired in anticipation of the film. Of particular note were the promos produced by the SciFi (now SyFy) Channel that transformed the “found footage” aspect of the film from mere conceit to completely plausible. They produced shows like “Curse of the Blair Witch” which aired in July off 1999 during the build up to the wide release of the film. These all gave the film a verisimilitude it would have otherwise lacked.
The most interesting aspects of The Blair Witch Project are that we never actually see the witch in the movie itself and how the film didn’t initially frighten me at all. I left the theater where my friend John Ford and I watched it in preparation of writing a review for the Sparks Tribune. Neither of us was moved by the film on first viewing, but our review wasn’t due for another day so we agreed to mull over the movie before meeting for our regular “dialog” themed review the next day. That night, when I went to bed and turned out the lights, was when the movie caught up with me. I was staring at the ceiling, genuinely scared. It made me reassess the film as one that give delayed fear, rather than immediate cathartic fear.
Seventh Son
If Robert Eggers’ The Witch is the perfect example of what happens when a director stays true to the source material, then Sergei Bodrov’s adaptation of Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s Apprentice (aka The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch in the US) is the perfect example of what happens when a film gets Hollywoodized. In Delaney’s original young adult series, Thomas Ward is an apprentice witch hunter (called a Spook in the books) who doesn’t know whether to trust Old Gregory and his tales of girls with pointy shoes and his naivete might well free Mother Malkin, a witch of the classic variety.
The screenplay by Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight pretty much tosses aside everything that made the book engaging, and Delaney’s book is a very entertaining example of classic witch lore. Yet there is something about this film that brings me back to enjoyable viewing after enjoyable viewing. The film, which was a financial failure that only earned $114 million on a $95 million budget, is more a Dungeons & Dragons movie than a traditional witch tale. I think the film would have been a financial success had they stuck to the original story, but Alicia Vikander and Ben Barnes have genuine chemistry in the film and Jeff Bridges is appropriately curmudgeonly so I find the film to be a fun time. Julianne Moore is very good as Mother Malkin, though with much more sex appeal than the character in the book.
I’m pretty sure I’m the film’s only fan, but fan I am and I watch it every year, even if only to see Kit Harrington as the Penultimate Apprentice that requires the recruiting of the final one.
Solomon Kane
Where Seventh Son abandons the source material in both plot and tone, M.J. Bassett’s Solomon Kane diverges quite a distance from the source material while still perfectly capturing Robert E. Howard’s Puritan Hero. This is in large part due to James Purefoy’s performance as Solomon Kane and the fact that Robert E. Howard’s characters have been the victims of so much pastiche fiction that getting the character right, rather than any plot elements, becomes the most important feature of any adaptation.
When people complain about L. Sprague deCamp’s Conan stories, it isn’t the plots themselves that are usually the source of ire. Instead, it’s a complete misunderstanding of Conan the character as an intelligent character who is as crafty mentally as he is skilled physically. Howard’s Conan isn’t Thrud and Blunder, he’s a character capable of appreciating the arts even as he knows that the artists themselves despise him as a barbarian. Similarly, Solomon Kane is a man of rigid virtue and Purefoy’s performance shines through in what is a relatively weak screenplay that didn’t trust the source material. I imagine this is in part due to the fact that some of it would be very out of touch with modern sensibilities. There is an entire Kane arc that was inspired by H. Rider Haggard that many would view as problematic and shifting away from that was likely an influence on the decision to write an alternate villain and conflict. Weaknesses in the screenplay aside, which I think I am actually overstating because it isn’t a bad screenplay, this is a film where the performances elevate the movie into something well worth watching.
Bell, Book, and Candle
I’m going to take a moment to shift away from the grim and dark and turn toward the witty and romantic. As my earlier recommendations of I Married a Witch and Burn, Witch, Burn suggest, I am a sucker for the romantic witch story and the pinnacle of the witch romance is Richard Quine’s (It Happened to Jane, The Notorious Landlady) 1958 adaptation of the play Bell, Book, and Candle by John Van Druten. The story is a simple one. A young witch named Gillian (Kim Novak) is bored with her life and ends up having a series of screwball romantic comedy adventures with her upstairs neighbor Shep (James Stewart).
The film is a delightful high concept mashup of the traditional screwball comedy with witchcraft lore that is made all the more charming because of a wonderful cast. Elsa Lancaster (the Bride in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein) plays Gillian’s Aunt Queenie and appropriately alternates between angry and charming. Jack Lemmon is very funny as Gillian’s brother Nicky, but the real show stealer is Gillian’s Siamese cat and familiar Pyewacket. This film, along with I Married a Witch, was one of the major inspirations behind the television show Bewitched, but it has a charm all its own.
Weapons
Okay, I almost didn’t include this film because including it in a list of witch films is almost a spoiler, but witches and disappearing children go hand in hand in folklore and Weapons is a very strong entry in the creepy as heck witch film genre. Many of the same things that made Robert Eggers’ The Witch such a strong film are what make Zach Cregger’s Weapons so effective. It’s a movie that uses the traditional witch tale to touch on a host of modern anxieties that range from the very common fear of parents that their children will be abducted to mass shootings and pandemic fears.
A Final Request
I’m looking for someone who is willing to stop by the “Geekside Chats” on a fairly regular basis to talk about a wide variety of pop culture. Ideally, you’d be willing to talk about movies, books, and role playing games. I’m willing to do a rotation for each of those if that fits best, but I’d like to do it fairly regularly. If you are up for it, let me know in the comments and we can try to schedule some discussions.
Well, sadly I'm kind of limited in regards to roleplaying games, and I know a lil about books. But if you need a movie/TV guy to stop by and be as absolutely nerdy as possible., I'm definitely the man for that.