A Book Review by Dávid Szőke.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas reveals the potential of contemporary filmmaking to challenge conventional cultural narratives about the witch, offering these figures greater space where they are no longer just passive objects of our anxieties but architects of their own stories.”
The figure of the witch as an archetype for female monstrosity has always captured the Western patriarchal filmic imagination. From the early silent depictions like Méliés’ The Enchanted Veil (1903), Robert Wiene’s Genuine (1916), or Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), through the uncanny antagonists in Old Hollywood classics like Walt Disney’s Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) or the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939), to the romantically charged, comic sorceresses in Halloween hits like Hocus Pocus (1993) or Practical Magic (1998), or to the more sympathetic rendition of the misunderstood and marginalized Elphaba, the original witch character from Frank L. Baum’s Oz-stories in Jon M. Chu’s Wicked (2024), witches and witchcraft have consistently embodied the generally spoken cultural anxiety about female power. Traditionally molded by the male gaze, witches have more often been depicted as the anthesis of the pure and sexually innocent idealized femininity, their demonic nature being marked by old age and physical ugliness, or as hypersexualized, enigmatic seductresses, exuding danger and allure. In both cases, witches have occupied the darkest spaces of human consciousness, whose ethereal presence in cultural narratives often confronts the heroes with their deepest fears and inner depravity. Such ghostly stories have haunted heteronormatively driven perceptions of the demonic and the monstrous female power, subtly weaving themselves into the fabric of our understanding of gender, power, and desire.
The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women’s Filmmaking (McFarland, 2024), the new book by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, provides a remarkable deconstruction of the heterosexist witch fantasies, examining how contemporary women cinema auteurs have liberated the demonic and sexually autonomous enchantress from the captivity of the male gaze. In this work, both the witches of the fantastic realm and those targeted by historical witch-hunts occupy some significant space. As Heller-Nicholas explains, contemporary women directors share some conceptual bases with filmic witches in that by using the female gaze to create unsettling onscreen magic, women filmmakers have long been marginalized for their transgressive vision which has actively challenged grand narratives in an industry predominantly governed by male authority. The rising visibility of films made by women shows, Heller-Nicholas argues, that there is an inherent need to provide a voice for the filmic outcast, thereby unapologetically talking back to the patriarchal canon that literally and figuratively tended to normalize their witch-hunting. Unfolding the tensions between the gender politics embedded in male-directed feature films from the past and the empowering visual narratives by women in the present, Heller’s book explores how alternative modes of representation might rearrange the frontiers of filmic witch depictions.
The book’s first part examines the intersections between fairy-tale narratives and filmic inspirations of real-life witch-hunts, within which the unorthodox portrayals of the witch by women filmmakers are critically reassessed. In Chapter One, Heller-Nicholas sheds light on how thematic issues of witches and witchcraft women made film adaptations of classical children’s stories in a manner that might provide ideas traditionally associated with feminism. Departing from Lotter Reiniger’s 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the author argues that the ideological extent of early filmic witch representations is not to be missed, since sorceresses in women-directed productions are more often than not gender-fluid shapeshifters, driving the narrative forward as important allies rather than being obstacles to overcome. The other witch stories explored in this chapter, the Soviet director Alexandra Snezhko-Blotskaya’s The Magic Swan Geese (1946), Helle Karis’ Estonian film The Wild Swans (1987), Nietzchka Keene’s 1990 visual reimagining of the Brother Grimms’ The Juniper Tree, and two contemporary adaptations of The Sleeping Beauty, one by Catherine Breillat (2010), and another by Julia Leigh (2011), all illustrate how 20th-century and contemporary women directors have tended to liberate the fairy-tale genre from its patriarchal shackles by crafting vivid, multifaceted visions of princesses and sorceresses. Chapter Two elaborates on the filmic reconceptualizations of witch-hunting. The films listed and discussed here, like Ania Breien’s The Witch Hunt (1981), Suzanne Schiffmann’s Sorceress (1987), or Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch (2017; see top image), share the broader sociopolitical narrative behind witch hunting, fuelled by our psychosocial construction of the fictional, yet “truly real” enemies, justifying the marginalization and persecution of anyone deemed an outsider or a potential threat to the dominant heteronormative power structure.
In Part Two, various themes are outlined, many of which have been revisited by contemporary women filmmakers. In Chapters Three and Four, issues of race and class are discussed in films such as Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street-trilogy (2021), Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou (1997), Deryn Warren’s Black Magic Woman (1991), Dorota Kędzierzawska’s Devils, Devils (1991), Jenna Cato Bass’s Good Madam (2021), and Mariama Diallo’s Master (2022). In Janiak’s films, Heller-Nicholas argues that tensions of class subtly intersect with elements of “othering” and intergenerational trauma, integrating queerness and other markers of social difference to examine the complex narratives of personal and collective histories.
In the same vein, by creating narratives from an intersectional lens, Heller-Nicholas claims that witch stories of the last decades have increasingly connected to racial politics. Chapter Five elaborates on the theme of trauma. Here, films like Janet Greek’s Spellbinder (1988), Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior (2022), and Zu Quirke’s Nocturne (2020), are considered for a broader discussion about how diverse traumatic experiences have been embedded in the pop cultural imagination, with the witch character embodying harm or the potential for harm.
Chapter Five places the issues of witchcraft and rape into a #MeToo context, with films like She Will (2020), Black Lake (K/XI, 2020), and Bulbbul (2020) to explore how the issues of violence and abuse have been dealt with in different cultural contexts. Motherhood is examined in Chapter Seven, in films like Agnieszka Holland’s Rosemary’s Baby (2014) and Stewart Thorndike’s Lyle (2014), two adaptations of Ira Levin’s novel of the same name and Roman Polanski’s on-screen reimagining of it (1968), along with Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother (2021) and Lynne Davison’s Mandrake (2022). While Holland and Thorndike’s films are primarily read as feminist reinventions of the 1968 original, the witch character has generally allowed filmmakers to bring witches. witchcraft, and fraught motherhood together in vastly different ways.
In Chapters Eight and Nine, the rituals of grieving and protection are discussed in Elise Finnerty’s The Ones You Didn’t Burn (2022), Catherine Hardwicke’s Dreams in the Witch House (2022), Kate Whitbread’s The Unlit (2020), Shimako Satō’s Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (1995), Dorothy Booraem’s Wake the Witch (2010), Victoria Muspratt’s Teen Sorcery (1999), and Rebecca J. Matthews’ Amityville Witches (2020). Sisterhood as a form of bonding and empowerment is examined in Chapter Ten, departing from the comedies Practical Magic (1999) and Hocus Pocus (1994), and expanding on films like Alexandra Senza’s Flee the Light (2021), Jagoda Szelc’s Tower. A Bright Day (2017), Tereza Nvotová’s Night-siren (Svetlonoc, 2022), and Anne Fletcher’s Hocus Pocus 2 (2022). The witch figure serves as a bridge for multifaceted experiences of gender identity in Chapter Eleven, in films like Francine Rzeznik’s Equinox Knocks (2000), Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2011), and Nora Ephron’s Bewitched (2005). Chapter Twelve examines the coming-of-age aspect of Zoe Lister-Jones’s The Craft: Legacy (2020), Marina Sargenti’s Mirror Mirror (1990), Doris Wishman’s Each Time I Kill (2007), and Rachel Talalay’s The Dorm (2014). Feminist visual narratives about desire are central to Chapter Twelve, in Brianne Murphy’s Blood Sabbath (1972), Jane Simpson’s Little Witches (1996), Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), and Allison Anders’ “The Missing Ingredient” from the film anthology Four Rooms (1995). The book’s final chapter reconsiders the cultural stigma of aging and the older woman as a sheer embodiment of black magic and witchcraft, discussing how filmmakers like Axelle Carolyn (The Manor, 2020) and Ariel Vida (Trim Season, 2023) have offered some fresh perspectives to break down the barriers erected by our sexist societies around this issue.
Considering these themes, Heller-Nicholas’ book provides a rich and compelling roadmap for understanding how the filmic character of the witch has evolved from a symbol of taboo, fear, and marginalization into a much-layered manifestation of resistance and self-awareness. Thus, by redefining genre and gender and exploring alternative cinematic revisions, The Cinema Coven (2024) reveals the potential of contemporary filmmaking to challenge conventional cultural narratives about the witch, offering these figures greater space where they are no longer just passive objects of our anxieties but architects of their own stories.
Read an interview with the author by Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo here.
Dávid Szőke holds a PhD from the University in Szeged in Hungary. He is currently researching counter narratives to antigypsyism in literature and culture at the Heidelberg University, Germany.