By Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo.
Hopefully the book will be part of a broader shift towards more focused, deeper critical dives into the nitty gritty of women’s horror filmmaking now that the field has been broadly solidified with incredible foundational texts….”
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ career offers a rich tapestry of interests around the exploration of horror and women’s filmmaking; her works are constantly marked by provocative, deep and focused exploration and deliberate research. Her impressive body of work, including Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, Eyes Without Faces: Masks in Horror Cinema, and The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema paves the way perfectly for The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women’s Filmmaking (McFarland, 2024) in which she delves into how films about witchcraft serve as a dynamic relationship amongst feminist narratives, historical resonance and cultural specificity. Her insights reveal how, through the metaphor of witchcraft, it is possible to intertwine questions of power relations, gender and class that span diverse cultural contexts and historical events. She calls attention to the thematic richness and notable diversity of this cinematic niche. I was honored to delve into and discuss her most recent work with her.
What inspired you to explore the intersection of witches, witchcraft, and women’s filmmaking in The Cinema Coven? I imagine that a lot came from your study, 1000 Women in Horror, or perhaps your other books and contributions to home video editions.
The Cinema Coven is my fifth survey book, after Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (2011/2021), Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), Eyes Without Faces: Masks in Horror Cinema (2018), and The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (2021); all these books have fairly long gestation periods where in most cases I have spent about a decade collecting the actual films I want to write about. A lot of people don’t realise how much time goes into this part of research, but I am always suspicious when people don’t take their time in this part of a major project because for me it is where I really do the bulk of my broader thinking. It’s such an essential part of the process, and it is sacred to me – it absolutely cannot be rushed.
So in this sense, this book was the result of a lot of different things. Certainly my interest in women’s filmmaking had been already established in 1000 Women in Horror, the book ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May which I co-edited, and even the new chapter on women directed films I added to the 2021 second edition of my first book on rape-revenge films.
But when it came to writing a book specifically on women directed films about witches and witchcraft, I initially sat down to see if I had enough primary source material to write a book chapter, and was actually quite surprised to discover that I had enough movies for an entire book. Some of these films are quite obscure, but there were big name titles – things like Netflix’s Fear Street series, Nora Ephron’s Bewitched with Nicole Kidman and the recent Hocus Pocus sequel – that were in a way kind of hidden in plain sight, more mainstream titles that really helped flesh out the diversity of the films I discussed.
You emphasize the connection between witchcraft and women’s power. How do you see this theme resonating across different cultural contexts in women-directed films?
I was honestly genuinely very surprised when I started writing about not only the cultural diversity of women directed films about witches and witchcraft, but also the historical diversity, too. To really give the films space to breathe and stand on their own – and to avoid any kind of ideologically icky reductiveness that would flatten out their cultural specificity – it was really pivotal to amplify and articulate that the films I look at in the book are not one ‘kind’ of movie, nor are they saying any one specific thing.

Some of the objectively strongest films discussed in the book – Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch (2017), K/XI’s Black Lake (2020), Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997) – incorporate cultures and ethnicities very different from my own as a white Australian, so it was a bit of a nuanced balancing act in a way to acknowledge a kind of broader universal folkloric and historical presence of the witch and all she stands for, while at the same time really making space for the cultural and historical specificity of films such as these to be celebrated as well.
What challenges do women directors face in creating horror or witchcraft-related films, and how do these challenges parallel historical perceptions of witches?
The basic idea behind the book is that women filmmakers – like witches – are traditionally deemed to be interlopers or outsiders dabbling in a ‘craft’ (be it science, medicine or movie making) typically assumed to be the domain of men. Women-directed films about witchcraft and witches therefore provided a really playful and interesting space to tease out the nuances of this metaphor in a more detailed, critical manner.
Clearly a lot – although certainly not all – of the films I discuss fall under a ‘horror’ umbrella, and while there have absolutely been very important markers of progress in the last few years such as Julia Ducournau winning the Palme d’Or for Titane and the enormous box office success of things like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, despite this progress horror still is largely and without question very much a boy’s club.
Women directors, despite everything, are still somehow seen as a novelty or as interlopers in the broadly assumed masculine terrain of horror filmmaking.
After I wrote 1000 Women in Horror – which is really a kind of fun, pop encyclopedia/reference book – I desperately wanted to move on from the kind of “Hey! Women make horror movies!” gimmick to something much meatier and specific and critically grounded….”
In your chapter on Coming of Age films, how do you interpret the use of witchcraft as a metaphor for personal transformation?
There has been excellent academic work on precisely this subject in Miranda Corcoran’s 2022 book Teen Witches: Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture from the University of Wales Press, so my small chapter really pales next to the scale of what Miranda does there. But clearly adolescence is a time where young people are teasing out the limits of newfound power and questions of bodily autonomy in a heavily gendered space, which make it a very rich space for tales of witches and witchcraft.
Films like the original The Craft and Zoe Lister-Jones’s 2020 reboot The Craft: Legacy are obviously really key here, and I also talk about movies like Marina Sargenti’s Mirror Mirror (1990), Doris Wishman’s Each Time I Kill (2007) and Rachael Talalay’s The Dorm (2014) to look specifically at self-image and makeover narratives about teenage girls in the space of witches and witchcraft.
You discuss feminist retellings of fairy tales. How do these reinterpretations shift cultural perceptions of witches?
As key figures like Angela Carter have famously noted, fairy tales should very much be celebrated as a plural affair – the fact that these tales regenerate and adapt across different cultures and across time means that they are almost more interesting because of the variations than they are as any kind of unmoving, singular or stable tale.

I have a fairly long chapter on this as it pertains to women directed films on witches and witchcraft, but in terms of Sleeping Beauty alone we get impressively diverse updated retellings or reimaginings of the tale in Catherine Breillait’s Sleeping Beauty (2010) and Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011).
The figure of the witch in each of these is very very different, and neither is – despite their titles – direct retellings of the familiar version of the fairy tale. Rather, we see in these two instances alone just how useful the metaphorical prism of the witch and witchcraft is as a way to start looking at and thinking about gendered power.
In chapters focusing on trauma or grief, what makes witchcraft a compelling narrative tool for addressing these themes?
Just even from a cross-cultural folkloric perspective, tales of witches and witchcraft broadly tap into ideas about power imbalances, a destabilised universe, and the loss (or threat of loss) of things we otherwise take for granted, often through a lens of embodied experience and questions of bodily autonomy.
Bring into this historical reference points like the Burning Times and the witch hunts, and I find that women directed films about witches and witchcraft have in fact provided an incredibly rich space for more personal stories about a whole range of things – grief, motherhood, rape, amongst others – to be explored in really creative and emotionally and intellectually impactful ways.
With successes like Julia Ducournau’s Titane, do you believe there is a growing space for women in horror cinema? What are the next steps for ensuring this progress continues?
The answer is bone-chilling in its practicality: women can only make horror movies if they can get them funded. This is priority number one, because – as many a woman horror filmmaker will tell you – the old prejudices that still somehow see male filmmakers as a normative default are still extremely strong.

Women directors have to stop being seen and treated as novelties, rather than industry professionals equally deserving of opportunities as their male counterparts. In the last ten years especially we have seen an important boost in distribution of women-directed horror – which is often erroneously misread as suggesting women have only just recently started making horror movies – but the bottom line is the purse strings are often held by men.
Far too many people in a position to fund women-directed horror movies still see choosing directors who aren’t cis-het white middle class men as “risky”. Grow up!
What was the most surprising or enlightening discovery during your research for this book?
I was genuinely surprised that there were so many films in the book made in the last two or three years – there is absolutely a contemporary wave of women-directed films about witches and witchcraft happening right now.
My survey books tend to be fairly deeply historical in terms of the case studies I write about, but this one is probably the one with the highest number of contemporary movies – this is something that is happening right now, and women filmmakers are absolutely being drawn to these stories in a very real sense at the moment. Just so many incredible movies – if you haven’t seen things like Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior (2022), Axelle Carolyn The Manor (2021), Mariama Diallo’s Master (2022) or Ariel Vida’s Trim Season (2023), I highly recommend you track them down!
How do you hope The Cinema Coven contributes to discussions about gender equality in filmmaking?
If the book does anything, it is hopefully that it is part of a broader shift towards more focused, deeper critical dives into the nitty gritty of women’s horror filmmaking now that the field has been broadly solidified with incredible foundational texts like Heidi Honeycutt’s I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies (Headpress, 2024) and edited collections like Alison Peirse’s Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre (Rutgers UP, 2020) and Victoria McCollum and Aislinn Clarke’s Bloody Women: Women Directors of Horror (Rowman & LIttlefield, 2022).
After I wrote 1000 Women in Horror – which is really a kind of fun, pop encyclopedia/reference book – I desperately wanted to move on from the kind of “Hey! Women make horror movies!” gimmick to something much meatier and specific and critically grounded in a way that sort of moved on from the novelty factor that it was for so many people. Obviously I am not the first person to do this – there are many books to flag, Patricia Pisters’s excellent 2020 book New Blood in Contemporary Cinema Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror from Edinburgh University Press amongst them – but for me at this point of my work on women in horror it felt really important to dig a little deeper and move beyond the perceived novelty of women’s horror filmmaking.
So many great critics have laid down the foundations for us in the terrain of critical studies of women’s horror filmmaking – it’s now time to get down to the real work.
Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo is an English philologist and has a master’s degree in cultural studies from the National University of Colombia. She is a literature, writing and reading teacher from Minuto de Dios University in Bogotá, Colombia. Her main research interests are in literature, visual research, television studies and cultural studies.