Category: Witch/Hag

I love The Craft, but I haven’t actually watched it since the 90s. I was delighted to find it exactly as I remember it – fucking awesome.

My clearest memory was of my deep lesbian devotion to goth queen Nancy, played by Fairuza Balk. Tellingly, I had completely forgotten Skeet Ulrich was even in this movie.

It’s the classic teenage story of finding a place of belonging amongst outsiders, only to realise that even there happiness is precarious. Sarah shows up at a new school, not knowing who to trust, and is immediately preyed upon by misogynistic pieces of shit. Friendship circles are a matter of survival, even though they are, especially in the case of female groups, frequently the subject of disdain. When Sarah is taken in by the coven, she is protected, valued and given a place to belong. They have her back, and support her wants, and through the metaphor of magic, have a transformative impact on her.

That feeling of first friendship, of friendship in a hostile environment like high school, feels so important and vital, it feels far too meaningful to fall apart over trivial shit. And yet it does. Those bonds can break and it can happen so fast. The Craft takes its entire first hour to build the relationship between these girls, and then it turns within a scene or two. Nancy’s hunger for power, once challenged, rebounds with such ferocity that those who had once protected Sarah against harm become the cause of it. They use everything they know about her, every way in which she was vulnerable to them, to try to destroy her.

And on rewatch, I like how much of it is not explicitly shown to be magical. Obviously you watch The Craft, you come away thinking of the floating, the glamours, the bursting through windows. But so much of what they see as proof of their powers is actually open to interpretation. The guy getting hit by the car when he chases Sarah into the road, the alight of butterflies in the tree around their ritual, the beaching of the sharks. The film is very explicit that their magic is real, but how easily this could be replicated among lassies who read ‘signs’ in every little thing, and see any likely outcome as a manifestation of their will. The characters all attend a Catholic high school, and thus are likely to expect consequences for their dabbling in magic, and not surprised to see it confirmed. I remember having religious friends at that age who were fretful about having used playing cards to read fortunes, something that worried me about as much as playing gin rummy.

The Craft remains such a good film because both its portrayal of teenage female friendship and experience of magic in modernity are so identifiable. So do the issues that cause the girls to be outsiders, the importance placed on appearance and beauty, mental illness and suicidal feelings, racism, class, addiction, and sexual violence.

I also felt sorry for Nancy in this film. Although ultimately ending framed as the villain, by my score she kills two rapists in this movie, Chris who we see try to rape Sarah, and Nancy’s step-father who it’s implied has been at her. Neither of which I really feel inclined to consider crimes to be honest. It’s Chris’s death that is shown as her point of no return into bad guy territory, but I’m still kinda on her side, because fuck that guy. Sarah’s like, “I think he was sweet deep down”, and it’s like, how deep? When he tried to ruin the lives of lassies in his school by branding them as sluts, when he passed on sexually transmitted diseases, or when he tried to rape you? How much are you willing to overlook for the sake of a pretty face? I think Nancy has the right on this one.

Throughout the film, Nancy is shown as hungry for power, it is the blessing she asks for from the ritual where everyone else asks for solutions to their life’s problems. You see her living in poverty, with her mum a drunk and her step-dad making sexually predatory comments about her, and you understand why those seem like they don’t have a simple solution you can just wish for, when you read the implication of her interaction with her step-father you understand why powerlessness is her greatest fear. Her revelling in power for its own sake is what is shown as her downfall, but watching it, all I could think was how she considers herself to have been protecting Sarah by killing Chris, to be protecting her coven. And it is Sarah that betrays Nancy, with the binding spell, to try to reduce her once again to powerlessness in the face of her enemies. When she finally turns on Sarah and encourages her to take her own life, her words are so telling. “Pathetic,” she spits. “Weak,” she reviles her. Even at her worst, she seems more tragic than villainous.

So good to see a 90s classic again and find it just as great as I remembered.

Really interesting micro-budget practically homemade horror. Shot during lockdown by a family in the Appalachian mountains, it is a pared down coming-of-age horror focused on a mother-daughter relationship.

Izzy and her mum live alone in the hills. It’s a peaceful and happy existence, surrounded by nature, a warm friendship between the two of them. They play in their own band in the garage, and forage nuts and berries to eat. The only quiet seed of discontent is that Izzy is not allowed to go into town when her mum drives down for supplies. Her mum has told Izzy that she has a precarious health condition that means she can only have limited contact with others, keeping her isolated at home. Izzy longs for friends and a life of her own, beyond just her mother’s company.

One day she stumbles upon a girl her own age, whom she desperately tries to befriend. At a party the girl throws, she and her mates trick Izzy into swallowing a worm. The result is an unravelling of the lies her mother has taught her all her life.

Izzy is not sick. She is like her mother, a hellbender. She feeds off the fear of the living.

Izzy’s mum has rejected her nature, giving up the cruelty and killing which imbues them with power, magic and ecstatics. She’s tried to ensure Izzy never knows the temptations of that way of life. But now she knows the truth, Izzy stands at a crossroads. Which path will she choose?

Liked this film, simple story, keeps a consistent focus on the relationship at its centre. It uses its limitations – the pandemic, the small budget – to its advantage, leaning into the sense of isolation and domestic claustrophobia. It’s also a great play on the classic pull and tear at mother-daughter relationships during adolescence.

Really wanted to see this when it came out, kept arranging with my sister to go, but we kept missing it. So delighted to get another chance to see it.

Alice Krige gives the lifeblood performance of this film as Veronica Ghent, an aging actress recovering from breast cancer surgery, who seeks solace in a Highland retreat. Unfortunately she is greeted by a shower of self-improvement enthusiasts who are all characters from a different genre of movie. She is in a feminist psychological folk horror, they are in a twee teatime comedy. You imagine them back home saying, “We went on one of them retreats, didn’t we Linda? The man who ran it was a right character!” Meanwhile Krige is drenched in blood having her third eye opened.

Initially aghast at having to share this very vulnerable and painful time with fools, Veronica eventually comes to believe she is being healed by the soil surrounding the retreat, nourished as it is on the ashes of all the women burnt as witches centuries before. Their pain mingles with her pain, their rage mingles with her rage, and she hopes to make a common cause in avenging injustice.

Because as Veronica withers and fades from public view, as she keeps her mastectomy a secret, and struggles even to recognise herself in the mirror, the director who made her his pet project at 13, who launched her career and raped her, that bastard is getting a knighthood. No fading from the limelight for him, no concerns about his aging or the longevity of his career. Still hailed as a genius, he’s going to be making a sequel to that first film of hers, and he’s auditioning so many young girls to find his new star.

In visions, Veronica sees a woman, an accused witch, bound and bloody, tarred and gagged with a scold’s bridle. And Veronica, here at what she considers the end of her career, the end of her womanhood, potentially even at the end of her life, she still can’t say what was done to her.

So that’s the plot, how was the film as a whole? Eh. Alice Krige is amazing, and if not for her performance, this film would struggle. Kota Eberhardt gives a strong showing as Desi, Ghent’s carer, and their relationship is the most resonant one in the film. In fact, at first I was a little irritated by interruption of all the flashes of visions and memories, because I felt it broke the flow of their back-and-forth, cut into the time need to establish their relationship and anchor the story in the real world. The film as a whole though I felt needed to be trimmer, tighter, that it could have just done with another going over in the edit.

And while this is a feminist horror, it is very much a white feminist horror. From the first scenes of this rich white woman snapping at the working class woman of colour employed as her servant, I was like, eeee. Please don’t let this be another film about how a rich white woman reveals that her life is in fact not perfect, to elicit the sympathy and support of other women, about whose lives she shows not a molecule of interest or solidarity. Please don’t let this be a ‘hug the maid’ moment.

Nae luck. That’s exactly what it is. Their relationship, despite it being one of the strongest parts of the film, goes absolutely uninterrogated, with Desi finding fulfillment through her support and growing admiration and affection for Veronica. Veronica even symbolically adopts Desi as her daughter by giving her a family heirloom, in a scene which has no inkling as to how paternalistic it looks. Veronica even criticises Desi’s androgynous appearance, which firstly fuck you, and secondly even if I kinda understand what you think you’re saying about the celebration of the feminine, fuck you.

The gay couple at the retreat are handed the most explicitly misogynistic monologue of the film, despite being a film which features two (hetero) rapists. One half of the couple eyerolls at the notion of patriarchy and when gesturing with his limp wrist has his hand magically set alight. Which, yeah, feels of a piece with the digs at Desi’s androgyny. So yeah, She Will needs to take another look at itself.

So a mixed bag, but still worth a watch in my opinion.

Wonderful getting to watch Haxan on the big screen with a specially created score.

The classic 1920s silent film examines the witch myth, the mass hysteria of the witch hunt, and its modern explanations of neuroses. In doing so, it births just about every trope of the horror genre to follow.

Surprisingly easy watch, given its age and how foreign that style of silent film is to us now, like reading Shakespeare in school. But Haxan is actually still very entertaining, and funny. And sexy. Like, really really filthy for its time. While tastefully keeping key areas out of view, there is no end of folk being stripped, whether to go out carousing with the devil, or to be poked and prodded by inquisitors. And the devil is overtly sexual, wiggling his tongue suggestively, or presenting his arse to be kissed by a line of witches.

(Side note: I’ve read witchcraft history some, and you’d be surprised how often arse-kissing comes up again and again. They were obsessed with it. Which given that the accounts are pure nonsense, the articulation of collective nightmares, makes you wonder if that wasn’t the medieval equivalent of the ultimate taboo sex act. The lack of adequate sanitary conditions probably made rimming a do-or-die sport so it would have been something you daren’t ask for, and thus its unattainability making it the object of obsession. Pet theory, nothing to do with the film.)

The filmmaker presents Haxan as a lecture in the history of the witch and the witch hunt. It explains the medieval worldview, and what the witch represented in that time. He even uses a pointer to gesture to interesting features in paintings and artwork from the time. The stern seriousness of these moments are used as permission to go into dramatisations of witch tales, complete with scantily clad women dancing to the devil’s piping, or nuns breaking into hysterical mass possession and casting aside propriety, or a pious man of the cloth begging to be flogged for his sinful thoughts. It’s actually very funny, leaning into the ridiculous, by showing women dressed as cats sneak into a church, supposedly as the story goes, to defecate on the holy altar.

Which, again, gotta say, the costuming is amazing. 1922 this film was made, and it actually still looks really good. The devil’s imps that accompany him on fife and drum remind me of nothing so much as the Fireys from Labyrinth, a movie made more than 60 years later. From the skeleton horse to the demonic pig, the costume design is just excellent.

The film concludes by rejoicing that we live in more enlightened times, where women are not decried as witches, but instead diagnosed as hysterics. Don’t know how to break it to the director but electroshock treatment and lobotomies were not the huge step forward he thought they were. And in making the connection, articulates so precisely who came to regulate and oppress women in the modern era.

Possibly the best part of Haxan is, after all the women in the nip being caressed by demons, after the men being driven wild with lust due to spells, after the demonstration of the modes of restraint and torture for scientific and totally not titillating reasons, the word for The End comes up on the screen in Swedish: SLUT.

The Deathless Woman is a documentary about the persecution of Roma framed around the legend of an undying Roma woman.

The unnamed woman was the pregnant wife of the leader of a group of Roma people in Poland during the 40s. When a pig went missing in the nearby village, a local man accused the Roma of the theft, and the Nazi occupiers massacred the whole community. The woman was shot and thrown in the unmarked mass grave, but in the legend, she does not die, becoming eternal in her rage, crying out for justice, for someone to bear witness to the suffering of her people.

The film starts with the buried woman narrating her story, and telling how she bewitches a London artist, subtly steering her towards uncovering her story. The artist, beset with omens, finding birds native to Poland dead her garden in England, begins to research the history of the Roma in the Holocaust. In Auschwitz, 21,000 Roma people were murdered, but on one night in May 1945, they rose up in defiance, turned on their Nazi guards, and refused to go to the gas chambers, a single act of extraordinary resistance in an impossible time. She visits a still and placid lake in Hungary, where over a hundred men, women and children lie in an unmarked mass grave hidden beneath the water.

The filmmaker uses the story of the search for the undying woman as a framing device for interviews with survivors. In Poland, a local man tells of when he was a teenager, being forced to dig the grave the Roma were thrown in after being shot. In Hungary a Roma woman tells how her mother, as a little girl, survived by hiding beneath her own mother’s body until after the shooting was done. Roma people speak of how present the fear still feels, that the majority will turn on them suddenly, and prejudice will catch alight into genocidal violence once more.

And as the film draws to a close, the quest becomes less about unearthing the deathless woman, but joining in her vigil, her eternal watch over her people, and sharing in her rage at the injustices done to them. It ends with the testimony of the mother of a man murdered in 2008 as part of a string of attacks by neo-Nazis on Roma people in Hungary. Separated by more than half a century, her story is eerily similar, the same elements, the guns, the fire, the chaos of not being able to find loved ones, the grief, the ash. Across Europe, the right is one the rise, and divisions and hatred are being stirred once more for political gain. The film asks us to keep watch.