10 great witch films

Witches have been a part of film from its very inception. In 1896, pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès made what some film historians call the first horror film (though it may be more precisely labeled the first supernatural horror film), Le Manoir du diable. Among the creepy denizens of the haunted manor are a coven of six ghostly witches, brandishing broomsticks and moving in a ritual circle. Méliès made several later shorts that would focus more directly on the witch, such as Chez la sorcière (1901), which places the title sorceress in a stereotypical lair, complete with a huge cauldron and an owl familiar, surrounded by toads, skulls and potions.

The witches of Méliès and his early film contemporaries were one-dimensional, the familiar, pointy-hatted hags of French pantomimes and fairytales. This fairytale conception of the witch carried on into the 1910s with the earliest film versions of Snow White (1916) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910), later remakes of which would create two of cinema’s most recognisable witches of the storybook variety.

Over the decades, the film witch matured along with the art of filmmaking itself, giving viewers more fully developed characters that reflect their time and place, spanning continents and cultures. Whether dwelling in the deep, dark woods or chic Manhattan apartments, the witches on the screen are a touchstone for how society feels about weird women – or women in general.

Here are 10 key films that explore the female ‘other’ through the lens of witches, each in their own unique way.

Director: Benjamin Christensen

Though it’s over 100 years old, the Swedish-produced documentary from Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen remains popular, even as many other silent films are long forgotten. Häxan draws a disparate range of audiences, screened at both serious film festivals and underground dance clubs. The appeal may be due to the fact that its director culled his meticulous historical research on witches down to the most provocative elements. The film’s atrocities and perversions continue to attract viewers who simply can’t look away.

The opening segment is presented as a lecture on the origins of witchcraft, from its roots in ancient Babylon through medieval times. This positioning of the film as an academic presentation, combined with the fact that we are watching century-old footage, makes the later re-enactments of witches at work – robbing corpses, brewing potions – feel documentary in nature. It’s easy to suspend disbelief enough to believe that we’re looking at real witches. And if we’re looking at real witches, it follows that when Christensen himself shows up as the Prince of Darkness, we’re looking at the real Devil. The true evil, though, comes from the men who persecute the suspected witches. The most chilling part of Häxan is knowing how little has changed for women deemed ‘bad’.

Director: Erik Blomberg

The White Reindeer’s Pirita may not seem like a witch to viewers in English-speaking countries, which shows just how rich and diverse the lore of witches is. The Finnish film’s opening theme, a Sámi folk song, tells us that she was “born a witch” with “evil in her belly”. That assessment seems at odds with the beautiful, vibrant woman we’re introduced to, who laughs boisterously while competing in the village reindeer race. After she marries a herder, she finds herself lonely while he is away for long stretches of time, and she seeks the intervention of a shaman.

The visit to the shaman awakens her inherent witchiness, and Pirita becomes a shapeshifter, transforming into a reindeer that lures men into the barren snowscape to prey on them. The witch of Sámi folklore is unlike the witches we’re used to on the screen, a deadly combination of vampire and lycanthrope. “A lot goes on here that southerners don’t understand,” says a villager in the film, and he could just as well be talking to the viewers outside of Finland. The snowy landscape is beautifully filmed, and Blomberg makes the most of the architecture of bones and antlers that litter the real-life sacred site.

Director: Richard Quine

Witches and Christmas may seem like an unlikely pairing, but the contrast is what’s at the heart of the film’s charm. The stars, a mere month out from shooting Vertigo together, play characters that are just as dissimilar, with Kim Novak as cool and aloof as James Stewart is comfortable as an old shoe. Novak’s Gillian Holroyd may be a witch, but she’s ultra-modern, slinking barefoot around her apartment in slim capri pants, surrounded by eclectic African and Oceanic artefacts and a spectacular mid-century metal Christmas tree. She and her peers spend their evenings at the Zodiac Club, a hole-in-the-wall jazz den that caters to the pagan set.

Despite its magical premise, the romance between a modern-day Greenwich Village witch and a mortal publisher grounds its stakes in genuine emotional vulnerability – namely, the rule that a witch loses her powers if she falls in love. Though based on a successful play, Bell, Book and Candle doesn’t succumb to the pitfalls that sometimes accompany adaptations from the stage. It never feels too talky, and the performances include crackling supporting work from Jack Lemmon as a bongo-playing warlock and Elsa Lanchester as the dotty aunt that advises in matters of the occult. Cinematographer James Wong Howe delivers a visual feast with a snow-covered New York during holiday season. Urban witchcraft never looked so good.

Director: Sidney Hayers

Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Conjure Wife regularly makes top-100 lists in both the horror and the fantasy genre, so it’s no wonder that it’s been adapted at least four times. Weird Woman (1944), a 1960 episode of TV’s Moment of Fear, and Witches’ Brew (unofficially, in 1980) all tackled the material. This version is decidedly the strongest, co-written by three masters of horror: Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and George Baxt. Released in the United States as Burn, Witch, Burn, the British-American co-production is an anomalous blend of folk horror and academic politics.

Night of the Eagle is surprisingly feminist for a film written by three men, exploring the extent to which women played a role in men’s success in the 1950s and 60s. In this case, otherwise-regular housewife Tansy Taylor (Janet Blair) has been secretly practising witchcraft to ensure the professional success of her husband Norman (Peter Wyngarde), a psychology professor and professed skeptic and non-believer of pretty much anything. After Norman discovers and destroys Tansy’s talismans, his life is upended by both real and supernatural events that escalate, culminating with the unusual and frightening sequence that gives the film its name. Night of the Eagle is itself like the personalities of its two main characters, alternately weird and rational.

Director: Cyril Frankel

Released in the US as The Devil’s Own, British horror film The Witches is sometimes criticised for its incongruity with other contemporary releases from the Hammer studio. (Director Cyril Frankel’s other title for Hammer, 1960’s Never Take Sweets from a Stranger, is darkly disturbing but similarly overlooked, falling outside the studio’s typical gothic horror output.) Taken on its own, the film is a compelling witchy thriller. Adapted from the novel by Norah Lofts, The Witches makes deft use of Oscar winner Joan Fontaine as schoolteacher Gwen, hired to work in the rural village of Heddaby. Gwen’s past is an unusual one: she suffered a breakdown while doing missionary work in Africa, after being attacked by witch doctors.

Heddaby ought to be relaxing, but things are off-kilter. The minister is only pretending to be a minister, the church is in ruins, and there are more headless dolls and unexplained deaths than anyone would find comfortable. There’s a vivid sense of small-town insularity, intensified by being filmed on location in the village of Hambleden, Buckinghamshire. This is a place that bears little testament to the year, and it could be the 1860s just as easily as the 1960s. The film’s final scene is polarising, but it’s part of what makes this film unique. Depending on your tolerance for camp, you too may love this film’s descent from quaint superstition into full-on ritual magic.

Directors: Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov

Horror films weren’t explicitly forbidden in the Soviet Union, but they were ideologically opposed to a Marxist-Stalinist philosophy that promoted rationalism. Cinema was expected to serve the state by being educational or uplifting. That makes Viy a rare example of Soviet horror, one that slipped through the cracks because of its connection to folklore. Rather, its supposed connection to folklore. The 1835 source novella by Nikolai Gogol has no folkloric roots, and the titular monster, the Viy, was of Gogol’s invention. The misunderstanding amounts to a historical stroke of luck that allowed Viy to elude the censors and bring us this unique example of Soviet weird.

A group of seminary students behave like frat boys: they get drunk, they carouse, they give their Bible to a goat. After one student, Khoma, refuses the sexual advances of an old woman, she climbs on his back and rides him around the countryside like a broom. Realising she’s a witch, he beats the woman to death, whereupon she turns into a beautiful young lady. Khoma has to spend three nights locked in a church, standing vigil over the coffin of the woman/witch that he killed. The events he witnesses grow more terrifying each night, from the coffin flying around the room to the appearance of demons and skeletons. Inventive camera angles and effects work to increase the sense of dread, culminating in the witch’s summoning of the dreaded Viy.

Director: Roman Polanski

While Bell, Book and Candle makes New York City witches seem romantic, Rosemary’s Baby uses the same city as a backdrop to explore the satanic. Ira Levin packed his 1967 bestseller with real events to make sure the story was steeped in the moment. Director Roman Polanski’s script uses every bit of it (Levin called it “possibly the most faithful film adaptation ever made”), so Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse dwell in NYC during the middle of a transit strike, the Pope’s visit, a contentious mayoral election, and even the stage play Nobody Loves an Albatross. The 1960s were unsettling times, and the witches of Rosemary’s Baby seem part and parcel of a world in turmoil. Instead of reaching back in history, the film makes witchcraft seem right at home in what was, at the time, the modern day. The connection still feels convincing.

Though the coven is central to Rosemary’s Baby, it would be terrifying even without the witchcraft. Pregnancy is scary, and Guy’s willingness to sacrifice his wife’s wants for his own success rob Rosemary of what little autonomy she has in an era when women weren’t even allowed to run in the New York City marathon. Rosemary’s lack of a voice works, of course, to the advantage of the cult. Numerous witchcraft films take place in remote towns, with the theme of “you don’t know what’s really going on out there,” but in a big city it’s even easier to hide. Who knows what’s behind those apartment doors? Great performances from Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes keep everything from straying too far into camp, even when it veers close to it (“He has his father’s eyes”).

Director: Dario Argento

Suspiria isn’t just a great witch film: it’s one of the most visually stunning horror films ever made. It’s splashy, lurid and saturated with colour. Jessica Harper stars as Suzy, a ballet student who has come from America to study dance at a prestigious German academy. The moment she arrives, she sees a young woman fleeing the school – a woman who is killed soon after in a spectacularly brutal fashion. Suzy comes to realise that the school is a front for a coven of witches bent on world domination.

A ballet school is a perfect setting for murderous witches, as witchcraft and dance have a long, historic connection (note that witches worship the Devil via ritual dancing in both The Witch and Häxan), and the Tanz Dance Academy has a deep concentration of feminine energy. Argento brilliantly exploits the mood in every possible way, from eerie lighting to the prog-rock soundtrack of Goblin, with whispered words, echoes and improvised instruments like buckets and hammers. The violence is often Baroque, featuring barbed wire, skylights and lots of glass shards, but some of the most unforgettable moments are simpler. A taxi ride in a downpour, a glass of wine poured in a sink, a makeshift dorm in a sheet-draped gymnasium: in the hands of Argento, these images are as unsettling as the goriest kills.

Director: Robert Eggers

After a few decades’ worth of teenage witches, remakes and Bette Midler singing ‘I Put a Spell on You’, director Robert Eggers brought the witch movie back to its folk-horror roots. The Witch is all the more impressive for being a debut effort, not just from Eggers (who also wrote the screenplay), but for a young Anya Taylor-Joy in her first starring role. The film follows a Christian family in 1630, homesteading in the harsh wilderness. After a series of trials (their baby vanishes; their crops fail), they look for someone to blame. Just as in Häxan, where ruined butter or barn fires are attributed to the sins of women, fingers point to the newly-pubescent Thomasin as culpable.

The Witch doesn’t rely on big tricks to create suspense, as in many contemporary movies. There are no big plot twists, no heavy-handed dialogue. In truth, the film often relies on silence (the film’s most noted line, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” is spoken by a goat). The horror of The Witch comes from the vulnerability of young women who are shunned by those who are supposed to love them, and how that rejection leaves them exposed to the dark things in the world that are waiting to be let in. It’s as much a reality in the 21st century as it was in the 17th.

Director: Lukas Feigelfeld

Lukas Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa began as a film school project in which the writer, director and co-producer researched pagan beliefs and folklore about witches to construct a character that might have inspired such myths. The result is a film that shows us indelible and often disturbing scenes that explore the question of whether a witch is born or made. In the case of Albrun (Aleksandra Cwen), a 15th-century woman living alone in the Austrian Alps with her infant child, there’s no definitive answer.

Albrun suffers the psychological damage of generational trauma, social ostracisation and sexual abuse, which festers in the isolation of the remote mountains. The film is genuinely unsettling, not only because of the startling actions of the mentally broken protagonist, but also because of her vulnerability as a woman living alone. As in The Witch, religious beliefs and superstitions exacerbate the situation. The cinematography is particularly compelling, emphasising Albrun’s connection with the earth and all of its dirt, moss, water and fungi.