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In making a list of the best witch movies, you're really defining how movies depict evil—and more specifically, how they personify the feminine other. In Evil Dead 2, they call the possessed hag in the basement a witch. Why? Because it's a movie, and we all know exactly what “witch" means. Witches are often the earliest villains we learn about as children—chances are the first image of a witch you can think of is the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz or the evil Queen's crone disguise in Snow White. We all think we know what a witch is, and what a witch looks like, even though on film and in historical fact, the images can be wildly different. The problem here is that by setting any boundaries, we lose so much. There are no Harry Potter movies on this list, because that's an entire can of worms—but is any list of the best witch movie complete if you don’t include movies about Wicca? Or movies about pagan cults? Is Halloween 3: Season of the Witch a movie about witches? (It's kind of about Celtic magic. Also television, commercialism and weird goo-filled robots. Halloween 3 is amazing.) How about Season of the Witch with Nicolas Cage? (That movie is about knights killing a demon.) What about movies that just have witches in them, like the Guy Ritchie King Arthur, which has a great performance by Astrid Berges-Frisbey as the witch who trains Charlie Hunnam's Arthur? Or The Witch Who Came From The Sea? (It's a metaphor.) We're in the deep woods already. But here, with many qualifiers, are the 21(ish) best witch movies. 21. VIY (1967), dirs. Konstantin Yershov, Georgi Kropachyov; Black Sunday (1960), dir. Mario Bava; Haxan (1922), dir. Benjamin Christensen; The Devils (1971), dir. Ken Russell; The Seventh Seal (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman; Macbeth (1971), dir. Roman Polanski; Throne of Blood (1957), dir. Akira Kurosawa "Why were you staring at me?" "Because you looked like a witch from a horror movie." —Hausu (1977) Haxan, one of the first masterpieces of the silent era, purports to be an exploration of witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Said to be written by the director after reading the 15th-century inquisitors’ manual known as the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), it tries to explicate the madness of the Inquisition in then-modern psychological terms. It's also a visual marvel, a showcase of the proto-special effects of the 1920s. In 1968 it was re-released with narration from William S. Burroughs, which somehow manages to make it less strange. Some of the most visually gorgeous films ever made are about witches—Mario Bava's debut film Black Sunday is really a vampire movie, based on the classic lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, but it begins with the graphic execution of a witch, who gets a spiked mask hammered into her face. The Russian color classic Viy, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's short story, concerns a young seminary student tasked to spend three nights sitting vigil over the body of an accused witch. The film has truly amazing special effects and a charmingly bleak view of human beings, and its conception of a witch as an old toothless hag who transforms into a gorgeous young woman with jet black hair would recur again and again in more graphic depictions of witches throughout the 20th century. Barbara Steele would play this character again and again, notably in the Long Hair of Death. Ken Russell's The Devils has full on anime-villain logic, where the despicable and cruel Urban Grandier (Oliver Reed) is so evil that he uses a taxidermied crocodile to fight an aggrieved father, only for a psychotic and undersexed nun (Vanessa Redgrave) to accuse him of witchcraft and mass debauchery as part of a land grab by Cardinal Richelieu and the Catholic Church. The Devils is a movie about the consensual madness of witch hunting, particularly in Loudon, France during the 1600s—the era nearly all witch-hunting films return to, a golden age of mass hysteria. Redgrave’s character, deformed and sexually stunted, has unrequited fantasies about Grandier—the most famous and powerful man any of these women had ever seen in person, as this was a period before the concept of celebrity. The nuns’ entire existence is a push-pull of deviant sexual impulses against their shame. Redgrave even suggests to a young woman requesting to join the order that most of the women here are either daughters of disgraced families or too ugly to be married off. This is an unadorned idea of faith, perhaps made most shocking when Grandier, facing his own fiery death, finds redemption in true love and bravery. Russell ensures that we despise Grandier before he’s falsely accused of corrupting an entire convent into Satanic sexual depravity (when he’s really just kind of a corrupt piece of shit who was sleeping with women above his station.) We come to understand that what is happening is not even a witch hunt but a triangulation by both the monarchy (portrayed as effeminate and pedophilic) and the church to wrest control of the independent walled city of Loudon away from Grandier. The thing about The Devils is that there is no witch ever seen on screen—just inquisitors and witch hunters gone mad with power. Many of the greatest movies have a minor element involving a witch burning. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal has a subplot about a madwoman who's been declared a witch being prepared for death at the stake as the Black Plague ravages the countryside. When Max Von Sydow's existentialist knight-errant and his squire first see her, she is nearly comatose and her hands and feet have been smashed. The disquieting thing is that when Von Sydow looks in her eyes, he says he sees not the devil, but fear. Like the rest of Bergman's film, it’s an anticlimax; after the knight speaks to her he feeds her a drug which allows her to die peacefully before she is thrown on the flames. The Seventh Seal is indebted to Shakespeare, as were the midcentury masters of arthouse cinema— both Akira Kurosawa and Roman Polanski adapted Macbeth to suit their own particular aesthetics. Polanski later said that what he loved about Shakespeare was how laconic he was—an entire scene would be written as "He is slain" and it was up to the director how to show exactly how it happens. In Polanski’s film, the three witches who speak of the future king's fate are blind by deformity, each speaking as both a harbinger of doom and a fury cursing him for what he's about to do. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (aka Spider Castle) features a single witch, who tells Toshiro Mifune's feudal lord his future of ambition and downfall. This same witch appears in the Dark Souls games. Both of these adaptations are violent and bloody, signaling a sea change in how classical stories would be told by the respected artists of the era. 20. The Wicker Man (1973), dir. Robin Hardy; Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), dir. Piers Haggard In the three-hour-plus documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, author and director Kier La Janisse codifies the “folk horror” genre as a modern grappling with folk tradition, often rooted in pagan European practices. The earliest and perhaps most sophisticated examples of the form are the BBC’s adaptations of M.R. James’ stories and the films of Nigel Kneale, which both find a totemic power in a culture often literally buried by not only Christianity but modernity itself. But Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man is ground zero for the popular conception of folk horror. (In an extended scene from Ari Aster's Midsommar, Florence Pugh even says "Haven't you seen The Wicker Man?" before her dumbass boyfriend gaslights her into spending the rest of their trip with a white-supremacist death cult. Aster is not a subtle writer.) The Wicker Man is built on a diamond of a screenplay by Anthony Shaffer which does the best trick of ‘70s filmmaking—it makes you think you are watching one movie until horrifyingly, you realize you are watching a different one. Edward Woodward plays a devout Christian policeman searching for a missing young girl on Summerisle, an island inhabited by a practicing pagan community and led by Lord Summersisle, a descendant of that community’s founder (Christopher Lee, never more sinister than when he turns up here in a classical witch’s sack-dress drag for the village’s May Day celebration, with blacked-out eyes and a beaming smile on his face.) The Sergeant is scandalized and mortified by the culture of Summersisle, and increasingly scared about what exactly is being done to this little girl—until he learns that he’s been brought here because as a chaste and upright man of God, he’ll make a fine human sacrifice. Eventually, brutally, we listen as Woodward begs for his life, then offers a final prayer to God as he succumbs to the flames. Satanism, paganism, and the occult were in vogue in the ‘70s; the involvement of actual members of the Church of Satan became a selling point in the advertising campaigns for films ranging from as the camp The Satanic Rites of Dracula to the nightmare meltdown The Devil's Rain. The Wicker Man is often paired in critical circles with two lesser folk-horror classics. The Witchfinder General stars Vincent Price as historical figure Matthew Hopkins, who rained down terror on the English populace in the name of the Crown during the English Civil War. There aren't really any witches in it; it's more of a revision of Price's earlier performance as a Christian minister of torture in Roger Corman's Tower of London. Blood on Satan's Claw is a better film about a fiend's remains being uncovered and infecting a rural community of seemingly innocent people, who begin to grow patches of fur on their bodies. Much of ‘70s folk horror channeled an older generation’s anxieties about youth culture becoming massive and prominent, as the baby boomers came of age and old moral standards collapsed; here, the most classical witch is the nymphette Angel, leader of the cult that springs up amongst the village's teens, who seduces men away from the Lord and engages in congress with an actual, physical devil. 19. Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), dir. Hayao Miyazaki; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), dir Jaromil Jires Witches and their powers can be a fantastic metaphor for a teen girl's adolescence. New powers and qualities about yourself manifest and life opens up to you, but you are also much, much more vulnerable to the often arbitrary rules of the adult world. Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 film, the most realistic and restrained Studio Ghibli movie, uses the idea of the witch as a perfect metaphor for life beating your ass the first time as an adult. 13-year-old Kiki (voiced by Kirsten Dunst in the American dub) leaves her comforting village and her supportive family (of natural-born witches) to spend a year honing her craft as a witch in a midcentury European city. The obvious metaphor here is the experience of moving to the city to become an artist. Although she hasn’t fully mastered flight, Kiki quickly realizes she can make money as a courier, but in monetizing the skill she’s trying to learn, she soon grows to hate herself and her lack of progress. What makes this film different than most of Miyazaki’s work is that it never escalates into pure fantasy; it’s genuinely about artistic burnout and the only solution being kindness and community. The finale, in which Kiki regains her powers in time to save her vaguely rude and aviation-obsessed boy love interest from a dirigible accident, feels like a “We need to end this movie with a big set piece” gesture more than anything else. Although the American dub changes the ending, in the original version Kiki never regains the ability to speak to her cat familiar, and he becomes just a pet. It’s an ending without much of a moral; it's just a snapshot of the moment when life gets a little too real for an artist for the first time. Valerie and her Week of Wonders yielded perhaps the definitive Tumblr-femcel image—Jaroslava Schallerová’s Valerie, sticking out her tongue after being tied to a stake and told to confess she's a witch. Czech New Wave director Joromil Jires’ film is a brief cacophony of gorgeous Jungian nightmare images from the dream world of a teenage girl, rife with garbled sexual and violent images but never serious enough for Valerie to get too upset about. 18. Lux Aeterna (2019), dir. Gaspar Noe; Day of Wrath (1943), dir. Carl Th. Dreyer Gaspar Noe's Lux Aeterna is enamored with film history and incredibly pretentious—quotes from great directors are sprinkled throughout the film, beginning with the witch-burning scene from Carl Theodore Dreyer's Day of Wrath. This is kind of a feint though, as the movie soon turns hard into durational stroboscopic sequences best seen in a cinema, where you get to watch light bounce off the heads of whoever is sitting in front of you. Absolutely hostile to anyone prone to seizures, the film played at Cannes with heavy warnings and paramedics on standby. Noe has never lacked the ability to hold an audience's attention nor escalating tension. He pioneered using low-frequency sounds to upset the audience—taking the intuitive tricks of Eraserhead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and making them deliberate and constant. Noe's enfant-terrible horseshit aside, Lux Aeterna is a very moving experience. We watch as Beatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, discuss what it's like to be sacrificed as a witch on film, how they have allowed themselves to be treated onscreen, and what it’s like to be used, glamourized and tortured in the name of art. Dalle is playing the director of a fictional movie about witch burnings. The crew is mutinous, she's lost control of the set, and the cinematographer is trying to take over the production. Gainsbourg is recieving disturbing phone calls regarding her daughter's well-being; Karl Glusman plays an arrogant little shit using his time on a major filmmaker's set to make connections and berate women he fails to ingratiate himself to. The cinematographer keeps talking about working with Jean-Luc Godard. Then, suddenly it happens. Gainsbourg and two other actresses are tied to stakes against an LED projection screen. The screen starts to glitch, strobing red-blue-green, and the score gets louder and louder. The other women run off and Gainsbourg stays, continuing to perform being burned at the stake without ever “dying,” and you as viewer are drawn into the strobe for the entire next reel. Noe has found a way to make the audience experience a sacrifice, a witch burning, an immolation. Like Gainsbourg herself you are terrorized, then numbed, and eventually you begin to feel yourself reset to the rhythm of the sequence, in a kind of communion. It's Metal Machine Music for your optic nerve. In Day of Wrath, set in the 1620s but filmed in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, is about Anne, the young wife of an older pastor, who learns—from an old woman accused of witchcraft—that her mother was also a witch, but was spared from execution by the pastor, who had designs on Anne. The most disturbing and still-relevant thing about Day of Wrath is the witch-burning sequence Noe lifted for his film, an unadorned depiction of ritual cruelty—tied to a ladder, the old woman screams, begging for clemency, until they drop her face first into the flames. It’s awful, and it has a starkness that nearly all other famous witch-burning scenes lack. The implication of Dreyer's film is that the oppressive and misogynist climate these women are living in drives them to destructive behavior; the treatment of women as evil causes them to destroy themselves and by extension, the people around them. 17. The Blair Witch Project (1999), dirs. Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez The Blair Witch Project is patient zero for found footage as the dominant horror aesthetic. Although the found-footage boom really came years later, in response to the success of the first Paranormal Activity movie, this one popularized the approach; Blair Witch was also an overwhelming hit, grossing several times its initial $60,000 microbudget, thanks to a strong narrative and what we would now call an alternate-reality-game element, featuring a disinformation campaign and an intricate Web site. Even beyond the basic conceit that you’re watching footage discovered after the “documentarians” in the film went missing, the lore is robust. There’s the Jersey Devil-style myth of the Blair Witch, who lives deep in the woods outside Burkitsville, Maryland, and a story from 1888 about an abducted child who escaped after seeing her, and a parallel thread from the 1940s about a serial killer who kidnapped and murdered seven children, making one child face the wall as he killed another. Three arrogant film students get lost and slowly unravel until they start hearing things at night; eventually one of them goes missing. People don’t often make movies like Blair Witch because it’s really hard—the cast were both filming themselves and improvising heavily throughout the movie, and the production mirrored the actual narrative, as the directors terrorized the three leads at night after long days of shooting. The film doles out its scares cheaply but expertly—weird sounds, tiny stick dolls wound with fabric, the endless black void of the woods at night, and eventually a house sitting in a place where it shouldn’t be, rotting and abandoned, its interior walls covered with hundreds of children's handprints. It's really a shame we got any further Blair Witch media; having constructed a modern myth with mousetrap precision, this one ends perfectly, with a sickening thud as the camera hits the ground and no further explanation. (What does a witch do? She lives out in the woods and kills children, for reasons we cannot understand.) Years later Sanchez spoke of the pair's initial plans to make two stylistically different sequels—both period pieces, one set in the 1600s witch-trials era and one set in the 40s, following Parr, neither one a faux-documentary. Instead Artisan Entertainment rushed out a metafictional sequel, Blair Witch: Book of Shadows, which flopped and killed interest in the franchise. Years later, the writer/director team Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett made Blair Witch, a loose sequel/soft reboot of the original; it’s a relatively uninteresting but faithful update until the last third, where the characters become trapped in an endless time-loop in the Blair Witch house. 16. The Love Witch (2016), dir. Anna Biller; Summer of Fear (1978), dir. Wes Craven The Love Witch arrives in the culture immediately after Lana Del Rey's album Honeymoon, now considered the end of the singer’s first aesthetic era. Del Rey has been called both feminist and anti-feminist, especially when it comes to her pre-Lust For Life work, in which every lyric seems to glamorize a kind of romantic immolation. Lana is treated like a pop star, but her most direct antecedent is Fiona Apple. It’s music made by an artist who’s a writer first, about the realities of being a woman and finding glamour in that—if the thing itself is toxic, living in it must be as easy to romanticize as anything else. Anna Biller's film codifies an entire aesthetic—heavily influenced by Russ Meyer, Jacques Demy and Stephanie Rothman's work, interested in a refined aesthetic rather than exploitation thrills—that was unnamed before The Love Witch. Everyone in this film is paperback-level gorgeous, every set and shot is composed to a degree somewhere between Argento and Wes Anderson, and the cast seems to be aiming for a tone resembling the work of non-actors in weird drive-in movies. It's a disquieting experience as it tries to explore a feminism rooted in romantic connection with men, an idea that has Lana written all over it. Whether or not Biller counts Del Rey as an influence, they have a similar sense of both taste and melancholy. After the release of his debut film The Last House on the Left, future Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven lost his job and spent several years driving a cab and directing porn while trying to finance his second feature, The Hills Have Eyes; when he was offered the chance to write and direct a made-for-TV movie about a Cajun witch who moves in with a family in California, he signed up immediately. Especially at this early age, Craven is too good and too angry an artist to be subsumed by the soft-focus drone of TV. The movie’s rage may be class-based, but its subject is the dissolution of the family unit by an outside force. Lee Purcell plays the witch—a jezebel, here to seduce the men and destroy the women one by one—with such a slow turn to make it feel truly insidious. 15. The Crucible (1996), dir. Nicholas Hytner Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a metaphor for the 1950s McCarthy hearings. This ‘90s adaptation, written for the screen by Miller himself, is quality Oscar bait—very portentous but also very well-made. It’s the kind of movie they show in history classes, or English lit, although it also features a fairly-accurate depiction of what pagan ritual looked like in the 1690s (cursing a man with chicken blood, dancing naked in the woods, etc.) Winona Ryder is excellent in her role, cancelling out her strained turn in Bram Stoker's Dracula a few years before; Daniel Day-Lewis seems to be warming up for his most extreme career-defining roles by just being hot and compelling in a period movie. The central story is that after being caught engaging in pagan-ish activities in the woods, Abigail Williams (Ryder) falsely accuses many other women in her village to save her own ass. Decades later, The VVitch would do something more straightforward, ultra-realistic and artistic with similar material; this one, by comparison, is a prestige programmer, but it's the best actors doing the best material. The finest moment of the film: Day-Lewis, offered the chance to escape the country, telling Ryder that in light of what they’ve done, they will not meet on the ship, but in hell. 14. Belladonna of Sadness (1973), dir. Eiichi Yamamoto Eiichi Yamamoto directed 3 adult animated features in the '70s for Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Production studio. Belladonna of Sadness, the last of the trilogy, has since been rediscovered and reappraised in the West, after catching on in the Los Angeles rep-cinema scene in the early 2010s. It’s exactly the kind of movie that is glorified in rediscovery—feminist in a complicated and of-its-time way, full of the kind of prickly contradictions modern movies tend to sand down. It's also a gorgeous movie that—reminiscent of live-action films like On the Silver Globe or The Color of Pomegranates—feels like it comes from a different universe, where psychedelic and confrontational art is provided the budget and production values we associate with Hollywood schlock. Tezuka is the godfather of manga and anime, an insanely prolific artist who worked from the very beginning of the industry until his death in 1989. He was Walt Disney, Jack Kirby and R. Crumb all in the same body, a gigantic mainstream figure but also a very strange and idiosyncratic artist who lived to see his ideas and principles questioned and discarded again and again. Belladonna of Sadness' script was written about the same time as Tezuka's 1970 manga Book of Human Insects, part of his move towards more adult subject matter—the story follows a young woman as she pursues talented men, learns their talents, then moves on, leaving each of them to respond in a dramatically different fashion. Tezuka conceived of the story as a critique of second-wave feminism; ironically, its protagonist Toshiko is one of the best-written female characters in the entire history of comics. Belladonna feels like an elaboration of the same ideas, but perhaps Yamamoto is more of a feminist than Tezuka. After Jeanne, a French peasant woman in the Middle Ages, is raped by royalty claiming prima nocta, she makes a bargain with the devil, agreeing to give her soul to Satan in exchange for great power. In a psychedelic and moving sequence, she agrees to give her soul (and body, as the devil too rapes her in order to grant his powers) to Satan in exchange for endless power, and in doing so, lets loose the bubonic plague on her homeland. Power is inextricably linked to sex and disease; Jeanne offers to save the world if she can conquer it, which leads to her being burnt at the stake as a witch. The closest narrative antecedents are Dr. Faustus and The Passion of Joan of Arc; the only visual precedents are the works of Peter Max and Tandori Yokoo. The sheer power granted by Satan tears through the fabric of time, and Jeanne sees/hallucinates things a medieval peasant could not possibly conceive. If Suspiria (1977) didn't exist, this would be the most beautiful film about witches ever made. 13. Witches of Eastwick (1984); Practical Magic (1998) Terrorized throughout production by producers Peter Guber and John Peters, famed Mad Max director George Miller tried to quit Witches of Eastwick multiple times, and reportedly thought about quitting movies altogether. He later said Jack Nicholson was the only thing that kept him working. Nicholson plays the devil—or a devil, anyway—who’s taken the form of Daryl Van Horne, a local rich guy whose mansion is built on a former site of witch executions. He’s an incredibly charismatic force who changes the lives of three beleaguered women at the end of their ropes—a buttoned-up, infertile music teacher, a sculptor and single parent, and an overwhelmed mother of six who works as a reporter. Each is seduced by Nicholson after first being repulsed by him. Being the devil, Nicholson brings out the most glamorous and confident sides of each woman before he asks too much of them and they have to fight back. Miller is one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, and this cast is amazing—Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer all are doing some of their finest work. Really though, this is a very strange entry in the filmographies of everyone involved, except for Nicholson, who finally gets to berate an entire church about women and their demands on men, a moment in continuity with similar speeches he's delivered in films like Five Easy Pieces, The Shining, and As Good As It Gets. The only problem really is that in an arguably feminist movie, the male antagonist’s big monologue really shouldn't be the best part. In Practical Magic, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock play the Owens sisters, who grew up raised by their witch aunts (Stockard Channing and Diane Wiest). Like many of these movies, it begins with a 1600s witch execution and a family curse, only this time the curse is on the daughters of the coven; any man they fall in love with is doomed to die. Kidman is the chaotic sexual creature who revels in her manipulative powers; Bullock finds a perfect man she loves and has children with him before he’s hit by a truck. Witchcraft in this universe is kind of a mixed bag. As in Bell, Book and Candle, a much better witch film that appears further down this list, no one can really get what they want from their practice. Bullock spends most of the film grieving her husband before a spell she cast as a child delivers her a new love interest, a cop played by heartthrob Aidan Quinn. It’s a strange movie with a vague message of empowerment constantly undercut by weird directorial choices, including a psychedelic desert driving sequence, a timeline that makes no narrative sense, and a weird joke (at the end of this very straight movie) that Sandy B is coming out. Akiva Goldsman’s script is a mess—the random guy Kidman was sleeping with is revealed as a serial killer, then returns as a malicious ghost who can possess people, until he’s finally defeated…by a town potluck that ends with a group of witches led by Margo Martindale literally sweeping the bad energy away. What we remember is important, though—Kidman and Bullock both looking high-glam while disposing of a body, the “midnight margaritas” scene with the witch aunts, and the entire cast dressed as pointy-hatted witches. 12. Hocus Pocus (1993) Hocus Pocus also begins with a scene set in the 1600s, in Salem, Massachusetts, where the three Sanderson sisters (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and a never-better Sarah Jessica Parker) have kidnapped a young girl to drain her life force and stay young forever. They are hanged (rather than burned at the stake—it's still a children's movie); when they’re resurrected three centuries later in the present day, they set out to kill the children of the entire town before dawn in order to remain alive. Directed by Disney Channel original-movie mainstay Kenny Ortega, Hocus Pocus should be trash—instead, it’s excellent, with a strong script by Mick Garris (writer of Psycho IV and many terrible Stephen King TV adaptations) and a terrific cast, including even the child actors (Omri Katz and Thora Birch). Unlike nearly every children' s movie since 1990 it has actual scenes and actual details—the spell book (basically the Necronomicon, the book from Evil Dead that was bound in human skin and written by the Devil in blood), the zombie with his mouth sewn shut, the Halloween ball with the skeleton band, the guy dressed as a cop, and the parents cursed to dance until they die. Hocus Pocus is a quintessential preteen Halloween movie, set entirely on Halloween night and not scary enough to bother your parents. It was also a huge influence on children's movies—Disney itself returned to the well for five “Halloweentown” movies. Sarah Jessica Parker plays the airheaded grunge bass player of your dreams; if you aren't already friends with a Goth girl who has a cat named Binx, you need to get out more. 11. Weapons (2025) A lot of the critical writing about Weapons online has explored the ideological underpinnings of the piece and whether or not it’s an inherently conservative movie—which is strange, because the movie is really a 2-hour setup for a “How many toddlers do you think it would take to take you out?” thought experiment, with French-horror-movie-level gore. Fan theories persist, about whether the film is director Zach Cregger’s way of grieving his former Whitest Kids U Know writing partner Trevor Moore’s accidental death, or whether the subtext is that gays and drug addicts are coming for your children; I think it’s really about watching grade-school kids kill that lady. Weapons owes the most to Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 Pennsylvania-as-hell missing-children film Prisoners, particularly in the way its wide-open, narratively tricky structure dances around important ideas about the ways in which our country is collapsing before finally settling on the most classic image—an old hag who hates kids did it. There is a lot about Weapons that's 1-to-1 with Villeneuve’s movie—cops slipping into violence just because it's easier than doing their job, raging public alcoholism, post-traumatic stress, paranoia about "protecting the children" from a culture that clearly doesn't give a single fuck about protecting children. Prisoners is misery porn made at the highest possible level, and Roger Deakins' natural-light car- chase climax is unparalleled. But Weapons is a lot funnier though, and more of a product of its time—a world of Ring cameras, insane internet-driven true-crime fanatics, mass shootings, overprotective CPS practices, police body cameras, and right-wing parents barking at teachers. This is Trump's America, but really it's the America of Alex Jones and the Real Housewives, where you feel like shit and obsess over something that feels ten times larger than you as your TV screams at you and you stare at your phone, and you drink yourself to sleep, forever, until you die. When Cregger cast Amy Madigan (in the best role she's had in the 20 years since Gone Baby Gone), he told her that Gladys was either an ancient creature pretending to be human or a dying woman struggling to stay alive using witchcraft. Gladys has become instantly iconic, a mildly horrific cabaret act of an old lady—every Halloween party you go to for the next decade is going to feature a Gladys. She's really terrifying for how little she cares about other people and the way she barges into scenes and just says shit through her hideous makeup. Eventually it turns out she’s feeding on the spirits of the people around her—she’s got something like 25 people, including 17 kids, in zombie mode inside her house by the end. Stealing their life forces doesn’t seem to be making her much better, though; she just keeps feeding and using people up, a metaphor that might be the most political thing about the movie. 10. Burn Witch Burn (1962); Curse of the Demon (1957); Drag Me to Hell (2009) An adaptation of Fritz Lieber's The Conjure Wife, Burn Witch Burn (aka Night of the Eagle) boasts a screenplay written by the best Twilight Zone writers, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, during their time on contract for American International Pictures. Peter Wyngarde plays a psychology professor who lectures against superstition in all its forms. He discovers his wife has been casting multiple enchantments on him, mainly spells of protection. He destroys or removes all her protections, totems and trinkets, only to watch his life very realistically implode—one of his students falsely accuses him of misconduct, her boyfriend threatens to kill him, and he almost dies in multiple accidents. It is later revealed much of the terror he and his wife are experiencing is because a rival teacher wants the promotion he's up for. The banality of the cause versus the extremity of what is done to this couple shows just how terrifying this power could be wielded by a true monster. Instead someone just resents your marriage and wants your job. People destroy each other's lives for less every single day. The film owes more than a little to horror classic Curse of the Demon, another adaptation of an M.R. James story; Curse is much more explicitly about witchcraft as a Satanic practice, and features a performance by Niall MacGinnis as Dr. Julian Karswell, an Aleister Crowley stand-in who curses a rival intellectual with a demon that hounds its victims to a nightmarish death. Witchcraft, in this world, is real and its practitioners are successful, even cosmopolitan servants of the dark lord, whose devotion makes them extremely powerful. Although it’s about a gypsy curse rather than a Satanic one, Sam Raimi's excellent Drag Me to Hell is nearly a scene-for-scene remake of Curse of the Demon. The antagonist in Raimi's film is herself a classical witch—a disfigured, half-blind crone who rips out ambitious young banker Christine's hair and curses her in an ancient, foreign, and inexplicable way. This isn't a truthful depiction of anything, except a folkloric archetype of evil. 09. The Lords of Salem (2013); The Devonsville Terror (1983) Rob Zombie was the best filmmaker of his class of torture-porn mavens. His films linger on human moments amid the more extreme scenes. Sometimes this is to their detriment—his Halloween 2 remake is an amazing movie about a teen girl struggling with her mental health and a kind of bad one about pseudo-mystical serial killer Michael Myers. Zombie is committed to developing his repertory company, which is why Lords of Salem features Zombie alums Ken Foree, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Meg Foster, and his wife Sherri Moon Zombie as the protagonist, a Salem, Massachusetts radio DJ and recovering addict named Heidi Hawthorne. Lords is Zombie’s most restrained and minimalist effort—there’s plenty of his trademark obscenity, but there’s a reason and logic behind it. The plot involves the re-emergence of a coven called the Lords to take their revenge on the man that's killed them in the name of God by making his descendant birth the Antichrist, but the film is really the story of a former addict's mental health slipping, and he treats it seriously. The primary influences here are The Shining and The Devils, with a soupcon of Polanski “apartment trilogy” mind-screw. What makes Lords so special is that Satan wins, explicitly. The Antichrist is born and loosed upon the earth. A beautiful detail of Zombie's film is that men fail Heidi in every possible way. Her coworker and ex-boyfriend allow her to descend in what appears to be a very gnarly relapse, and her Ken Russell-inspired hallucinations reveal that both the Catholic church that condemns Satan and the black metal dudes who worship him are posturing and empty in the face of true evil. As Heidi descends into psychic hell before her ascendance as Satanic Madonna, we see popes and cardinals in corpse paint jerking off multicolored dildos. There’s no such thing as masculine sexuality in this world, and male violence doesn’t equal power; women—and only women, played here by Dee Wallace, Meg Foster, Judy Geeson and Patricia Quinn, actresses who’d outlived their usefulness to Hollywood, all delivering career performances—are the ones who can connect with the devil and all he represents. The Devonsville Terror is a very, very realistic movie about a rural religious community that, for the vaguest possible reasons, decides that three women who’ve just moved into town—a one-room schoolhouse teacher, an environmentalist here to test the local water supply, and the host of a radio call-in show— are witches. It’s very clearly a man’s idea of a movie about misogyny, but it gets its point across very clearly. Because of a misogynistic and superstitious culture, innocent women are brutally murdered by rednecks in the name of purifying their town from an ancient witch's curse—there is a curse, though, and one of the women is here to mete out retribution to this farming community. Like all great horror, it's contradictory nonsense that undercuts its own argument, but it's definitely the best movie garbage-merchant director Lonmell ever made. 08. I Married A Witch (1942) Originally to be produced by Preston Sturges until he and director Rene Clair couldn't stop fighting, I Married A Witch is effortless screwball comedy. Veronica Lake was heavily derided by her costars and collaborators—she couldn't act, she was awful to be around, she was using her sexuality to have a career. All of that is pure bullshit, because Veronica Lake is one of the purest screen presences in movie history—her louche, tossed-off delivery is the kind of thing actresses have to put massive amounts of effort to portray. There isn't another performer this side of 1967 Cher who cared less that she was on camera, you cannot take your eyes off her, and her voice lilts through scenes as if she's just been told the building is on fire and the exits are locked but she's so high she starts laughing. It’s another film structured around a curse placed on a family following a Salem witch burning; in this case, every member of the Wooley family is doomed to marry the wrong woman, and Lake’s Jennifer reincarnates three hundred years after Salem to break the heart of gubernatorial candidate Wallace Wooley (Frederic March) and ruin his engagement. The script (Dalton Trumbo did an uncredited pass!) makes a lot of strange rules for witches—they can't cry, they can't die, they reincarnate in fire—and even then it all seems to be an excuse for marvelous circa-1942 special effects like cones of smoke conversing in the midst of a fire. A screwball comedy in which the characters experience the gamut of human emotion over the course of three days—even Veronica Lake, who has kind of made a career of not experiencing said gamut. 07. Bell, Book and Candle (1958) Filmed the same year as Vertigo, with the same leads (Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak) and originally the bigger hit, Bell Book and Candle is a strange film that has more than a little in common with I Married A Witch (and is said to have directly inspired TV’s Bewitched.) Directed by Robert Quine, it’s a wistful romantic comedy set during Christmas in a members-only underworld of New York City witches, with quite a few knowing nods to both the Greenwich Village folk scene and the queer scene. This was Jimmy Stewart’s final turn as a romantic lead, before he gave it up in favor of traditional dramas and playing cruel bastards in Westerns. Novak, meanwhile, is purely hypnotic—the film’s focus constantly returns to her eyes, her voice. She’s a little bit alien but also magnetic; you, too, would fall in love with this woman, although she’s mercurial and a little mean (when Stewart's phobic fiancé is rude to her, Novak terrorizes her with thunderstorms) and can't fall all the way in love with you because she's a witch. The supporting cast is amazing—Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, all being allowed to be funnier and stranger than they were in their leading roles. A marvelous little detail is that none of them seem particularly happy or feel benefitted or fulfilled through their supernatural powers; Lemmon gets his kicks using his magic to turn off streetlamps. After she enchants him, Novak and Stewart end up on the roof of the Flatiron Building and wander around in the snow until they get back to their village apartment building. It's deeply romantic, a classic New York love story about cosmopolitan and sensible people acting against their best interests in a relationship they can't label because that would mean it's real. The real story of the film is not about a witch renouncing her powers for love; it's about a lesbian falling for a vanilla straight man with a boring ass job and blowing up her entire life. Is there a more modern New York romance in a movie from 1958? Last year's Materialists felt like a script written in 2016; this feels like it was written two weeks ago, right down to the strained magic metaphor. 06. The Craft (1996) It feels like there should be a lot more movies like The Craft than there are. There aren’t a lot of canonical teen-girl-gang movies, period—there's Heathers, Jawbreaker, Mean Girls, and maybe Bottoms, if that counts, and there’s The Craft, which predated girl-witch TV like Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are movies that try to be a cultural moment for goth teen girls and often fail—the awful 2020 Black Christmas reboot comes to mind. The Craft is low-key just a gender-flipped The Lost Boys—but it's so cool we have that. Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney) moves to Los Angeles with vague ideas about her own budding supernatural abilities. She becomes friends with three unpopular girls who practice witchcraft. Neve Campbell, just about to rocket to stardom in Scream, plays a burn victim ashamed of her body. Rachel True is a swimmer hounded by a racist popular girl. Finally, there’s Nancy, the most troubled member of the coven, who’s intense and a little scary and lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother and her white-trash boyfriend. They induct Sarah into their circle, and with the arrival of their "fourth," are suddenly able to perform real spells. The girls worship the ancient pagan deity Manon, whom they describe as the entire field that god and the devil do combat on. They’re a girl gang in the classic genre-movie sense, destined to turn on one another in the second act, but will forever remain in public memory as four girls walking down a hallway looking cool as hell. The girls get what they want, and it kind of sours and makes them callous. Nancy, insecure that Sarah is clearly much of a natural at the supernatural, eventually turns to the dark side. But as in Jawbreaker, you really end up rooting for the villain, because Fauriza Balk, in a career-defining role as Nancy, feels like the only real Goth teenager to be captured on screen until at least the next decade. She's never been as good, or seemed like as big a star. The music is uniformly-bad soundtrack-level alt-rock that—minus a Siouxsie and the Banshees song and a Portishead remix—never gets particularly hostile or spiky. Some elements feel icky years later; we’re meant to feel sympathy for jock turned stalker turned attempted rapist Chris (Skeet Ulrich) because he’s under a spell. (A man wrote this script.) But The Craft is forever immortal simply for the moment when a bus driver warns the coven, "Watch out for those weirdos, girls," and Nancy responds "We are the weirdos, Mister." 05. The Witches (1990) Director Nicolas Roeg rarely made films in the American studio system, or even movies that followed a traditional narrative, so his adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches is a little too intense to be a children's movie. Roeg's best films—Bad Timing, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don't Look Now—are elliptically-edited expansions of time, featuring characters feeling lost in the worlds they inhabit. The Witches is pure story delivered plainly, with Jim Henson effects. Dahl's twin instincts were to mystify and uplift the odd while at the same time punishing characters who violated his weird, often racist, classically-English ideals. The villains of The Witches are not only stereotypes but fully envisioned illustrations of such—these are hags who despise children, hoard money, and can't grow hair. They meet at an off-season hotel in Bournemouth and plot to change all the world's children into mice for them to be killed by their parents. It's all very Dahl—whimsical, nonsensical, and cruel. Anjelica Huston plays the Grand High Witch as a diva, a high-femme version of Karl Lagerfeld. When she removes her costume she looks like an overly-sexualized Skeksi with a gigantic hook nose and sunken eyes. The Witches is one of Jim Henson's last screen credits before he died, and the effects here showcase the Henson workshop's mechanical genius at its peak. We watch as the witches turn a small boy into a mouse, leading to many shots of closeups of a talking mouse-boy face. Roeg's film belongs on the shelf alongside ‘80s films like The Neverending Story and Return to Oz, dark and upsetting movies that terrorize their child characters in order to captivate and terrorize audiences in equal measure. A second adaptation premiered in 2020, starring Anne Hathaway and directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script credited to Kenya Barris and Guillermo Del Toro; like all of Zemeckis’ recent work, it’s technically stunning but narratively inert, and it somehow manages to be much less considerate of actual disability than the original from three decades earlier. 04. The Witch (2015) Robert Eggers' debut film, The Witch is not particularly innovative as a work of art. The technical elements of the movie are almost entirely cribbed from The Shining. (The jarring-cut-to-a-flat-landscape move? Pure Shining.) But it doesn't matter. This is an unequivocal masterpiece, one that Eggers has struggled to equal, even while maintaining this one’s distinct, obsessively period-detailed style. The events onscreen feel like things we’re being allowed to see, things we shouldn't be seeing, but every composition is refined, and every scene is an idea being delivered. Unlike many 1600s witch tales, the story focuses on the 1630s in New England. But the characters are all born in England, and speak with English accents, and the movie feels more like a European folk tale than an American story. After a combative hearing in a Puritan town hall regarding how he practices his faith, a family leaves their colony to homestead in the unspoiled wilderness, growing bad corn on the edge of what may as well be an endless forest. Thomasin, the eldest girl, is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, in her first speaking role. You see why Taylor-Joy quickly shot to stardom following this film's release—she’s a film actor, not a movie star, with the qualities that set apart the Steve McQueens of the world; you never get bored watching her do things, and it makes a lot of sense she replaced Charlize Theron as Furiosa in the Mad Max films. Thomasin’s family is never given a surname; we’re left in a closed world of first names. Aside from the Witch herself, there is no world outside the family unit for her. Her father is a selfish and arrogant man; her mother is the kind of woman who resents and suspects her daughter as she grows into adulthood, as if they’re in some unspoken form of competition. Her older brother is callow and wants to be more of a man than he is; her other two siblings are weird, antagonistic little shits, like most 4-to-6-year-olds. That’s the setup for a film that—even down to its stylized title—explores its subject from every possible angle. What is a witch—someone who speaks with the devil through a familiar? A hag who kidnaps and eats babies? A gorgeous woman deep in the woods who seduces and terrorizes young boys. A heathen against common Christian practice? Someone who makes a covenant with the devil? Someone who performs rituals naked in the woods with other women? Is it a woman gone mad? A possessed child driven insane by evil? What if you methodically laid out each possible idea and showed it, not in a hunt-and-peck, Maybe this? kind of way, but simply as events that are happening without contradicting one another. As the eldest daughter of a poor family, she is entrusted with the lion's share of caretaking responsibility of her four younger siblings despite barely being a teenager. When the family is at their most desperate the parents discuss selling Thomasin off to indentured servitude. She's not a person, not in this world. She is an object, or often the subject of blame. Once the baby goes missing (and immediately dies, so we know the search for him is a futile one), she has done something unforgiveable. Thomasin, in her frustration, lashes out at the twins and claims to be the Witch of the Woods, in league with Satan himself. The symbols of witchcraft and curses pile up—blood in the milk, rotting crops, children who claim to speak to their goat Black Phillip. Every aspect of the family’s life falls apart and they are starving, their child missing and their lives falling apart. Have they been cursed or is the father's arrogance, indicative of the Puritans themselves leaving England and imposing their draconian ideas of sin and One of the more subtle moments is in signing her pact with the devil, Thomasin says she has no idea how to write her name. In a world where her parents know only divine provenance and sin, and seem to struggle with the very concept of free will, wouldn't you sell your soul to the devil, if only to be free to have your own desires, your own determinism? The final pair of scenes of the film are indelible -- Thomasin asking Black Phillip to appear to her and agreeing to sell her soul to hin -- the petty trifles he tempts her with show just how empty and ugly her life has been to this moment. Following that we her naked, shorn of every obligation to family and church as she walks into a witches circle and is immediately shown to be a powerful witch, flying above the other witches at the top of the treeline laughing with joy. She’s damned, but she’s finally free. 03. The Wizard of Oz (1939); Return to Oz (1985); Wicked (2024) L. Frank Baum's Oz books were an attempt at creating a fully new and fully invented American mythology; they’re clearly the products of their moment, from the turn of the century into the start of World War I. They’re bizarre and violent despite their whimsical, child-friendly tone, and they seem particularly strange now that time has rendered their arcane political messaging more obscure. Oz has passed into American myth through the movies. The Wizard of Oz is the definitive Technicolor film, and also the definitive witch film—the reason we’ll always picture the Wicked Witch as a green-skinned woman in a black dress and a conical hat, riding a broom. She speaks with a sneer, gazes into her crystal ball, and dies on contact with water. Her power in this world is almost godlike—but she’s still thwarted by an innocent girl who’s basically stumbled in off the street. This is a fantastic lesson often repeated in children's media, fairy tales and hero's journey stories (a farm boy blows up the Death Star, a Hobbit destroys the One Ring); Dorothy leaves the movie with two Wicked Witch bodies racked up. The Wizard of Oz’s impact is so vast it’s almost immeasurable. An entire century of children have been freaked out by the trees coming to life, the flying monkeys, the field of hallucinogenic poppies, and the soldiers moaning a death march outside the Witch’s castle. As a kid, watching the Wicked Witch set an hourglass and promise to kill Dorothy after the sand runs out, Rob Zombie assumed she was going to storm back into the room and beat her to death herself. The Coen Brothers, directors who have never been afraid to steal whenever they felt like it, once declared the only movie they ever consciously reference is the Wizard of Oz. David Lynch's love affair with the Wizard of Oz (expressed most explicitly in Wild at Heart) inspired a whole documentary, Lynch/Oz. Return to Oz, directed by Walter Murch in 1985, takes the material dead-seriously. Dorothy has been back in Kansas a year and dreams of Oz every night; her aunt takes her to a psych ward. Amid Freudian nightmare imagery (the Nome King warping from live action to stop motion, the Wheelers, drowning, a city in ruins), there's also Mombi, canonically the Wicked Witch of the North, who has a hall full of severed heads which she wears interchangeably. When Dorothy tries to sneak down the hall, all the heads wake up and scream; it’s one of the very few movies that have given me nightmares. How we relate to the Wizard of Oz is an excellent barometer of the culture at any given moment. The ‘30s version speaks to a search for optimism in the wake of the Depression. Return to Oz is emblematic of the ‘80s, when children's films were effects-driven and terrifying. And the 2000s have been about franchise-building—both Wicked and Oz the Great and Powerful are prequels that give an emotional rationale for the original's villains and have very little to do with the source material. But Wicked (whose second half, Wicked: For Good, drops later this year) also highlights our need for a cultural force to replace the problematic Harry Potter and a desire for more blockbuster movies about female relationships. Director John M. Chu, a veteran of the Step Up franchise and the adaptation of In the Heights, is the only current director best suited for a high-gloss musical like this one; none of it ever feels silly or arch, largely because of his direction. There is a pretty unpleasant color-graded sheen to the images onscreen, but this is the most faithful film adaptation a Broadway show has gotten since the 60s—especially given how it's been split into two parts. It also has the songs to back it up—you don't need to care about show tunes or Ariana Grande at all to know "Popular" is going to be sung at talent shows until the end of time. 02. Rosemary's Baby (1968) In Adam Curtis' experimental documentary It Felt Like A Kiss, we see a piece of behind the scenes footage from Rosemary’s Baby: Mia Farrow in a dowdy haircut, wearing a fake pregnancy pillow, stabbing herself in the stomach, then falling down laughing. It's an absolute mindfuck, because to anyone who recognizes the set or the haircut, that's Rosemary Woodehouse, miming the exact horrifying thing you fear someone will do to her throughout the entirety of Rosemary's Baby. (We also know it's almost exactly how Rosemary's Baby director Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate died a year later at the hands of the Manson Family, which makes it even more bizarre.) Rosemary’s Baby is based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, which incorporates multiple events from 1965—the popularity of Vidal Sassoon, a transit strike, a visit from the Pope to NYC. Levin sold the rights to William Castle, a dime-store Alfred Hitchcock famous for his gimmick-laden and misogynistic-even-for-the-era films. Castle was always talking down to his audience; his column in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine was written at a 5th-grade level, just barely. In Shock Value, his history of the new wave of American horror, Jason Zinoman details the moment where Paramount studio head Robert Evans agreed to produce Rosemary's Baby; the first thing he did was boot Castle from the director's chair. Instead, Evans went classy and hired European arthouse director Roman Polanski, who had not yet made a film in America, nor developed his cursed reputation as a weird philandering husband, the subsequent victim of an epoch-changing tragedy, and finally a child rapist who fled prosecution. So much is cursed about this movie, right down to the location, the Dakota apartment building, where John Lennon would later live and ultimately die. Farrow broke up with her husband Frank Sinatra during filming; Polanski’s family was murdered shortly afterward. Rosemary is the middle part of Polanski's “apartment series,” following Repulsion and The Tenant, each of which trace a character’s descent into madness. In this case it’s Rosemary, a kind woman whose actor husband (John Cassavetes) wants to try for a baby. A note left behind in Rosemary’s apartment by the previous tenant, who was clearly losing her mind, reads "I can no longer associate myself." Soon enough, Rosemary is driven insane by paranoia—first about what might be happening to her, then what might happen to the baby she conceives under mysterious and nonconsensual circumstances, and then about whether the Satanists next door are going to sacrifice the baby. She’s wrong about everything, and therein lies the horror. But Rosemary Woodhouse is also the ultimate gaslit woman and the ultimate victim of the patriarchy—her coward of a husband sells her body to a cult, and every single person in her life tells her everything is fine until she’s sickly, a prisoner in her own home. She is told she's overreacting by her husband, her doctor, her neighbors—because after all she's just a housewife. After the surrealistic night of the ritual (where she screams "This is no dream, this is really happening!" in the Devil’s face as he rapes her), Rosemary wakes up covered in marks, and rather than showing concern, her husband says "Oh, I'm sorry—I was an animal last night." And when Rosemary finally reaches out to see a different doctor (played by Charles Grodin of all people), he listens to her elucidate exactly what's happening, says Yes, I understand, and then calls her husband to come pick her up. She’s exhausted. Her difficult pregnancy is affecting her mental state. She's just another hysterical woman. Her weird, loud and nosy neighbors, the Castevets (played by the amazing Ruth Gordon and former silent film star Sidney Blackmer) turn out to be Satanic cultists that have been grooming her as a vessel; Roman Castevet (Blackmer) is the son of Adrian Marcato, a famed witch active in the 1920s, again modeled on Aleister Crowley. Roman was born Steven Marcato, and when she discovers this Rosemary's first response is that Roman must have changed his name to avoid his father's reputation. She’s depicted as such a good, earnest person; by the end of the movie when she's sneaking through secret doors with a butcher knife in her nightgown, you see how far these people have pushed her. 1. Suspiria (1977); Inferno (1980); Suspiria (2018); Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Giallo master Dario Argento's Suspiria has a reputation for making no sense, which says more about the state of media literacy than the film's actual qualities. Argento said the movie was his love letter to Expressionism in all its forms. We drown in color, the music floods every scene, every set is immaculately designed, every set piece is structured around a kill, and every kill is the most beautiful thing ever filmed. It’s one of the final films—if not the very last—to be printed using 3-strip Technicolor, and the color itself is a narrative element—certain scenes were shot with a strip removed so we only see blue or red without contrast. It's unreal. The film was advertised on early release for its extremity, even as it was heavily cut by U.S. censors. The first murder is still extreme—after being stabbed so many times we can see her heart through her chest, a woman is hurled headfirst through a stained-glass window, then hanged when it breaks and she falls; the falling glass kills another woman accidentally, almost as an afterthought. A witch riding a broomstick appears in the outline of her blood. Another death involves an innocent girl falling into a room full of barbed wire before having her throat slit. From the hypnagogic construction to the score by Argento and experimental prog band Goblin, this is totemic, titanic filmmaking at the highest level—it's just in the service of a trashy horror movie where pretty girls get stabbed. Argento met cinematographer Lucianio Tovoli one night after a particularly vivid acid trip, and told him that his previous film (Profundo Rosso) had been a tribute to Tovoli's regular collaborator Michelangelo Antonioni. Argento wanted to push the aesthetic depth much further which required a lot of filming on a soundstage. The film references Argento brought to the table belie his origins as a film critic—Stanley Donen's Funny Face, Abel Gance's Napoleon, Brian De Palma's Sisters. First and foremost is the influence of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, especially the hellish run through the black forest and the design of the witch herself. It's impossible to think of a color movie that feels both more like a cartoon and more like an acid trip than Suspiria. The other biggest touchstone is the cinema of 30s German Expressionism, particularly F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. Siegried Krackauer's book From Caligari to Hitler traces how Weimar-period cinema seems to be a barometer and even to predict the rise of fascism, mainly in stark visual language which creates a geometric anxiety. It's like a hallucination of evil to come. Suspiria isn't just a student film packed with little visual math problems. Argento had a lot on his mind about the relationship between German expressionist cinema and fascism. Two of the locations were famous for being sites where Hitler spoke—a bar that was part of the Bier Hall Putsch and a massive and empty square in Munich. Madame Blanc, head of the dance academy where the film is set, is named so to invoke Snow White; Helena Markos, the great witch deep in the bowels of the building, is named after Helena Blavatsky, one of the Nazis’ favorite occultist writers. In a thematic vein Argento would return to again only in his films concerning magic, there is always a twinning between movie evil and real evil. In Demons 2, the daughter is even named after German film critic Lotte Eisener. In The Sect, the lead character sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from Cabaret immediately before the horror occurs. This is a world full of women, where the men truly do not affect the plot and the one who sort of does is only here to explain the occult to a barely grasping young dance student. Another is only here to be brutally murdered inexplicably by his own seeing-eye dog. There is an implied lesbian relationship teased between Suzy and Sara, but this is a hive of highly competitive women who each fill a very specific role—other students are gossiping and rude, teachers are cruel, kitchen staff are brutes with hatchets, Madame Blanc (played by former Fritz Lang starlet Joan Bennet) is a queen bee who is the businesslike face of the school, all hiding the ancient and godlike mother of sighs, Helena Markos, who cannot even be seen by the naked eye. There is a sense with Bennet and Alida Valli's casting that the ingenues of yesterday become the mothers, teachers and wicked witches of the present (a trick later reused to great effect in Black Swan.) The script for Suspiria was a product of Argento and wife Daria Nicolodi's honeymoon the year earlier, which was touring the great occult sites of Europe. Nicolodi said a girls’ school she attended was secretly run by a satanic coven. Nicolodi at least talked like she believed in magic throughout her life. There are implications that the Tanz Akademie is a Waldorf School and that the unreal and haunting interiors are Rudolf Steiner's Goethenum—an architectural marvel that warps light naturally into colors as designed by the famous turn of the century occultist. A sign in the opening cab ride references Oskar Kokoschka, one of the founders of Viennese Expressionism, who was designated a "degenerate" by the Nazi party. The hotel where Pat Hingle is savagely murdered is painted with MC Escher designs. Madame Blanc's office is decorated with Aubrey Beardsley's background art from an early production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Argento’s next witch movie, Inferno is a cursed film. The script, again by Argento and an uncredited Nicolodi, feels like a much more dour enterprise when compared to Suspiria's fairy tale. This is kind of a D&D manual for Suspiria and its world that really didn't need it, built around the idea o
