All of Them Witches: Female Anxiety in the Supernatural

The witch genre is having a resurgence in the past five years or so, which is good news for every little goth girl who watched The Craft in middle school and fantasized about having all the dark power the god of creation could bestow upon her. Witches, both in regards to unfairly prosecuted ones of reality and those seen in fiction, tend to be women so films featuring witches often have a foot in the genre of Female Anxiety. They feature women looking for and struggling with power, which is a feeling we can all relate to.

In that sense, Female Anxiety mixed with the supernatural is an uncomfortably perfect fit. For a demographic always trying to be taken seriously, the appeal of having powers makes perfect sense. One doesn’t have to simply sit back and accept her position if she can destroy men by sleeping with them or get rid of a toxic ex with a wax voodoo figure.

Those of you who have been reading Back Row for a while now know that we shamelessly love Anna Biller whose low-budget, immaculately crafted films are as hilarious as they are beautiful. Her 2016 offering The Love Witch brought her a lot of attention, and that’s not surprising. The Love Witch follows Elaine (Samantha Robinson), a gorgeous young woman with a lot of bad luck when it comes to relationships. She spends the movie searching for her perfect man and performing spells on the men she does come across. Eventually, she winds up in the arms of her friend’s husband, and the small town has decided they’ve had enough of her. They call for her to be burned but she is rescued by Griff (Gian Keys), whom she considers the man of her dreams. When he rejects her, she stabs him to death and is left alone in her apartment without anyone.

Describing this movie in the simplest of terms makes it sound regressive and sexist, but rest assured that it is anything but. Elaine is a character formed from thousands of female roles and tropes smashed together, and she falls somewhere between damsel in distress and femme fatale. She speaks openly about wanting a man who takes charge and not wanting to be in control yet she exercises her power over them the instant she can. Being with her literally destroys these men, causing Elaine to blithely shrug and move along to the next, even as her desire to be loved grows beyond her control. She laments to her friend about all this, even asking for sympathy from someone she plans to betray. 

Elaine is an interesting manifestation of femininity: she sees helplessness as an inherently feminine trait yet doesn’t seem to apply any of those ideas to her magic. It’s as if she believes that control can be granted to her only in a certain domain. She is fast to blame others for her problems and proclaims her innocence up to the very end–even when staring her betrayed friend right in the eyes.

For a more haunting and less technicolor witch movie, we move to Zambia for the magic realism of Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not A Witch (2017). I wish it was more widely seen, because I loved this when it came out. Like The Love Witch, this is a film about how a woman’s place in the world is unreasonably strapped to expectations.

Shula (Maggie Mulubwa) is a normal, albeit serious, child who is accused of being a witch in the village where she has just shown up. This is decided by a witch doctor and a counsel in the village without any defense for Shula, who has done nothing remotely witch-like. Other older accused witches are tied to huge spools of white ribbon and made to do hard labor, and little Shula is forced into their numbers.

Throughout the movie, Shula’s powers are ambiguous but appear enough that she is exploited by the local authorities. She is asked to solve a case of theft and to make rainfall even though she is still tethered to the white ribbon, and unallowed to leave. The older women that she is around care for her as much as they can, but it is evident that Shula is unhappy. She tells one of them that she wishes she had been a goat instead of a little girl then is seen leaving the tent while the rest of them are asleep. The movie ends with two men dumping a body, that may or may not have been Shula, and the older witches mourning for her. It begins to rain as they are doing so, and the last shot is the white ribbons fluttering as all the witches have been freed.

Unlike Elaine, Shula is not in control of or nor does she believe she has powers. She is assumed to be a witch because she is serious and doesn’t talk much. There is a subtext of how a woman or girl is expected to behave running through this movie, and Shula truly gives all she has to be accepted into normal society. The cruel joke of it is that this is where she would be either way. As a girl, her options are limited, and if she is not tethered to the white ribbon and being branded a witch, she is trapped in a home and metaphorically tied down with the label of mother. In a time when women are facing terrifying realities, I Am Not A Witch speaks to them all, proving that some feelings and stories really are universal.

Then, of course, there’s the classic Witches of Eastwick (1987), which I might not have included had I not recently read the book. It’s wildly different from the movie, but dare I say, I enjoyed the movie more. It’s not that I didn’t like the book (I read it in about three days so I must have) but the film has a more cohesive quality and presents more loveable versions of the three female protagonists.

Alex, Suki, and Jane (Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon) are friends living in a small Rhode Island town. They’re each single yet hardly lonely, and have interests and careers they like. Completely fulfilled they may not be but who among us is? When a strange, rich man Daryl Van Horn (Jack Nicholson) comes to town, the connection between the women tightens with his influence, and powers they didn’t realize they had come to the surface.

Get ready because here’s where I’m going to discuss the differences between the book and the movie. Reading is fun, kids. Do more of it.

In the book, these women are already practicing witches, Alex being the strongest among them. Still, Daryl's influence drives them to do bigger, more ambitious things with themselves and their chosen careers. What makes it interesting though is that Daryl, for all his preaching and encouraging, winds up failing them as well as himself. Everything he pushes them to do falls apart, and the more successful endeavors, like a spell that gives another woman cancer, carry through. In the movie, Daryl’s main focus is on producing heirs. Each of the characters finds herself pregnant about halfway through. It’s less clear what Daryl wants in the book although the witches have a guess that he’s using them to kill off an heiress he married to get her money as he is burning through his.

Witches of Eastwick the movie has a more direct storyline but also less actual witchcraft. Much of what the women accomplish is by accident until the end where they hatch a plan to take Daryl down. The characters are also a little less fleshed out, as is the case with many film adaptations, but that is rectified by the actors playing them. Cher, Sarandon, and Pfeiffer absolutely make that movie with their performances. It’s no wonder it became a classic. Jack Nicholson, meanwhile… is fine in it.

I for one welcome our witchy overlords back in power. Witch movies making a comeback speaks to a larger trend of people (not just the ladies) wanting more control over how they’re seen. There’s a lot of discussion right now about who has power, who gets power, and what power means to society in general. And that right there, that question of power and control, is the core of Female Anxiety and the spirit of them witches.