Combining extensive clips from witchcraft-themed Hollywood films and analysis from authors, scholars, and practicing witches, The Witches of Hollywood is a fascinating documentary that charts the evolution of the cinematic witch and the shifting cultural attitudes that she represents in American history. Film critic and witchcraft scholar Peg Aloi says that witches “embody every single possible permutation of what a woman can be and the ways in which women have been celebrated and worshipped and valorized, but also demonized and misunderstood.” Director Sophie Peyrard’s The Witches of Hollywood seeks to tell the witch’s story and thus tell the story of Hollywood’s often fraught relationship with feminism.
The documentary highlights pivotal moments in the history of the iconography of Hollywood witches. For example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first film to show a witch as anything other than an aged crone, featuring “the very first fantasy vamp witch,” according to Bell, Book, and Camera author Heather Green. Disney’s Evil Queen is both a crone and an alluring femme fatale, both of whom are feared and demonized. According to Pam Grossman, author of Waking the Witch, the Evil Queen’s villainous duality represents the dichotomy of womanhood: “As a woman, you’re double bound. You really can’t win.”
This tension between the ugly, bitter witch and the young, alluring witch continues throughout the film’s analysis of Hollywood sorceresses. Maiden, Mother, Crone: cinematic witches are either beautiful women who bewitch men with their feminine wiles or they are evil old hags who covet beauty and/or power. Motherhood is usually presented as the ideal role for a woman, with witches like Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch giving up their power to become wives and mothers. This emphasis on the heteronormative nuclear family was especially prevalent after World War II, the film notes, but it began to change with the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s.
With the end of the Hays Code in 1968 — a set of moral guidelines for Hollywood films that regulated onscreen depictions of sexuality and “gruesomeness,” among several other topics deemed objectionable — witches entered the horror genre in full force, according to the documentary. In a segment that highlights the film’s main weakness, the talking heads discuss legendary horror films Rosemary’s Baby, Season of the Witch, and Carrie. It’s an intriguing discussion, with insightful analysis into each movie’s depiction of witchcraft and what it reveals about American society, but it feels frustratingly brief. It’s impossible to cover every single witch who has ever appeared in American film and television, but at just 55 minutes, the film has too little time to go in depth and examine over a century of celluloid witches. A miniseries that could expand on the film’s themes (and ideally add more talking heads of color as well as trans and non-binary talking heads) would be a welcome addition to this captivating and important discussion.
Since the documentary moves chronologically, covering major Hollywood touchstones from the 1920s until the present day, it takes a long time for the film to address issues of race in cinematic depictions of witches. Hollywood ignored and marginalized actors of color for a long time (and in fact continues to do so), so it wasn’t until 1996’s The Craft that Black witches had any substantive mainstream representation. Rachel True’s character Rochelle “opened up a whole new possibility of what the Black witch could be in the mainstream,” according to author Dianca London. Prior to Rochelle’s role as a member of a teen coven who pursues her own individual goals through the power of witchcraft, London says, “the use of the Black witch’s power was always in service to whiteness.” Even though Black witches had immense power, they were still essentially relegated to servanthood in Hollywood roles. That changed with Rochelle. The documentary notes that witches of color have shown up in increasing numbers in the 21st century, citing examples like the Latina reboot of Charmed and Gabourey Sidibe’s Queenie from American Horror Story: Coven.
The witch has always been a political figure, in real life and in film. “The ultimate radical, the ultimate revolutionary, she rebels against all oppressive systems of power in her own way,” says Kristen Sollee, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists. The film ends on a hopeful and inclusive note, confirming that a witch is not defined by race or gender; rather, a witch is someone who uses the craft to pursue liberation and seek individual and communal empowerment. Witches existed in all cultures for thousands of years before Hollywood was born and they remain far more diverse than what is shown in Western film and television.
The viewer is left wanting much more from The Witches of Hollywood, but the film is still a fascinating and intelligent analysis of the ways that American cinema uses the witch archetype to grapple with society’s views of what women are and what they should be.
