WHAT WENT WRONG - Witches! A Primer

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

As spooky season approaches, Chris and Lizzie explore a brief history of witches. Find out how they’ve evolved in folklore, literature, and entertainment from ‘MacBeth’ to ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to ‘Weapons’ and beyond! Plus discover how ‘Practical Magic’ fits into this witchy arc, and what the upcoming sequel may bring to the cauldron. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies, and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone if you have magic on your side, or do you? Or should we burn them? Or see if they float? Or, I don't know. I don't trust women. Lizzie, what are we talking about? We're talking about women. No, we're talking about witches. We're entering, the very tippy top of spooky season, I would argue. And also, of course, we're covering the OG practical magic because of the release of the second one. So I thought, why not just double down?

Why not triple down on witches and kick this all off with a primer? I'm sorry, Chris, I'm going back to the pronunciation of primer that we all know and love about witches. If you want to say it wrong, you're more than welcome to. I do want to say it wrong. It's my right. It is your right. Totally fine. All right, Chris. What are your thoughts and feelings on witches, the vitches, if you're forward to- Oh, love them. Okay. Great. Yeah. Witches are great. Big Witch fan. Big Witch fan. Big Witch Energy. I, no, I've always liked witches as a concept. Nicholas Rogue's adaptation of Roll Dolls. The Witches always made a big impression upon me, and I really liked that book as a child. And the Angelica Houston performance is very fun in that movie. I haven't rewatched Practical Magic for the podcast yet,

But I saw it when I was young and I remember enjoying it. And then even things like, I don't know, Halloween town. Oh, yeah. Pocus Pocus was a big one. Snow White, obviously, going back. But we've had some great witchcraft, screencraft, witchcraft. In recent years, obviously the vich, as you, the VVo Vich and Robert Eggers' update slash throwback. And then most recently, Weapons was one of my favorite films of the last few years, which is a great witch entrant.

We're going to talk about both of those witches on this episode. So I'm a big witch fan. Love a good witch. Big witch guy. Love a good witch, love a bad witch. Love a bad witch. Love a wicked witch. Love them all. Great.

All right. Well, today I thought it would be maybe not fun, but at least informative, to walk through a brief history of witches. And more specifically, a brief history of the way witches have been depicted in literature and, of course, eventually in film. And, Chris, the thing that is most interesting to me about all this research is that that witches maybe more than any other archetype are often a bit of a canary in the coal mine. If you pay attention to how society depicts its witches, it will often tell you how that society wants to treat its women. Poorly. Badly.

Almost always badly. Yeah, not much of a plot twist, I guess. Not really a uniform distribution around good. It's kind of like skewed to one side. No, it's like how bad, how bad does it get? I did read one theory. I don't know if you came across this in your research, but I read a theory that, I don't know, maybe it was the 15th century.

No, this would have been 17th century, New England. Not a good time to be a witch. No, there was perhaps a mini, not technically an ice age, but like a sort of atmospheric event that caused a lot of crops to die, and that one of the reasons there may have been a spate of witch burnings at the time was climate change, basically. But they got the causality reversed, of course. Well, that's actually, I mean, we're going to talk about that quite a bit. That's most of what was happening.

Yeah. Is that people were just looking for explanations for bad shit that was going wrong. And the easiest thing was to point it at the old lady in the corner. Yeah, exactly. But Chris, I actually don't want to start in Salem, Massachusetts with a bunch of teenage girls. We will get there. But I would actually like to start in Innsbruck, Austria, with a bad monk. So sometime around 1485, a Dominican friar named Heinrich Krane. marched into the town of Innsbruck with his panties in a twist, because about a year earlier, the Pope had issued a papal bull, which informed the residents of then Germany, I believe this was part of that region at this point, that their country was being overrun by witches. And this papal bull granted inquisitors, like Heinrich, the right to persecute and prosecute said witches. So he's very excited about this. But much to his dismay, the townspeople don't really care, which is like super embarrassing. So there were rumors that a woman named Helena

Sheiberin had caused the death of a local knight via witchcraft. But the thing is, nobody really seemed to think that this was the church's problem. Because the idea of witchcraft falling under the church's purview was actually pretty new, which I didn't know until I started really looking into this. Exodus chapter 22, verse 18, says, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And even though Some think that that may be a translation issue and may have meant poisoner Heinrich did not care. And he had his work cut out for him. So he went really hard after Helena. And it didn't help that the first time she saw him in the street, she spat on him and called him a bad monk. She wasn't wrong. She was also a notoriously independent, outspoken woman with a rich husband. Now, if this was America, seems like everybody probably would have burned her at the stake as fast as possible. But something kind of unexpected happened here. The town kind of stood by her, or at least. least they just didn't really support Heinrich. He accused at least 13 other people of witchcraft, and then he dug his heels in really trying to prove it. He interrogated them, tortured them, but he did not get a confession. Eventually, the local bishop was like, sir, you have zero evidence,

and you need to get out, get out of town. So he did eventually leave, but Chris, like all good trolls, he was not going to give up that easily. So he went back to his little stone basement, and he started writing up his manifesto. To the abbey? Yeah, he went back to the catacombs. He wrote the Malias Malifacarum. Oh, he wrote the Malias Malifaccarum. Okay.

Do you know what that word means? No, but I know of it as one of the, as like an occult text, sort of. Sort of. So it means hammer of witches. Cool. He wrote it 1486. And Chris, it was a guidebook on how to identify, interrogate, and successfully convict witches. Nice. Pretty cool. So this is where we get the concept of a witch's mark, which is basically

just a random spot on a woman's body that the investigator was allowed to search for and that purportedly fed her demon familiar. I would have been screwed. I am covered in moles. Me too. I would have been dead so fast. I have a giant mole on my back. It's like so big. Is it okay? I got checked. It's totally fine. They were actually like, it's so big. We're not worried about it. It's were like through the uncanny valley of mole size. Great. I took up my shirt and they're like, oh, you're fine. Like, this would have killed you right now.

But also, please put your shirt back on. We don't need to see that. It may have its own brain, but you're fine. So it also outlined torture techniques and declared that torture and death were essentially the only correct ways to truly identify a witch. Dick Cheney style. Yes. Basically, most importantly, it proclaimed that witches were probably ladies.

If it's a witch, it's a bitch, trademark. Heinrich Kramer certified cool guy. Yeah. Also, like, they're not talking to me, so, like, it's probably the women. I'm pretty sure it's all women. Now, if this happened 100 years earlier, it probably wouldn't have amounted to that much. But, Chris, what civilization-altering invention had popped onto the scene around 1440? Ah.

The printing press. The printing press. Normally thought of as a good thing, unless you're Heinrich Kramer. This is why we can't let people read. This is why we can't let people read. This is why you should have kept the masses in Latin. But this was also like OG fake news. This was, exactly. And I mean, even the founding fathers were pretty against magazines and or local newspapers, I believe, for example. Because they were like, yeah, they were like, this is, we're proliferating information far too quickly. We need to control this. Like, you know, ASAP, the masses will be faked out. Well, that's completely correct. This led to Kramer's book actually becoming a bestseller in the region, I believe. second only to the Bible for over a hundred years. I mean, that's a great box set. The Bible and Malias, Malifakarum, yeah. Well, the reason I'm telling you this is that this piece of, essentially,

fanfic, I'm not exactly sure what we should call it, but this piece of fake news is really the beginning of the witch-hunting craze. But let's back up a little bit, because witches and witchcraft were not always considered a direct threat, and they certainly weren't always considered a religious threat. Back in ancient Mesopotamia, magic was not pitted against religion in the way that I, that I at least think of it being now. Instead, it was like religion used as a way to explain the unexplainable. So this is what you're talking about with like a very cold winter. Natural phenomena, unexplained deaths, illness. There was also a very widespread belief in demons.

Shout out to Pazuzu from the Exorcist. Yeah, Pazuzu. Lamash do also, I think, attacked pregnant women and babies. Is that a lady demon? Not so cool. But figurines of these demons were commonly worn by people trying to protect themselves from that specific demon. So if everybody's walking around with amulets doing spells, what makes a witch a witch? The answer, I think, is sort of like bad intentions.

Because everybody's kind of doing something. Also, being a lady helped. And while there were very few mentions of benevolent witches in early texts, although there are some, most seem to agree as time went on that when you combine women with magic, bad things happen. It's obviously also not an accident that one of the only positions in which a woman could hold any kind of power, in this case magical power, is deemed bad. So right from the get-go, the term which does seem to apply almost exclusively to more marginalized groups, most commonly to women. That's not to say that it was exclusively women. It was not. There were plenty of men who were also accused of being witches and or potentially practicing witchcraft. Highlander. Yeah, exactly. That's the only one.

Just Highlander. Also, it didn't just refer to people who cast spells. The idea of a witch could refer to those with, like, Liam Nason, a very particular set of skills that you can't explain. Oracles would be a great example. One of the earliest witch figures in the Bible is the witch of Endor, who was closer to a medium. She brings back the dead prophet Samuel for King Saul to have a little chat with. Samuel predicts that Saul and his son will die. This, of course, does come to pass.

She's essentially whoopey and ghost. That's like as far as she. goes. Also, like, George Lucas just pulling names from everywhere, isn't he? Oh, certainly. Yeah. This one goes out to Sharon in Australia. A little bit of a pastiche. All right, go ahead, Lizzie. All right. So for most of the early days, even though belief in witchcraft was extremely widespread, it was still not viewed as a direct threat to religion. Those were very separate, nor were witches necessarily viewed as criminals. It actually wasn't until around 400 AD that St. Augustine started to make the argument that pagan gods were demonic in nature.

And since paganism was more closely associated with magic and mysticism, then by the transient property, magic must run on a demonic engine. And it also didn't help that Christianity was now positioning miracles as exclusively acts of God. So they have a bit of a catch-22 here because they basically can't really acknowledge magic because they're saying all miracles are by the hand of God. So we don't even really want to talk about the idea of black magic or witches because then how would you explain that if God is. the one doing all of the magical miracles. Isn't this kind of where, like, Gnosticism breaks off to, because Gnosticism allows for...

A little magic to creep in? A little magic. An original mover. A lesser God. Not just the Christian, although I know there's the three bodies. But yeah, it is interesting how that Christianity really says, we're going to take the ball and go home, and no one else can play

with it. Yes, absolutely. You're not allowed. Everything is God. This is all God's domain. God supersedes everything. And if you are worshipping or even considering the existence of something else, that isn't just like your belief. It is inherently demonic. That's the shift that starts to happen at this point. So for a lot of the medieval period, belief in witchcraft did remain pretty widespread amongst the common people, including in benevolent forms like healing magic, herbalism. And the church basically turned a blind eye.

Actually, in 1258, Pope Alexander IV essentially told church investigators to, like, bugger off and leave your everyday witches alone, saying that the church really doesn't need to intervene unless heresy, i.e. directly working with the devil, was involved. But things start to change in the 1400s. Universities were being formed and newly educated groups of elites. You shouldn't trust those. We're pouring over ancient texts, particularly some ones from the Muslim world. And many of these described very complex magic, cosmic forces. and of course some demons. And suddenly an idea started to form, particularly in the Western Alps, that people practicing magic, they were not isolated spellcasters in their little huts, Chris. They were members of

a secret satanic cabal. There are no new ideas. We've been doing this since the dawn of time. Can you imagine what a cesspool medieval Reddit would have been? It just would have been the same as our event right now. There would have been no difference. It just would have been an old English.

Like, that's the only difference. Might have been more fun, though. Maybe. So in the 1430s, a small group of writers who were mostly church officials, legal authorities, they started to describe how witches would meet in secret groups, worship the devil, murder children, and plot directly against Christianity. And this is really one of the first times, at least in writing, that you see witchcraft pitted as a direct threat to the church itself.

And my understanding is that it had to do with the idea that performing any kind of magic involved summoning a demon, unless you're God, who I guess gets a free pass. So if you were practicing magic, you were worshipping demons. According to historian Mimi Brock, quote, probably the most gruesome thing that people imagined witches to do is people imagined some witches might grind up or use parts of humans, especially parts of unbaptized infants to make them into a paste, to make them into a potion and anoint themselves in order to fly. Now, if you're wondering, how did we go from herbalism to flying baby paste, the answer may be rooted in a little anti-Semitism. A lot of the imagery I just mentioned was already associated with Jews. There's the killing and eating of Christian children,

gathering in secret, conspiring against Christendom, etc. These are not new ideas either. And the idea of witches having hooked noses also does trace back to anti-Semitic roots as well. It's an easy way to other them since aquiline noses are a more Mediterranean trait and much of this was happening around Europe. So why start attributing this sort of thing to witches? It may simply have been that the church and some secular courts were looking for new crimes to prosecute and new ways to exert power. It's kind of like the 15th century version of the Patriot Act. You mentioned Dick Cheney. He would have loved it. Nice. And this is when the term witch really crystallizes into more of a defined legal category, which is fun. All right. So now we're caught up to Heinrich Kramer and his Malifakarum,

hammer of witches, et cetera. With every new town that this stupid book spread to, more witch trials followed, which was a bad thing. Obviously, it's bad for the accused witches, but Chris, any idea why this may have been bad for quite literally everyone in the town? I mean, causes paranoia and distrust amongst society and divides people? Yeah, those are all bad things. But also, there's basically zero medical practitioners in these areas.

And often the people who are being accused of witchcraft were the only. healers in the town. They were growing herbs, brewing potions, you know. So basically what you're telling me is RFK is showing up at all these towns right now. It's not totally dissimilar from what's going on. So this led to the European witch craze from the late 1400s through about 1782, and around 45,000 people were executed. Most of the accusations did come from people, like you said, trying to explain away their bad luck. Had they recently argued with a neighbor, receiving. an angry look from someone. Is that why all my crops died? How about the old childless lady who lives on the outskirts of town? What does she do to my crops? Yeah, what's she doing out there? Minding her

business. Why is she so happy out there by herself? Doesn't she want a husband? She must be taken pleasure in my misfortune. Everyone in Europe sounds like they're from the panhandle. Everyone in Europe does a bad panhandle accent. Of course, as this panic grew, Chris, it also created a new job opening. There we go. Now we're talking about the political platform we're building, bringing jobs to your town. We've entered ice territory now. We're creating jobs.

And this job was the witch hunter. Your mother and I are not for the asteroid. We are for the jobs the asteroid is creating. Now, this was a very lucrative position, Chris. In 1644, a man named Matthew Hopkins claimed that six witches, that attempted to murder him. And this launched his career, for sure, as one of the most prolific witch hunters ever to enter the game.

He was responsible for at least 300 trials and executions. And, of course, he charged for his services. This reminds me of there was a really great article that people should look into, might have been ProPublica or something that put it out, but it was about this guy who created this completely based-in-nothing system to determine the guilt of, individuals who have made 911 calls, basically that when they are suspects, and it is a system of, well, you need to listen to their answer and the way that their voice sounds, blah, blah, blah.

And the example that's used in this article is there was this woman who's like 18-month-old child suffocated in his bed. And this guy said, well, according to this, my super sophisticated system, she definitely killed him. And this one was convicted largely on this person or his program's expert testimony. And it's all based on nothing. It's just gobbly gook. And it's opportunistic. And he sells it as, and I have no doubt he believes it.

That's fine. But he sells it to police departments who, for whatever reason, are purchasing this thing. Yeah. And so I encourage anybody out there. There's an American Psychological Association article called Guilty Collar, Real World Implications of a flawed 911. tool, and it's called Considering Offender Probability and Statements Scale, is what it's called. Wow, that's horrifying to think that that might be something in the back of your head when you're calling

911. And yes, and the ProPublica article is called how Jessica Logan's call for help became evidence against her by Brett Murphy published on November 20th, 2022. And the detective is Eric Matthews, who's involved in this. Matthew, Matthews, a connection. Yes. It is absolutely mind-boggling. The lack of sophistication in this, which is being used to put somebody away, perhaps for life, in prison. By the way, this mother also had at least one other child. Oh, my God. So this other child is being deprived their parent. Check out this article, witch hunting remains a lucrative business within the police community, apparently. Well, you said something interesting, Chris, which is that you said, I have no doubt he believes it. I have some doubts that.

Matthew Hopkins believed what he was doing because... Yeah, I smoked weed with Johnny Hopkins. He knew what he was doing. He knew he was doing. One of his favorite tests was actually to prick the witch's marks. And if you didn't feel the prick, you were a witch. But it is believed that this worked so well for him because he used a retractable pin. Yeah, of course.

He's David Blaine. God damn it. See you in hell, Matthew. Yeah. Cool magic trick. Again, this is the problem with aligning economic incentives, right? If you say finding this thing will yield rewards, you will figure out a way to find the thing, whether or not it exists. Yeah, well, this is like the people saying that we shouldn't allow anybody to be betting on wildfires.

For obvious reasons, I would say. Yeah. That's happening, by the way. So other witch-hunting tactics included tying suspects some to their toes and tossing them in the lake. And, of course, if they floated, they were a witch. If they drowned, they were not a witch, and they were also dead. So that's a great test. In 1606, peak witch-hunting craze, which has officially entered Entertainment,

appearing as three weird sisters in what play, Chris? And Macbeth. That's right, Macbeth. I love Macbeth. It's great. That's my favorite, Shakespeare. Very good. And so much imagery from this play has become synonymous with witches.

Double, double, toil, and trouble, fireburn, and cauldron bubble. The cauldron, the three crones. That's all thanks to Willie Shakes. But I do want to point out, he doesn't really. refer to them as witches in the dialogue. It's only in the stage directions. They're also not evil, in my opinion. That's correct. They're not. Yeah. So I'm sure he didn't want to visit from the Matthew Hopkins of the world. And the fact that he used the word weird, that word is actually derived from an old English word that's closer to the idea of fate. So they are positioned more like ancient

oracles than they are the kinds of witches that were being hunted when he wrote the play. This is also where the word weird shifts from its original meaning, I believe. And it is worth noting that at the absolute height of witch frenzy, King James, the king at the time, was publicly anti-witchcraft and black magic. Shakespeare both declines to call these women witches, and he makes it very clear that Macbeth makes all of his own decisions. Yeah, yeah. But Macbeth is one of my favorite stories in this tradition that we continue to explore,

even with all the way through, like, you know, looper and stuff like that, of your fate can still exist, even as you inexorably guides yourself toward it. And I love that fun tension of Macbeth seems fully capable of making his own decisions. And yet, even though he's aware of his fate, he steps into it wholly with, oh, my God, who's the man who is not born of a woman, who. McDuff. McDuff, whose name always makes me laugh. But, yeah. But anyway, I love Macbeth.

It's such a good storytelling. Well, and I think, you know, to your point, like, you could read the witch's lines as though they are encouraging him because they're not telling him that something bad is going to happen. They're saying, you know, basically you cannot be destroyed by anyone born of women. But it's a warning. You could also, it's a warning or it's a prophecy. It's a prophecy. I mean, they all come true. But either way, everything that happens ultimately happens because McBeth and his wife are greedy dummies. You got to watch Don't Look Now. Nicholas Rogue, Donald Sutherland, 1970 something, I can't remember. But you have to watch it because it's kind of. of that idea. There's this blind woman and her sister who are maybe witchy, who are trying to warn Sutherland through Julie Christie, and it's so good. And it all takes place in Italy. It's kind of like it got a jalo, that type of Italian slasher from the 60s vibe to it. Check it out. I will. But I do think Shakespeare is saying something pretty pointed here, given what we know about when he wrote this. Yeah. But just 20 years after Macbeth hit the stage, Puritan colonists, who probably didn't go see that play, set sail and landed.

in Salem, Massachusetts. No, they left because of those places. That's right. They were the least fun people possible. They were already living very strict and isolated lives before they left. Our ancestors. Yeah, good times. And now they were getting way more than they had bargained for in Massachusetts,

including constant friction with Native Americans and French settlers, and, of course, the ever-present threat of starving to death. Now, 1692 marked one of the coldest winters on record. this is what you were talking about. And it pushed panic in the colony to an all-time high. It, of course, reached a fever pitch when two young girls, nine-year-old Betty Paris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams, started acting weird. A doctor couldn't find anything physically wrong with them, so he diagnosed it as the work of an evil hand. The girls were pressured to reveal the perpetrators of their supposed torment, and of course they eventually accused three women. Sarah Good, a homeless woman, Sarah Osborne, an elderly poor woman, and Tituba an enslaved woman.

Tichiba understandably said, fuck this, and immediately named other supposed witches in the community, kicking off what we now know as the Salem Witch trials with a very simple concept.

If you are accused of witchcraft, your best bet is to confess and name more witches. If you don't, you're probably going to hang or you're going to get smushed like poor Giles Corey. I'm going Denzel at the end of training day.

I got files on everybody here. That's what most people did. By spring of 1693, over a hundred people had been imprisoned and more than 200 had been accused. The madness did finally stop. Do you know what stopped it? Did the weather turn? No, I love this so much.

Somebody accused the governor's wife and he was like, just hold on here. Just hold on one second. Hold on. Easy now. He stepped in, suspended the special court, released prisoners, and overturned a bunch of sentences. Now, no one knows exactly what caused this mass hysteria. Some think maybe ergot poisoning, moldy bread,

even some kind of mysterious brain inflammation disease, but nothing has ever been confirmed. I don't think it was any of that. I think they just freaked out. Yeah, I think this stuff spreads. We continue to see it spread, you know? Yes. I mean, QAnon. Yeah. QAnon is dumber than that. Just saying. Like, with the amount of information we have available today, you know what I'm saying? That's the thing. 1692, we're dying from starvation and freezing. I can understand losing your mind. You're looking for reasons why. Yeah, exactly.

Yes. And you're also trying to figure out, like, is there anything we can do to fix this? And, of course, the answer is be nicer to the Native Americans, but they can't do that. So they're going to start accusing their own people. But also, like, even if they were nice, it was just, yeah, bad times. And also, you didn't, some of the Native Americans probably didn't want them there even if they were friendly. No. So, like, you know, no guarantee.

Now, thankfully, as the Enlightened. took hold and science was becoming more of a thing, which trials began to peter out. The final execution in Europe is dated to usually around 1782. Real bummer to be the last person. That would suck. Hold on. Science. Oh, you already did it? All right. Well, okay, that was the last one. But even though witch trials were dying out, witches in literature, were just getting started. In 1812, the Brothers Grimm published Children's and Household Tales, a collection of fairy tales that they had basically compiled from oral stories that have been circulating around Europe for decades. These featured two very prominent witches. Of course, the child-eating witch in Hansel and Gretel

and the evil queen in Snow White. And if Shakespeare intentionally made his witches ambiguous, the Grimm's made theirs 100% evil. Beguous. Bigguous. They also really codified the idea that witches are solo ladies who are out to get children. Again, this is very different from Macbeth, which was, was previously, you know, sort of the idea of the witch. And then in 1893, a woman named Matilda Jocelyn Gage wrote a manifesto titled Women, Church, and State. In it, she stated what now seems very obvious, which is that the witch hunts were a pretty thinly veiled excuse to eradicate some powerful, independent, and intelligent women. Gage wrote, quote, a witch was held to be a woman

who had deliberately sold herself to the evil one. Anything could be used as evidence of witchcraft, possessing rare knowledge, having an unusual witchmark, suffering from mental illness, owning black cats, the use of verbs for healing, performing black magic, or having an ability to float or swim. But those condemned as sorcerers and witches as heretics were in reality the most advanced thinkers of the Christian ages. They killed all the smart people who knew how to swim. Literally. She's right. I know. It's just, it's just, yeah. For the first time ever, the witch was being reframed as a victim.

And Matilda's influence did not stop there because in 1900, her son-in-law wrote a book, a series of books, actually, that introduced a brand new concept, The Good Witch. Who was her son-in-law? Oh, El Frank Baum? El Frank Baum, yes. I was like, is it Frank L or L. Frank? I always get them reversed.

It is L. Frank Baum. The book was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which, of course, pits a good witch versus a bad witch. Visual depictions of witches also started to change around the turn of the century. Suddenly, they weren't always crusty old hags. They were often young, soft, and very beautiful. Now, when the Wizard of Oz hit the big screen in 1939, Glinda reflected this new good witch. But its depictions of the wicked witch hearkened back to the old days with a few existing tropes.

So let's talk about what the wicked witch looked like. You have the hooked nose. We talked about this. The warts, these are dating back to the witch's marks in the Malias Malificarum. Pointy shoes. This one's a bit weirder. Apparently both the Catholic and Anglican churches regarded pointy shoes as, quote, contributing directly to people's sexual proclical.

Livetes, according to Andrew Miller of the Museum of London. So I guess the Wicked Witch is horny. They turn me on. The black pointy hat. This one is thought to be linked to early anti-Quaker prejudice. I guess this kind of hat was very common in the 17th century, but Quakers actually refused to take their hats off when preaching. And people were not stoked on Quakers because they believed in things like gender equality. So naturally, a lot of them were accused of witchcraft. And then, of course, there's the broom. Yeah.

No one's really sure where this came from exactly. It may have been an easy way to connect women to witches since household duties tended to fall to women more than men, but this was a long-held attachment to witches. It may have also been associated with a pagan fertility ritual or with a belief that witches good up staffs with hallucinogenic ointments and rode them around for a good time. That's a real thing.

Okay. We're going to... Just go ahead and leave that there. But there is one quintessential evil witch trope that the Wizard of Oz added on its own. Green skin? Green skin, yes. The filmmakers did this because they wanted to show off technicolor. That is why they made her green.

The technicolor on, I mean, 1939. Oh, it's so good. It's crazy. It is so good. That's also why they changed the shoes to the ruby slippers from silver. Also why the Emerald City is green. But for whatever reason, the green skin really stuck. For bad witches, that is.

Just three years later, the good witch was morphing into The Hot Witch. And in 1942, Veronica Lake starred in I'm Married a Witch, where she plays Jennifer, a 17th century witch, who dooms all men and the family of her accuser to constantly marry the wrong woman. What a curse. Flash forward, she's been freed from her ethereal bonds, and she decides to use a love potion, yada, yada. Of course, obviously, you know,

she makes this man fall in love with her to torch. him and it has unexpected results. Did you see the Love Witch? Love which is great. Love which is very fun. Yeah. Definitely pulling on this big time. That's right.

Even visually, it harkens back to that. It was 60s, but yes. Yeah. But there are some big changes here. Jennifer is blonde. She's super hot. Super hot. But at the end of the day,

she seems to believe that love is the greatest power of all. And she trades her witchy skills to basically become a domestic housewife. So a lot of the messaging is the same, though, which is bad. It's kind of a little more. made. Yeah, basic housewife is the goal. The woman has to trade her power for the bliss of domesticity at the end of the day. Yes, which is an ongoing theme with witches. So in 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. And among many other things, this did address the anger that a lot of women felt at the time because during World War II, they had experienced more independence than ever.

And then they were told to go back home right after in many ways mirroring what I married a witch was pushing, encouraging domesticity over independence. And Friedan's book was a watershed moment. And then one year after it came out, what TV show hit screens across America? Bewitched. Bewitched. Yes. Did you ever watch it? I did. And also, kind of I dream of genie is kind of the same thing. Yes, but she's a genie. I know, but I'm just saying it's kind of, you know, we're potato potato here. But yeah, bewitched. I watched reruns of Bewitched on like Nick at Night as a kid. Yeah. Me too. I really loved Bewitched. super fun. Bewitched is the this. Yes, the nose. The nose. I always

forget, because I dream of Jeannie's the body wiggle. Yes, the body wiggle. Elizabeth Montgomery is in Bewitched, and she wiggles her nose very well. Like, really well. I know. Nobody else can do it. No. And she's amazing in that show at playing the comedy of being this, you know, all-powerful being married to just

a bumbling, basically useless idiot. Played by Dick York, who's also very funny. Yes. A common trope that would continue for 50 years through the shot episode films. Yes, indeed. So there are two sort of main readings of Bewitched. I think both of them are valid. One is that it is a staunchly feminist show. You know, it's tracking a talented, in this case, magical young woman. She's struggling to balance her own ambitions and she's having this awakening of power and then also has to juggle that with the idea of being a suburban housewife and that it's kind of walking that line. Another read is that it shows, yes, a talented, powerful young woman with a substantially less, talented husband and that what the show is really saying is that it's in her best interest to hide her power in order to survive in what is still clearly her husband's world. I think it's both. Both are true. Yeah, I think it's 100% both. It's a reflection of the time during which it was

made. I think it's probably as subverses as it could be to still reach such a huge audience. Yeah, I think so. And that's what makes it interesting. So throughout the rest of the 60s and 70s, we did see a real reclamation of The Witch. It was now a positive and even a feminist figure. And And of course, also in the late 60s and 70s, there was an occult boom in cinema. Think The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby. But the 80s saw a real dearth of big budget, high-end, spooky witch or witch-adjacent content. You have any guesses why? Were we just moving away from women-centered stories in general towards like the action movies and stuff like that?

I'm not sure. Horror movies were moving towards slasher's as opposed to witch stuff? So it does seem to track pretty directly with the real. reaction to free love, civil rights, and feminist movements of the 60s and 70s, mainly Jerry Falwell's moral majority, which was campaigning very hard against a perceived corruption of, you know, good folk, particularly by Hollywood. There's a lot of witch stuff interestingly in Italy around this time. So if you get like Susperia, right, and then also 70s and then phenomena with Jennifer Connolly.

And then Don't Look Now was shot in Italy, largely, even though it's a Nicholas Rogue movie, 70s, yeah. So you've got that, yeah, all in the 70s happening. But yeah, 80s. But when was the witches? Was that 90? Well, the Witches of Eastwick is 80s. But basically there's very little sort of like high-end occult content. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's all on the fringe. It's not in Hollywood specifically. No. There's a lot of B-movie. There's obviously Evil Dead. There's a lot of classics. But you're not seeing these sort of major Hollywood productions in the same way that you were. But by the end of the decade, the tides do start turning again. because of girl power. And as the girl power movement of the 90s took hold, we start to see the advent of the Teen Witch,

kicking off with 1989's Camp Classic Teen Witch, which is amazing. I don't know if you've ever seen it. The idea of a teen witch was, of course, not new to the 90s. Sabrina Spellman first appeared in Archie Comics in 1962. But according to scholar Miranda Corcoran in witches and the cultural construction of female adolescents or a short history of teenage witches, teenage girls often seem inherently terrifying. They speak in a shared code of strange slang and acronyms. Their rituals, friendships, and rivalries seem intense and fundamentally Byzantine. To the uninitiated, they can seem like a strange, uncontacted tribe, or obscure cult. Their language, behaviors, and dress appear obscure and inscrutable. You can draw a line from something like The Craft right back to the Crucible and even the Salem Witch Trials themselves. Everybody's scared of teenage girls. Sure. And speaking of the craft, 1996 is the craft.

It was a watershed moment for the popularity and accessibility of witchcraft. Chris, have you ever seen the craft? Yeah. It's so fun. Firusa Balk. Of course. Robin Tunney. Yeah, Robin Tunney back in the day, who's not really aged very much.

No. Yeah. I mean, I haven't seen the craft since middle school or high school, but I enjoyed it. Oh, my God, I loved it. I had a couple of girlfriends who were girls who really, really liked it. Did they think they could be witches after watching it? Because I did. 100%.

Yeah. The one that stuck with me more just because of the scope and the tone was so unusual to me. It was not a teen witch one was, I technically would put death becomes her in this category, kind of. Kind of. Yeah. Isabella Rossellini is sort of a sorceress in that. Yeah. So the craft is important in terms of on-screen witches.

It's obviously it's a teenage wish fulfillment story. and even though the movie got mid to bad reviews, it became kind of an instant classic and it propelled a new generation's interest in witchcraft and paganism. And the timing was perfect because it coincided with the earliest days of the internet. Suddenly, you could look up spells.

You could find where to buy Wicca books. And Andrew Fleming, director of the craft, made sure to hire a Wicca consultant for the film who helped authenticate the narrative and also made sure that the spells used would be recognizable to anybody with access to a spellbook, for example. I certainly thought that I could be a witch after watching it.

And the craft managed to distill both the power and the fear of teenage girls into one movie that also made witchcraft pretty cool. But if the cratch, if the cratch... But if the crotch was going to change the world. If the craft broke through the broomstick ceiling shows like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed, really softened the image of witches, making them even more accessible while also building on the power of sisterhood and positioning witches as full-blown, heroes at this point. So by the time practical magic was released in 1998, we were fully in the era of, I would say, the fun and games witch.

This movie is based on the 1995 novel by Alice Hoffman, and it builds on a lot of the groundwork that we've already laid with a few important twists. It leans all the way into the sisterhood angle by focusing on a multi-generational family of witches. The two witchy leads are the heroes of the film, and, so. succumbing to their magic and power is what eventually saves the day. Love is initially pitched as being at odds with magic. In fact, the film opens with the 17th century witch, cursing, not unlike I'm married a witch. She curses her own descendants, though, not the accusers

in this version, with the inability to maintain love. And this time it's because anyone who loves an Owens woman is destined to die, which feels really impractical. But whatever, I guess she was mad. Of course, eventually, it's love that breaks the curse. Or does it, we'll find out in practical magic, too. But there are a few things this movie does pretty differently. And I think one of the big ones is the aesthetics of it. If the craft made Witch's Cool, Practical Magic made them Nancy Myers. Like, the production design. It's so good. It's the William Sonomification of witchcraft. I love it. Barbara Streisand loved it so much. She tried to buy their house. It wasn't the real house. We'll get into that

in the episode. It's very aspirational witchcraft. Yes. Exactly. Yeah, everybody wanted to live in the Owens' house. It's organic. It's full of flowers. It's a kind of kitchen built for midnight margaritas. It's amazing. It also differentiates between Sally and Jillian's powers without really diminishing either of them. Sally may be the stronger witch. Her magic may be more powerful, but Jillian arguably has stronger empathy, intuition, and social skills. And the movie doesn't necessarily prioritize one over the other, which I do really like. I like this movie a lot. I'm very excited to get into it in Monday's episode because the backstory is a lot more interesting than I expected. So more about that on Monday.

Other works, of course, reimagined the backstories of famous witches like Maleficent or, of course, wicked, reframing them as not inherently evil, but just complicated. Then you have obviously things like Harry Potter, also reimagining the idea of a witch and wizard in general and looking at them in their childhood. But the friendly, relatable witch of the late 90s and early 2000s faded, as we all collectively realized that perhaps the fight for women's rights needed to kick it back up a notch. And by the 2010s, the on-screen witch was once again far more serious and way more political. Think of movies like The Witch, a Susparia remake. Even Midsomar, which I think you could argue is in this realm. They seem to reimagine witches as complicated beings pushed to the outskirts of society by society. The witch in particular was called wildly feminist by Wired, and Jex Blackmore, a spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, said that the witch was more than just a horror movie, but a film about female rebellion and what it means to be seen as an outsider and the impact of patriarchal societies creating witches out of women who don't fit the rules.

I think that that idea of creating witches is very important for this era of the on-screen witch. So the rise of the powerful, complicated, and serious witch coincided directly with Me Too and Times Up. and a feeling, at least I felt for sure, that real progress was being made. Which did all kind of come crashing down when the 2020s hit. Peyton McCarty-Symus, author of That Very Witch, Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch film points out that as conservatism rises, our on-screen witches change pretty dramatically. They often go in a more cartoonish, sometimes even comedic direction, and they tend to lose any complexity or more specifically any humanity.

As of the 2020s, they point out, backlash to feminism has returned with a vengeance cloaked in a conservative defense of traditional, read conservative, cis-white, or religious femininity from tradwives to Sydney Sweeney. And Chris, there's one movie in particular that Peyton McCarty Seymus believes marks a not-so-fond farewell to the feminist witches of the 2010s. It's a movie you and I both really enjoyed from 2025. What is it, Chris? Warpens.

Warpins! Better known as weapons. Now, McCarty Seymus told Fantasmag, quote, Sporting a face full of clownish white pancake makeup with a shock of red lipstick smeared over her mouth, Gladys is an equally textbook kind of witch, an evil child-eating crone. The feminist opening passage turns out to be Crager's real headfake, because as it turns out, the conservative parents are right. There really is a witch out to get the kids in this town. She just doesn't look like Anya Taylor Joy anymore.

Now, McCarty Simas is not saying that Weapons is a bad movie at all. In fact, she says she really enjoyed it. And I don't think that she's saying there's anything inherently wrong with this portrayal, I think her point is it seems to be marking a change in the way that we are depicting witches on screen. And I want to close with this quote from her. When talking about which movies, I tell my audience is to follow the rage. Who is it directed towards and to what end? Where witch-adjacent, hagsploidation films like the substance direct that rage outwards towards patriarchy, here that rage is boomeranged back again onto that perennial anti-feminist boogie woman, the witch. It is interesting.

Interesting. I do not have the same read on the substance. I don't think the substance is nearly the feminist film that other people portray it as. Interesting. Shots fired at the substance. I do not. Do not. I like the substance, but I don't think it is as progressive in certain ways as a lot of people have said it is. We'll hold that for another episode because I would love to hear more about that. This did get me thinking, though, because I really love weapons. I still, I think, you know, obviously it opens with Julia Garner's character. or being quite literally accused of being a witch and being the one who is doing something to the children. And this is an interesting point that, like, they are correct. There is an actual witch, but the witch is not a complicated person. It is this absolutely horrifying clown demon

that, you know, is, like, holding a Pizza Gate in her basement. Yeah. I mean, I think the cosmic joke of what they're saying, that I think that's kind of the point is, what if Pets Ciccate was real is kind of the, you know, the joke at the end. But really, I would argue it's more complex than what she's saying. I think that we have reason to believe that Josh Burlin's character is borderline abusive, especially with the way his child acts at school and with the anger management problems that he has.

Like, nobody, this movie does not end well for anyone. And I think that's kind of the point. The town kind of tears itself apart. And then literally the witch is, everybody is torn apart at the end in some way or another. Well, I think it's holding up a mirror. I don't think it's advocating for anything. And I don't think that she's saying it is. I think she's saying that it is functioning as a reflection of more of where our society is today than, for example, when the witch came out.

Yeah. But I also think Crager's a far less obviously political director than other directors. Like, he may have a political position, but I think he tries to hide the ball. You know what I mean? On that stuff, pretty effectively, generally speaking, whereas certain other folks, I think, I think, for example, I think Eggers is very specifically saying, like, look how, look how, look how, onia Taylor Joy is constructed through the abuses of her family and their inability to process. Right. He's essentially saying she doesn't have a choice. Like that this, or I guess she has a choice, but it's being mauled by Black Phillip or, you know. But there is also a witch in the woods who we see eat their baby in his movie. So I don't see how they are that fundamentally different, I guess is my point, the witch and weapons. Fair enough.

I guess it's because we get the origin story through the witch and weapons. We see it fully realized without more exploration of that. But I'm fine with that. There's still a young woman who is suffering arguably at the hands or the perceived hands of of like an older outsider creature. But she's not a witch. And she doesn't become a witch. Well, Julia Garner does not become a witch, but in the witch...

Because of the internet, she has more options. I get it. Anyway. I see. All right. Chris disagrees with everything. No, I think it's a great point. I just don't think it's quite as black and white.

I wouldn't draw steep conclusions necessarily from that. Yeah, I agree with you. But I do think that it is a valid thing to consider that I think what Crager is doing is very smart. And I think that if the whole joke and idea is what if Pizza Gate was real, that is a different reflection of what we are seeing today and of how witches, as it were, are being treated. So I think it's a very valid point that that movie marks a change in the way that we are seeing this portrayed. I don't know. I've just had more money spent on Wicked and Wicked 2 and We have Practical Magic 2 coming out this next month.

I'm just saying like it just seems like weapons remains more an aberrace. than a trend. We'll see. All right. Well, I think that sets us up decently well to talk about practical magic on Monday. Listen, it's not the most transcendental

of witch portrayals, but I think that the movie itself and the story behind it, particularly with the director Griffin done, is very, very interesting, very moving. And I'm really excited to get into it, and I'm excited to see what they do

with practical magic, too. Burn the witches. What have you going to practical magic? too, and it is a complete continuation of weapons, and it has become so retrograde. I was going to be hardcore maga. Oh, that would be amazing. All right. Well, thank you so much, Lizzie.

That was fascinating. I didn't know much about witches. And now I know what to look for. That's right. And I appreciate it. Now you know to poke them with your retractable pin, and you'll find them fast. All right, guys. Well, we will see you on Monday for our coverage of practical magic.

Can't wait. What went wrong is a Sad Boom podcast. presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by H. Conley.