Something Wicked

Witchcraft in Movies, Television, and Popular Culture

Douglas Brode, Leah Deyneka

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9798765122334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

An anthology of essays that deal with Witchcraft and the figure of the Witch, as they have been presented in motion pictures, television, and popular culture, in order to understand how, why, and when the common anti-Witchcraft/ anti-Witch attitude evolved. Mainstream tales of Witchcraft, including modern movies, novels, TV series, and other examples of our popular culture, more often than not express the traditional notion of a Witch as a wild, dangerous, untamable, "nasty" woman, obsessed with a desire for power to control all around her, in most narratives such a hunger presented as a negative. In truth, The Witch is a symbol of 'threatening evil' only to those men and women who accept a conservative sensibility. For members of either gender who do not, The Witch is perceived as hero and role model. This collection begins with the Biblical figure of Lilith, followed by Morgan le Fey from Arthurian legend/ myth in literature as well as in popular culture, followed by the more contemporary depictions of the Witch that start to appear in the 1960s; for example, in the Bewitched sitcom, the Star Wars franchise, Harry Potter, and even the television show Scooby-Doo. International depictions of the Witch are discussed, including Italy's Dario Argento's films, Suspiria and Inferno. The final section of this collection focuses on the most iconic depictions of the Witch produced during the 21st century, including A Discovery of Witches, Penny Dreadful, Game of Thrones and the history of the Witch in films by the Walt Disney studio, from its origins more than a century ago to the latest releases, arguing that here, if perhaps surprisingly, we discover the most fair and balanced portraits of Witches in the history of film and TV.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Villain Still Pursues Us
• 1 “Seen in the Sphere of Lilith”: Lilith as the Progenitor of Witches and Other “Nasty Women”
• 2 “In my time I have been called many things”: Morgan le Fay in Popular Culture
• 3 Through a Lens Darkly: Dreyer’s Witches
• 4 Sorcery in the Suburbs: Bewitched, Resistance, and Gender Transgression
• 5 Rosemary’s Baby: Rosemary’s Body and the Devil Inside
• 6 Whose Law Is It Anyway?: Detection, Magic, and the Uncanny Spaces of The Wicker Man
• 7 The Nightsisters of Dathomir: How Witchcraft Came to the Star Wars Universe
• 8 Sirius Black and the Wizard World: Power and Bias in Harry Potter
• 9 Disenchantment, Haunting, and The Witch’s Ghost!
• 10 Suzy, We Always Knew You: The Timeless Terror of Witches in Old and New Suspiria
• 11 Bodies of Knowledge and Bodies of Power: Dario Argento’s Inferno
• 12 “The Mark May Be Gone but the Spell Is Still There”: Dis/abling Magic and Gender in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle
• 13 Shadow of Suspicion: Representations of Witchcraft and Misogyny across Cultures
• 14 “A Woman Who Walks in the Footsteps of the Goddess”: Genre, Adaptation, and A Discovery of Witches’ Transformation of the Cinematic Witch
• 15 “So the Darkness Spoke”: The Witch as a Compromised Figure of Liberation in Penny Dreadful
• 16 No Safe Spaces: The American Colonial West as Historical Horror in Robert Eggers’ The Witch
• 17 Gaia’s Vengeance: Ecofeminist Horror in Apostle (2018)
• 18 A Witch in Westeros: Melisandre, Compulsory Maternity, and the “Snow White” Factor
• 19 “Something Wicked This Way Comes”: Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Witchcraft
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright