The Witches of Hollywood

This is a documentary discussing the portrayal of witches in Hollywood films. It's a straight shot to discussing feminism and female empowerment. It's a fascinating talk but I don't know any of the talking heads. That's what this needs. It needs to talk to somebody like Emma Watson or one of the girls from The Craft especially since they're highlighted in the progression. Watson certainly has plenty of opinions but this is a small film. At least, it's a short and compelling watch.

Having found Cinema Red: Natives & Horror (2019-also reviewed) to be an interesting swift doc about Native Americans in Horror cinema,I was happy to spot the online Soho Horror Film Festival screening/streaming a doc about the history of Wicca and witches in Horror,leading to me meeting the witches of Hollywood.

View on the film:

Bubbling away for an hour, director Sophie Peyrard casts a lively spell which examines the depiction of witches and Wicca across the decades in film and TV, with great chosen clips from the likes of the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch to the remake of Suspiria.

Combining all the clips together, Peyrard interviews a number of academics and brings out fascinating detail on how the repulsion and fear of witches in Hollywood, represents a fear of women becoming increasingly liberated across the decades,from the spells which were cast on the silver screen.

First of all, ignore the reviewer who claims this has something to do with Wicca, which is completely false. It sets out to discuss the witch as an archetype as portrayed on film and in tv shows and use that as a metaphor for changing views on women in general, feminism, and female empowerment. It's an interesting, quick watch but doesn't cover any real new ground if you are already familiar with the topic. However, I imagine it could give some younger women and perhaps men some new ideas, or even might just make them want to check out a movie they hadn't heard of. I suppose you could argue that Willow, the character from Buffy, called herself a Wiccan (she was not though) or that The Craft inspired many to become interested in Wicca. But that is the only connection you will find to the real life religion.

My biggest issue is that some of the movies mentioned had their plots twisted or flat out changed to fit the narrative the filmmaker was creating, a common complaint with documentaries. For example, in I Married A Witch, Veronica Lake did not start out seeking love, finding Frederic March. She was seeking revenge against the descendants of her past tormentor who killed her and her father. In Bell Book and Candle, Gillian was not tired of being a witch and looking to become human and fall in love - she wanted also revenge against a college rival whose engagement she wanted to break up. A clip from the movie was taken completely out of context to reinforce this change to the plot of the movie. It was the same presenter who was making these statements by the way, so I am not sure where the fault lies. But by radically changing the plots, they could then better fit into the documentary's thesis with no messy nuance or loose ends. Not to mention how they pick and choose which movies to include and which they skip over, again, since they might not fit the narrative.

If you watched this in vacuum, you could easily come away believing that prior to the late 60s, there were no other mentions of witches in movies at all beside the ones mentioned. At least once they get to the seventies, it's stated that many other movies were made that didn't get featured, but again it implied they all were of the same type, such as cheap horror movies in the seventies or more empowering movies like The Craft in the nineties.

They also state the very first witch of color on screen was in The Craft. I thought this strange since they even mention Tituba at one point, who certified showed up in many earlier movies/shows. I wished they explained why, for example, the craze in the seventies for voodoo-type practitioners was excluded. Or tarot card readers or psychics as further example. They include Rosemary's Baby and those are arguably satanists, not witches. What was the definition for witch that they were using anyway? There were certainly times in many movies where a magical practitioner was called a witch as a slur or just out of fear. So just being straight up called a witch could not have been the criteria for inclusion in the documentary.

It seems if you claim you are going to examine witches in Hollywood, you examine them all in all their guises and roles. Or else you are up front with the viewer and say you want to specifically show how feminism was depicted on screen specifically via the witch metaphor, and almost exclusively white feminism at that. How about discussing that most of these movies/shows where written or directed by men?

Again, this is good for a quickie, casual watch especially to get ideas for a new movie or show to watch. It's far too brief and unfocused to draw real conclusions on any academic level. Take it with a big grain of salt.

The Witches of Hollywood 2020 TV-14 55m

I came to this documentary expecting to see scantily clad women under the moonlight dancing and speaking mumbo jumbo.

Instead, it is a genuine documentary with a covert mission to link feminism and the evolving attitudes of women toward life with a select few witch-themed films in Hollywood cinema from the 1930s to 2020. Many of the themes in these films were distorted to serve the documentary's agenda. Some depict evil or foolish characters who aren't even witch-like. You might not want to watch this if you haven't seen the films first. We acknowledge that there is no space for the many witchy-woman films, so this selection of movies was made to align with the documentary's narrative, albeit with some minor adjustments.

The speakers or presenters may not be familiar to most viewers, but they have appeared in other presentations on the topic. The main issue is that they show one movie each time, and then every critic gets a 30-second opportunity to explain what we are watching. This is referred to as a sound bite format.

This presentation claims to focus on "Hollywood" but includes some foreign content. Some are Italian, while others, like Hermione Granger in "Harry Potter," are English. They had to omit "Night of the Eagle" (1962) because it portrays witchy women supporting their men rather than abandoning them.

After all this time, we get a grand speech about submissive women after watching witchy movies, becoming snots in their own right.