The figure of the witch has had a formidable presence in cinema since images were first captured on film to flicker across the silver screen. From early titles such as The House of the Devil (1896) and Haxän (1922), through to classic Gothic horror films such as Black Sunday (1960) and Suspiria (1977), right up to contemporary works like The Love Witch (2016), The Craft (1996) and The Witch (2015), the figure of the witch has intrigued, terrified and seduced audiences across the world. Over the years she has gradually come to represent ideas concerning female empowerment and sexuality, and defiance of patriarchal conventions and societal expectations. Author Keri O’Shea’s new book, Celluloid Hex: The Witch in Horror and Genre Cinema, serves to explore the figure of the witch and her evolution on film. By exploring key titles throughout the history of cinema, and the times in which they were produced, O’Shea considers how factors such as social and political climates and shifts have altered and developed the way the witch has been realised on screen. The witch has been consistently reinvented and reframed by filmmakers to explore various issues, particularly historical anxieties concerning powerful, influential women and society’s atavistic fear of them. Addressing ideas concerning traditional gender roles, women’s rights, systemic sexism, the witch is now just as associated with ideas regarding esotericism, nature, spirituality and divine femininity, as she is with diabolism and the occult.
O’Shea sets out her stall in the introduction, clearly stating her intentions (and pre-emptively justifying the absence of certain films in her study) and her aim: this is a focused work using snapshots from throughout the history of cinema to demonstrate how representations of witches and witchcraft have evolved. An examination of a history through different lenses. The book consists of nine in-depth essays on ten titles (both versions of Suspiria are analysed in one chapter), selected because they not only demonstrate a clear (and often fascinating) relationship between the stories they are telling and the world in which they were produced, but also because several titles, such as The Seventh Victim (1943), Night of the Eagle (1962) and Lords of Salem (2012), have oftentimes been overlooked or underappreciated in terms of how they portray witches. O’Shea’s approach, and tone, is scholarly yet accessible and her love and knowledge of the subject is itself a bewitching presence as she guides us all the way from Haxän to The Witch. Many of her observations gleam from the text like crystal shards, and there are myriad moments that captivate, for example when she posits “The history of cinema is in many respects a history of magic – of suddenly being able to see and experience the impossible.”
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| All of them witches: The high-society coven from The Seventh Victim |
Beginning with Haxän, a silent documentary-style film examining superstitions surrounding witchcraft, O’Shea considers how this early portrayal of witches is rooted in ideas of ‘otherness’ and devilry, but that it still reflects on the cruelty of witch trials, the contagion of fear and misogyny these trials sparked, and the communities they tore apart. Moving ahead to the 1940s and the Val Lewton produced The Seventh Victim, O’Shea justifies her exclusion of a chapter on Rosemary’s Baby (1968) by choosing to focus on this generally overlooked film which, despite its central themes of despair, diabolism and suicide, was produced during a time of censorship, the Hays Code and Hollywood witch hunts and blacklists. O’Shea examines the influence of The Seventh Victim on Rosemary’s Baby, specifically its depiction of an upper-class, seemingly benign, modern-day coven and the ‘warped pacifism’ they exhibit in their attempts to drive a former member to suicide.
The benign façade that masks powerful witchcraft is considered further in a chapter on Night of the Eagle, with its ideas of belief versus rationality, superstition versus science, male versus female, and use of Jamaican folk magic, all playing out under the stifling faculty-lounge politics of a highly conservative college in a sleepy English town. The powerful, far-reaching legacy of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, and its amalgamation of horror and beauty, is explored with particular attention to its ground-breaking depictions of historical cruelty inflicted upon those accused of witchcraft, made possible with a relaxation of censorship in Italian cinema at this time. O’Shea holds a mirror to society while examining the generational divide playing out onscreen during Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), exploring the youth rebellions and anti-authoritarianism of the 1970s which underpin the 1700s setting of the film, also a time of great upheaval, with its ‘religious dissent, turmoil and violence.’ She also details how the contagion of fear in the 70s, and the influence of the Manson family, find their way into the narrative. Changes in society during the 70s are also analysed for their influence on George Romero’s Season of the Witch (1972), with its depiction of a bored suburban housewife kicking back against societal constraints and the ‘boredom of affluence’ with her experimentations with witchcraft 'as a hobby', seeking escapism from the mundanity and pressures of modern life.
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| Witch, please: The sisterly coven in Lords of Salem |
To my mind Rob Zombie’s work is all too often dismissed, as divisive as hell as it is, by scholarly, academic works, so it’s really nice to read a proper, considered analysis of what is arguably his best film here. O’Shea suggests that Lords of Salem exploits ‘centuries of paranoia, alarmism and belief in the power of music to subvert and degrade’, exploring Zombie’s use of a cursed record to establish links between music and ritualism. O’Shea observes that Heidi (Sherri Moon Zombie) can be seen as a ‘feme sole’, a ‘widowed or unmarried woman not subject to the legal controls or equally, protections for married women in Puritan society’, which directly echoes the kinds of women typically targeted in American witch trials: women who stood outside of social conventions. Accusing them of witchcraft was a way of stripping wealth and power from ‘inconveniently independent women in the community.’ O’Shea’s examinations of Suspiria (1977) and Suspiria (2018) not only provide a fascinating comparison, but a deep dive into German society in the 1970s and critical appreciation of two very different versions of the same story. Of particular interest is her exploration of The German Autumn (1977, the year the first Suspiria was made and when the 2018 version is set), a time of deep social unrest, terrorism and political change, reflecting the political upheaval within the 2018 film's coven of witches and its violent, far-reaching implications. Lastly, O’Shea looks at The Witch, with its banished family serving as a microcosm for ‘the concerns of Puritan society on a larger scale’ and its refusal of cosy answers ‘position[ing] us in a hinterland between certainty and uncertainty’. O’Shea further ponders this sense of liminality in the character of Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), as she floats between adolescence and adulthood, and the film’s use of archetypal depictions of the witch as maiden and crone.
The compact form of Celluloid Hex is a little deceptive, because there is a wealth of well researched and captivating material within, which enriches understanding and appreciation of each of the films considered. That each title is allocated its own chapter means the reader can dip in and out, or read from beginning to end to map the progress and evolution of the depiction of the witch. The cracking conclusion speaks truth to power as O’Shea sums up the perception of the witch throughout the years, reflecting that she not only serves as a reclamation of feminine power, but also highlights a misconception about societal ‘progress’ – O’Shea reasonably laments that centuries on from Puritanism, are we really any further advanced? We only need to look around us today for a glimpse of a ‘morally judgemental kickback against a rapidly changing modern world’ – epidemics of misogyny and gender-based hate crime, religious extremism, and the continued demonisation and persecution of ‘others’ who are perceived to be different or somehow unacceptable (nowadays its refugees and trans people).
Celluloid Hex deftly illustrates how witches and witchcraft continue to compel and beguile us because they have come to represent a redress of power. They represent an uplifting of the downtrodden, and in today’s unspeakably grim world we need these kinds of stories more than ever. This is a concise and focused work, written with pristine clarity, authoritative knowledge and moments of dark humour. A love of the subject matter, and the films considered, emanates throughout.
“Whatever modernity seems to have finally killed the witch, stubborn and resilient pockets of belief bring her back. Cinema quickly fulfilled this same purpose: cinema itself in its early days, must have offered up seemingly inexplicable kinds of magic.” Keri O’Shea, Celluloid Hex.
To pick up a copy of Celluloid Hex, and to read more of Keri's work, head over to Warped Perspective.