Unseasonally, witches are having a moment this spring
It must be the season of the witch.
Witchy women have long cast a spell on the public imagination, from Samantha (Bewitched) to Sabrina (Sabrina, the Teenage Witch), Hermione (Harry Potter) to Elphaba (Wicked). But rarely have they been as omnipresent in pop culture as this spring, with sorceresses bringing their black magic to film, TV and Broadway.
The most playful depiction is in the Judd Apatow-produced Love, Netflix's 10-episode dark comedy. The series follows the romantic entanglements of a sad sack named Gus (Paul Rust), who tutors the bratty teenage star (Iris Apatow) of a show-within-a-show called "Witchita."
"When we thought of 'Witchita' having to do with repressed women in the 1950s and '60s secretly being witches, we just thought it was a cool idea for a TV show," says Love co-creator Lesley Arfin. Loosely inspired by Once Upon A Time, Charmed and MTV's slate of supernatural thrillers, "it was fun to write this cheesy soap opera with this clever conceit."
A more chilling portrayal haunts The Witch, a horror hit at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival that has put a hex on the box office with $20.9 million since last month. Set in 17th-century New England, the low-budget folktale follows a young girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) whose Puritan family accuses her of witchcraft after her baby brother disappears in the woods.
The film's titular witch isn't a hat-wearing, broomstick-riding villainess — rather, she appears as a bloodthirsty, naked hag living deep in the forest. Director Robert Eggers' approach was to go back to early impressions of witches at the time of the Salem witch trials: reading period journals and court records, and looking to paintings and woodcuts by Hans Baldung Grien.
"Audiences are generally surprised by how primal and dark the witch of this period is," Eggers says. But the witch can also be a symbol of strength, who represents men's fears about women's agency and burgeoning sexuality in a male-dominated society.
"What I learned was that by writing a story about witches, I'm writing about female power in a way that I didn't realize," Eggers says. "Feminism just bursts from the pages of history without trying."
Fashion blogger-turned-actress Tavi Gevinson sees a similar feminist spirit in Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible, now in previews on Broadway with Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn) as the dubious Abigail Williams, who accuses dozens of Salem women of witchcraft to divert suspicion from herself. Gevinson co-stars as Mary Warren, one of the accused.
"It's so clear to me that the girls were acting out in response to being repressed and abused, and never being given any sense of identity and autonomy," Gevinson says. Although the play was written as an allegory for the second Red Scare, "if you take out Miller's politics and just look at the humans, I find it satisfying when the girls rise up, because it was something that was stewing for a long time."
Gevinson, 19, says she has been drawn to "witchy" things since high school, when she used a Ouija board and listened to "Stevie Nicks and Hole — it was just whatever angsty thing I experienced at 14."
The fascination, she adds, comes "from the time you're a little girl, (when) you learn about princesses and witches and all of these archetypes. The witch gets to be powerful in a way that all these other feminized identities don't."