[page 91] Abstract: This article analyzes a series of women-directed witch films released alongside the so-called “elevated horror” cycle of the 2010s but which approach the subject from a radically different perspective. From Zoe Lister-Jones’ The Craft: Legacy (2020) to Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas (2019), Leigh Janaik’s Fear Street trilogy (2021), and Charlotte Colbert’s She Will (2021), the history of the witch is taken in a more overtly topical direction, tapping into the history of the witch as a political symbol to make overt commentaries on the state of feminism in the 2010s. Each takes its own approach to anti-misogynist depictions of witches and witchcraft, though they share marked similarities in their conclusions. By unpacking these films as their own discrete corpus of woman-directed horror, it becomes possible to see a different angle on the witch as a cultural symbol of our witch-saturated horror moment.
Keywords: Black Christmas, Fear Street, female directors, feminism, witches, She Will, The Craft: Legacy
“Ah, ‘the Patriarchy,’ the war cry of hysterical women biting the hand that feeds them.” – Keith, She Will
“Now it’s your turn to burn.” – Lily, The Craft: Legacy
Witches have become a stalwart part of the horror landscape over the course of the past decade, most notably in high profile films like Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018).1 These witch films are unified by a particular set of aesthetic and thematic principles linked to what has become broadly known as “elevated horror”: an auteurist sensibility, careful, “artful” aesthetics, overtly political historical underpinnings, and a focus on “trauma” as a significant thematic element.2 In this article, I analyze a series of witch films released contemporaneously to the “elevated” horror cycle of the mid-to-late 2010s, but which hold a different set of elements in common. [page 92] This selection of films from the tail end of the 2010s (post-2019) represent a different thematic approach than seen in the witch horror films above: Zoe Lister-Jones’ The Craft: Legacy (2020), Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas (2019),3 Leigh Janaik’s Fear Street trilogy (2021), and Charlotte Colbert’s She Will (2021).4 In these films, the history of the witch is taken in a different, more overtly topical direction, tapping into the history of the witch as a political symbol to comment on the state of feminism in the 2010s. All of these films are also, not coincidentally, written and directed by women and explicitly present themselves as “feminist” films, and although each takes its own approach to anti-misogynist depictions of witches and witchcraft, they share marked similarities in their conclusions. Their difference from other films in this cycle is in many ways categorical: each of these films was intended for a younger audience than its counterparts, specifically pre-teen and teenage girls, and the former two are rated PG-13, while the Fear Street films are rated R but based on young adult horror novels. By unpacking these films as their own discrete corpus of woman-directed horror, it becomes possible to see a different perspective on the witch as a cultural symbol of our witch-saturated horror moment.
Politically, each of these modern teen witch horror films is explicitly feminist in its themes and carefully designed to speak to the issues of the moment: The Craft: Legacy—a sequel to the 1996 teen classic The Craft (Andrew Fleming)—for example, goes out of its way to emphasize that witchcraft is the territory of all women, not just cisgender ones, as one of the central witches is transgender. The film is predicated on many of the rigid, biologically binary constructions of gender seen in witch lore (the teenage coven first meet when Lily [Cailee Spaeny] has a particularly heavy period, and one of the girls mentions that witchcraft is charged because “we house babies in our stomachs”) but quickly works to update them (“not all of us can do that . . . trans girls have their own magic”). Both The Craft: Legacy and Black Christmas take this rejection of bio-essentialist tropes further, reappropriating the [page 93] symbols of the genre to tell consciously feminist stories. In The Craft: Legacy, cisgender male members of a separate, evil “pagan cult” try to steal and abuse this “feminine” power, a point that stresses the adaptability and strength of femininity while actively rejecting bio-essentialist conflations of femininity with femaleness.5 Similarly, Black Christmas, a loose adaptation of the classic 1974 slasher of the same name, takes this further, fully reversing the traditional presentation of women as in league with the Devil, instead depicting Black Magic as the exclusive territory of misogynistic frat boys and their professors who, as in The Craft: Legacy, want to use it to dominate and control women.
These films’ reappropriation of anxieties surrounding witchcraft and pagan cults directly ties into concerns around the mainstreaming of the alt-right. Over the course of the 2010s, self-described “Western Chauvinists” and incels (“involuntary celibates”) aligned themselves with the alt-right militia group The Proud Boys before and after the January 6, 2021, Capitol Insurrection. The radicalization of these groups has been so pronounced and extreme over the last decade that in March 2022, the United States Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center released a report identifying incels as a terrorist threat against women and queer people. While this designation may be unsurprising to women or queer people, it nevertheless signals a rise in violent activity. This announcement came in the wake of mass shootings like Scott Paul Beierle’s 2018 attack on a massage parlor in Tallahassee Florida, which culminated in his suicide and the deaths of two women working there (Lorenz). A note that Beierle left at the scene read, “If I can’t find one decent female to live with, I will find many indecent females to die with” (Sganga). Taking advantage of a real recent decrease in men’s quality of life in the United States, from rising unemployment to rising suicide rates, figures from the so-called “manosphere,” such as white supremacist podcaster Jordan Peterson, stoke antifeminist fear and grievance through the specter of lost manhood.6 During the first Donald J. Trump presidency (2017-2021), this [page 94] tactic began to spread to the highest levels of government, with Republicans like Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, and Madison Cawthorne, among others, explicitly appealing to incels in books on the subject of “failing masculinity” brought about by “liberals” or through dog whistle references to subjects like “falling sperm counts,” a key notion of the racist “great replacement theory” promulgated by white nationalists and also used by conservatives during the antifeminist backlash of the 1980s (Norris).
As previously noted, both The Craft: Legacy and Black Christmas feature as their villains all-male pagan cults—both of which are depicted as fraternities, which are well-known sites of misogynist violence and sexual assault—whose overall aims are to use magic to strengthen the patriarchy in explicitly chauvinistic, “men’s rights” terms: in the former, the cult leader Adam (David Duchovny), a masculinist motivational speaker whose goal is to help his clients “atomize weakness into sovereign power,” emphasizes that men “are not created in [women’s] image—we are your rulers, your kings!” In direct parallel, the members of the fraternity-cult in Black Christmas are instructed by their sponsor-leader, Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes), to “imagine a world where you’re no longer sitting in the corner: you’re sitting on the throne” as he possesses them to create “an ‘army’ of young men to take power back” from women who pose a “threat” by “stepping out of line,” killing any whom they deem “unruly.”
The rhetoric that both films employ to characterize their antagonists draws directly on the violent anti-feminism of right-wing extremists as deployed by Republican politicians in the late 2010s and continuing into the present, situating themselves directly within discourses around modern gendered culture war issues: Professor Gelson is presented as an out-of-touch classics professor who faces dismissal for his refusal to add women to his syllabus, citing Camille Paglia’s infamously misogynistic rhetoric to defend himself. Adam’s role as a motivational speaker and author of books with titles like Man Up and The Hallowed Masculine who asserts that [page 95] “power is order” and that “girls [are] too weak” to wield power is clearly modeled after Jordan Peterson (as well as the likes of Robert Bly in the ‘70s), who frequently asserts in his lectures that “The masculine spirit is under assault” and “chaos is represented by the feminine” (Bowles). Indeed, the chilling notion of an “army” of incels evoked in both films was referenced in 2016 by former Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Before his affiliation with Trump, Bannon was likely best known for creating the alt-right website Breitbart—known for its antisemitism and anti-feminism and featuring headlines like “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”7 —a fact that highlights the role anti-feminism played in the ideological underpinnings of the President’s inner circle. When asked directly about the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement’s relationship to incels, Bannon said, “You can activate that army,” suggesting incels were a valuable political block for then-President Trump; “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump” (Snider).
Black Christmas is particularly conscious of the murderous dynamics underlying #GamerGate, itself becoming a lightning rod for similar harassment upon its release. In the film, one anonymous harasser warns the main character, Riley (Imogen Poots), that he will “bring her to her knees,” texting another victim a brutal, macabre joke before he kills her: “What do a Christmas ham and a sorority girl have in common? They both squeal before they die.” Professor Gelson plans to install this “army [of men] . . . into courtrooms, boardrooms, and the halls of Congress to set the world right” by subjugating women not just through magic, but through the American legal system. In an even more topical nod to the contemporary implications of this statement, to signal that one of the main male characters has become possessed, he is shown drinking a beer. “Since when do you drink beer?” his girlfriend asks—“I like beer,” he snarkily replies, in clear reference to United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s repeated exclamations during his Senate hearing on the [page 96] multiple sexual assault allegations from his days in a college fraternity (Baer). Takal mentioned both Justice Kavanaugh and his fellow Justice Clarence Thomas as inspirations for the film, describing the cult as a representation of how, in a “cyclical” political culture in which “all these predatory men who had been called out during the #MeToo movement . . . [could start] re-entering society without totally reckoning with what they had done. . . . [Y]ou can’t ever completely kill or destroy misogyny and sexism” (Bibbiani).
As this would indicate, of the two films, the form of specifically sexualized anti-woman violence present in the manosphere is most explicit in Black Christmas; Riley struggles throughout the film in the aftermath of her rape by a member of the frat-coven, a trauma which drives her. After she and her sorority sisters perform a song-and-dance routine exposing one of the frat brothers as her rapist, the coven pursues and systematically murders them in retribution, calling them bitches and sexually threatening them as they torture them. Because the police didn’t believe Riley when she reported her rape, sorority sisters band together across houses to defeat the fraternity-cult, forming alternative forms of vigilante justice and community that reflect the tragic realities that many women face in a justice system whose flawed approach to sexual assault often leaves victims to rely on systems of witness and solidarity rather than legal recourse.
Yet, as if to illustrate Takal’s point about the pervasive nature of misogyny as well as the salience of her film’s critique, Black Christmas was met with sexism and vitriol by commenters online. Comments ranged in intensity from invectives against its tone (“I felt like I was in a man hating seminar”) to racially and homophobically inflected comments to “skewer this piece of shit . . . a thinly veiled excuse to hurl insults and denigrate white men and please all the ideologically possessed morons in Hollywood along with the globulous, blue-haired feminists and limp-wristed ‘men’ under their progressive spell” (Lipsett). Takal’s co-screenwriter April Wolfe even reported men online calling both writers “cunts” [page 97] and telling her that the film had made him “root for every man in every horror film to rape the female lead” (Lipsett).8
More broadly, the ideological refraction of witchcraft lore back onto rapists, alt-right misogynists, and white supremacists of all stripes (here coded as incels and “men’s rights activists”) could be readily interpreted as a simple binary reversal, designed to present witchcraft as a “natural” domain for women’s power under threat. That being said, particularly in recent years, the relationship between far-right movements and occultism has come to the fore in tandem with the left’s reappropriation of neo-pagan and occult symbology. Just as witches joined together to hex Donald Trump, ultraconservative occult practitioners like white supremacists David Griffin and Leslie McQuade, the leaders of the occult group the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (an offshoot of a late nineteenth-century secret society of the same name), created a website dedicated to “the magic war” against liberal politics, offering magical “self defense” spells and rituals for “all those who abet” Donald Trump in direct response to these feminist hexings. As Egil Asprem, a professor of Religion at Stockholm University, points out, this website primarily proffers links to clips from alt-right conspiracy theorist and podcaster Alex Jones’ website Infowars, cementing this connection to modern neo-paganism, mainstream conspiracism, and ultraconservatism. Similarly, Bannon and alt-right white supremacist ethno-nationalist Richard Spencer have both expressed interest in the occult theology of noted Benito Mussolini propagandist Julius Evola, whose philosophy blended virulent antisemitism—he wrote a preface to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and misogyny—he also wrote a tract entitled “Woman as Thing”—with Hermeticism, Tantrism, and mysticism.9
In Black Christmas, these historical dynamics are foregrounded through the demonic spirit of the coven-fraternity’s fictional founder, Calvin Hawthorn, who learned black magic in the nineteenth century when he sensed “the threat posed by women” and left tools and rituals for future generations to [page 98] curse and control them. As one character warns Riley, Hawthorne was rumored to offer “disobedient women as a sacrifice to male pagan gods.” This plot point highlights the film’s interesting attempt to distance magical practice writ large from the misogynist iteration depicted by this film, whose female characters are not themselves witches. In The Craft: Legacy, Adam references the masculine pagan symbology of his family crest in a similar link to specifically male-oriented neo-pagan traditions. The multiple valences of these reversals reflect the mired cultural significance of witches and neo-paganism in the social climate of the late 2010s and early 2020s, inflecting these boogeymen with an even more pressing level of political salience beyond their broad generic significance. Created in the wake of #MeToo and during this increasing wave of misogynist violence, these women-written and -directed films present not women but men as frighteningly cultish pagans, willing to resort to curses, possession, and murder to maintain their dominance in the face of what Professor Gelson derisively labels “false accusations” and what both he and Adam call a growing “weakness” in men—a deeply potent topic in an age when even White House staffers espouse a rhetoric of male chauvinism so violent that it was deemed a terrorist threat.
The Fear Street trilogy, adapted from R. L. Stine’s YA horror series of the same name, combines the approaches of The Craft: Legacy and Black Christmas while making the racialized and homophobic biases of the manosphere’s philosophy more explicit as it follows several generations of women from a town that has fallen under a witch’s curse.10 Previously called Union, the town has been divided into two sections, Shadyside and Sunnyvale, since the seventeenth century. The town’s division is characterized by racial and economic binaries: Shadyside, the poorer, more diverse section, takes a witch for its high school’s mascot, establishing the familiar binary of “good” and “evil” that fits neatly into understandings of witches as specters of economic, racial, and gendered otherness, while already subverting them slightly [page 99] through point of view— the protagonists are consistently from Shadyside and depicted as underdog heroes. In Fear Street Part 2: 1978 (hereafter 1978), a traditional slasher set at a summer camp and evoking Friday the 13th, this dynamic is literalized most directly when the innocent protagonist, Ziggy (Sadie Sink), is accused of being possessed by the town’s famous historical witch, Sarah Fier, by Sunnydale residents after stealing $10 from their rich ringleader, Shiela (Chiara Aurelia). As punishment, the group string Ziggy up by Sarah Fier’s “hanging tree” and burn her with a lighter. To get her revenge, Ziggy works with counselor Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland), the town’s Sheriff by 1994, to lock Sheila in the outhouse and “Carrie her” by pouring a bucket of roaches on her in a direct parodic tableau humiliation of the protagonist of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) by the popular students of her school—Ziggy is reading the book at the film’s opening (and Sheila graffities “Ziggy sucks cocks in hell” over her bed in reference to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) to heighten the cinematic parallels at work).11 Embracing the role of “the witch” here, then, provides a cinematic and literary lexicon to enact class-and-gender-based revenge. Yet, at the film’s conclusion, the real witch, Sarah Fier, still appears to kill Ziggy’s sister (the typical slasher “good girl” to Ziggy’s final girl), along with a coterie of sexually active, drug using counselors, a choice intended to flatten the “sex/drugs = death” conventions of the subgenre.
As the series progresses, though, the representation of the witch in question evolves dramatically from this symbolic register, eventually entirely subverting the expectations of the conservative witch film in a manner similar to Black Christmas. Whereas for the first two films, Sarah Fier (Kiana Madeira), hanged for witchcraft in 1666, is depicted as a malevolent, murderous spirit who possesses people and compels them commit murder, the final entry in the series, Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (hereafter 1666), reveals that she was actually the victim of a homophobic power grab by a man, Solomon Goode (Ashley Zukerman), who made a deal with the [page 100] Devil for wealth and influence by stealing the local healer’s book of Black Magic—a twist in keeping with the depictions, in both The Craft: Legacy and Black Christmas, of male warlocks’ usurpation of women’s “natural” power as witches (used for good, i.e., healing) for personal gain and violent subjugation, typically depicted as capitalistic, abusive, and self-interested. In order to maintain their grip on power, the firstborn male of each generation must sacrifice another soul to the devil, leading to the possessions and murder sprees depicted in each film, turning the Goode family into their own all-male hereditary coven. Interestingly, even in previous cycles of witch horror, warlocks and male witches are depicted in these terms: in The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), for example, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) tells Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) that his grandfather introduced neo-paganism to the workers on his island as an incentive for productivity in his orchards (“the old gods roused them from their apathy”), framing masculinized neo-paganism as a form of capitalist intervention rather than an organic, native part of their ideology or sense of self. Eye of the Devil (J. Lee Thompson, 1966) shares many such plot elements, following the lord of a barren chateau as he leads a coven through a harvest ritual involving human sacrifice for reasons that are depicted as largely pragmatic. In Necromancy (Bert I. Gordon, 1972), the warlock leader of the town-coven in which the film is set is motivated by a selfish desire to reanimate his dead son rather than by a true faith in the so-called “old gods.” In 1666, the healer who originally possessed the book warned against its use, seemingly guarding it for safekeeping, although how she came to have it in the first place is unclear.
The first accusation of witchcraft against Sarah and her lover Hannah (Olivia Scott Welch) comes from Caleb (Jeremy Ford), a villager who propositions Hannah and is spurned, only to discover the relationship between the two women, inflecting his misogynistic accusation with homophobic violence. Solomon confirms Caleb’s accusations to cover his own responsibility for the town’s misfortune as the local pastor [page 101] (whose soul Solomon sells to the Devil) kills all of the town’s children. The two are tried and sentenced to death. Sarah, who was never a witch at all, having simply embraced the moniker for its symbolic power, confesses and thus martyrs herself to save Hannah, turning her embrace of the title into a tragic reminder of the witch’s role as universal feminine scapegoat and boogeyman.12 At her execution, she promises Solomon that her soul will linger to show those who find her body or the book that he stole what he had done through visions of each subsequent murder caused by the Goodes’ actions. In so doing, the film retroactively splits the supernatural forces hounding the protagonists into masculine and feminine “evil and good,” with Sarah’s curse actually aiding the protagonists in their fight against the warlock’s curse rather than the other way around; as Deena exclaims, “Goode is evil” (the films are based on YA novels after all).
The series’ lesbian couple protagonists, Deena and Sam, are played by Madeira and Welsh respectively, directly linking the queer, non-witch heroes to their persecuted queer witch predecessor, further purifying any negative associations that the archetype carries. Deena and Sam finally discover this secret and give Sarah a proper burial after killing the town sheriff Nick Goode, Solomon’s most recent villainous ancestor, thus putting her to rest and declaring her the town’s first “Shadysider.” In so doing, they fully reclaim the witch as an underdog figure of rebellion and moral uprightness in keeping with Jules Michelet’s notion of Satan as de facto patron saint of “outlaws”—in this case, the working class, queer women and people of color. By linking these women through the symbol of the witch, alternative forms of community, as in Black Christmas and The Craft: Legacy, supersede traditional structures of power and hierarchy in order to protect women whose struggles went historically overlooked.13
Like The Craft: Legacy and Black Christmas, the Fear Street series employs traditional slasher conventions to tell its story, following a group of teenagers as characters are picked off one by one. Their conclusions take the “conservative” [page 102] morality tale structure of the classic slasher film and provide viewers with conventional closure and a restoration of order—though in this case the “normal” or “correct” order being restored serves as a form of feminist restitution against the patriarchy rather than a reinstatement of patriarchy as seen in earlier films like Carrie, in which a young woman’s death functions as a rejection of women’s agency (tenuous though that restoration may be). In both The Craft: Legacy and Black Christmas, this reversal is made explicit as the young women protagonists set their supernatural male attackers on fire in the classic image of a witch burning, symbolically (as well as literally) scourging the world of their virulently misogynist ideology. Black Christmas even appropriates the iconic concluding moments of Dario Argento’s original Suspiria (1977), in which the coven is burned alive inside their evil ballet school. “Now it’s your turn to burn,” Lily tells Adam in The Craft: Legacy before her coven incinerates him.
One film, 2021’s She Will, focuses exclusively on the #MeToo valences of this mini cycle of women-directed witch horror films while also reflecting more of the aesthetic and narrative conventions of the cycle writ large. The film tracks the emotional journey of an aging starlet, Victoria Ghent (Alice Krige), in the wake of a double mastectomy at the same time her most famous film, shot when she was just thirteen, is being remade. To escape media attention and contend with the procedure that she views as robbing her of her femininity and sex appeal—which she already views as compromised due to her age—she spends a surreal week at an artist’s retreat. Set in Scotland and shot on location in the region which hosted the last of the UK’s seventeenth-century witch burnings, Victoria begins to have visions of these women, who were burned with metal cages on their faces as a punishment designed to “silence defiant women”—as a book read by her nurse’s aide Desi (Kota Eberhardt) describes it—in one of the most obvious gestures towards the link between witches and the rebellious women of the present. As time passes, Victoria develops a growing affinity for the land, the mud, and the peat, all of which are [page 103] pregnant with the ashes of these persecuted women. She begins to sleepwalk, covered in (and eventually melding with) the mud, reliving the women’s final moments, an experience of bonding and unity that helps her overcome the past trauma that undergirds her mastectomy experience and mingles with her visions in fractal flashes: a pedophilic sexual relationship with Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell), the director of her childhood breakout film. This revelation is clearly intended to evoke figures like Franco Zeffirelli, whose Romeo and Juliet [1968] featured underage teenagers who—in a 2023 lawsuit charging the director with child sexual abuse—alleged that participating in their nude sex scenes was coercive; and Roman Polanski, who was arrested and deported for drugging and raping a thirteen year old girl in 1977, historicizing the nature of Hollywood’s sexual abuse of women in the context of the #MeToo movement (Maddaus).
As Victoria’s affinity for the land and its history grows, so too does her agency. Eventually, Victoria gains the power of fire, described as “healing” and “the soul of the earth” as well as a tool of femicide, housing both pain and rebirth. Once she gains this power, she is able to assert her agency over men who have previously derided her and the woods in which they work. The men are universally characterized as repugnant, controlling boors: “it’s important to leave your mark on the land,” one man tells her, urinating against a majestic old oak tree. In the first full demonstration of her budding agency, she sets a man’s hand on fire when he dismisses a critique of his comments on a piece of art Victoria paints as reflecting “the male gaze” and “the patriarchy,” calling her “hysterical” and “biting the hand that feeds her,” another reversal of the classic image of a witch burning inflected with feminist rage. Finally, she is able to visit her former abuser in his dreams, a classic skill associated with seventeenth-century witches, and drives him to suicide after she forces him to admit wrongdoing. She and Desi leave the retreat together, emotionally rejuvenated and with a stronger sense of connection and community. [page 104]
Of the films discussed thus far in this paper, She Will is the only one to deliberately reflect the narrativized aesthetic tropes of the broader 2010s cycle typified by A24’s “elevated” horror output, incorporating overt psychedelic imagery and the use of nonlinear, oneiric storytelling as well as engaging with tropes of femininity as connected to nature. These tropes do appear in the other films, though only in passing and seemingly without much thematic relevance—though their presence at all affirms their ubiquity in the cycle. For example, in Fear Street Part Three: 1666, the young townspeople of Union consume hallucinogenic berries at a midnight party, though they are stolen from the healer and don’t serve any narrative function. Their effects are shown as handheld POV shots, fast motion, and choppy editing in a manner reminiscent of Suspiria. Similarly, in Black Christmas, the black liquid that Professor Gelson uses to possess the frat boys mani fests in hazy, soft-focused handheld shots and rapid, scattered editing, and in The Craft: Legacy, the coven’s abilities are occasionally (but not always) signaled by use of hazy color effects (their “auras”) and surreal freeze frames.
She Will’s use of these types of effects is, in contrast, incorporated into the film’s narrative and serves a thematic purpose rather than appearing only sporadically or in isolation. The film’s departure to the retreat is marked, like the character’s entrance into the “foreign world” of the Harga in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), by a shot flipping the world on its head, hewing its context from ordinary life in order to present its supernatural elements. Victoria’s dreams of the witch burnings are replete with dissolves from shots of floating ashes and halos of light to semi-abstract shots of mandalas of fire and intricate closeups of moss, insects, and leaves. Desi is given magic mushrooms by a man who later tries to rape her and is told that “the peat here makes them special,” literally linking the hallucinogenic fungus to the bodies of witches past, feeding their potency. When this man corners Desi in the woods, she is still hallucinating, and Victoria (as well as the woods themselves) seems to share a psychic connection with [page 105] her—the mud that has begun to seep into Victoria’s dreams, blood, and spirit creeps over the man’s shoes, eventually swallowing him without a trace in a metaphysical act of solidarity from beyond the grave. Victoria, who begins the film describing her meticulous makeup and hairstyles as “warpaint,” slowly rejects these symbols of youth and sex appeal, finally embracing her mature body and literally “letting her hair down.” As the men of the retreat celebrate the anniversary of witch burnings, “the triumph of reason over against the demonic dark women,” Victoria stands tall, mastectomy scars revealed for the first time, and confronts her attacker, smiling broadly against the backdrop of the scourging parody of innocent women’s funeral pyre.
Narrative structure, however, sets this film apart from the witch films of the elevated horror cycle like Suspiria or The Witch, linking it more closely to the other films described previously in this paper: whereas in those previous films order is overthrown and anarchy is imposed, presented as a horrific yet cathartic rejection of not only patriarchy but social structure itself, here, “good” triumphs over “evil” once more—as in The Craft: Legacy, Black Christmas, and the Fear Street trilogy, the film suggests that feminist solidarity is possible in the “real” world. Though the slasher structure that defines these other films is absent here, writer-director Colbert’s choice to present the patriarchy’s overthrow through the microcosm of Hathbourne’s death presents the film’s feminist vision through a more realistic, narratively conventional framework of the normative horror film. This triumphant image of Victoria embracing her status as a witch is reminiscent of climactic images like Thomasin laughing and floating above her coven at the end of The Witch—Victoria spends much of her dreaming hours floating, too—though the film’s narrative emphasis lies on more worldly concerns, setting up an arc parallel to The Witch only to reject it: as she becomes progressively more entranced by the woods, her health deteriorating, Victoria instructs Desi to leave her and not come back. From there, this climactic sequence of satanic [page 106] embrace unfolds. Yet, afterwards, as Victoria lies seemingly dying in her bed after her psychic murder of Hathbourne, Desi returns for her, waking her from her trance. As the two drive away, Victoria turns to her with a small smile: “I’m glad you came back for me,” she tells her, and they return to civilization with renewed purpose, unity, and hope for a more empowered, self-assured feminist future.
Viewed from this perspective, films like She Will, Black Christmas, The Craft: Legacy, and the Fear Street trilogy as well as others from this cycle of woman-directed witch horror—for example, The Five Devils (Léa Mysius, 2022) and The Other Lamb (Małgorzata Szumowska 2019)—represent a rejection of the fearful collectivism of films like Midsommar, instead positing a community of women capable of making positive if incremental change to patriarchal systems. While they share many of the same themes that characterize these other films—namely the tensions between feminist-coded expressions of feminine power and a misogynist backlash to it—they notably lack the same relationship to the supernatural abject that is the central focus of the broader witch horror cycle of this decade. While the outletting of anxieties in films like The Witch and Midsommar presents a more radical thesis that in many ways seems to hold a stronger appeal to women viewers (as evinced by their significant online fanbases and the relative commercial failure of these films), these women directors’ visions of feminist triumph are in their own way equally subversive: they co-opt horror film’s conservative structures to emphasize the practical survival of women under the patriarchy here and now.
Notes
1. It may seem rather odd to not include the most obvious example of women-directed witch horror from this period in an analysis of this subject. It is, however, precisely the singular and iconic nature of Anna Biller’s The Love Witch that puts it outside the purview of this brief study. Her film has been (rightly) viewed as an auteurist work of the [page 107] purest kind, having been created with profound levels of creative control and representing Biller’s unique and highly idiosyncratic perspective. Thus, the film takes on a wildly different thematic and political approach to this kind of material than any other film of the decade. I do, however, write about The Love Witch in detail in my book on witch horror, All of Them Witches: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film.
2. I discuss the ramifications of this cycle across my work. See, in addition to All of Them Witches, “A24’s Folk Horror Boom and Bust” (Brooklyn Rail, Apr. 2022, brooklynrail.org/2022/04/film/A24s-Folk-Horror-Boom and-Bust) and “Acid Flashbacks: The Psychedelic Horror Film Post-1979” (Horror Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2024, pp. 55-68).
3. Notably, this was the first Blumhouse film to be directed by a woman.
4. As Netflix releases, the Fear Street films were originally intended for theatrical release and moved to Netflix as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The trilogy remained on Netflix’s “Top 10” list (one of the few audience metrics that the company provides) the entire month of its release, making it a particularly notable popular case study for the subgenre during a period in which theatrical viewing was nearly impossible. Illustrating that dynamic further, the pandemic also disrupted the release of The Craft: Legacy—released on VOD during lockdown (the same weekend as Robert Zemeckis’ remake of The Witches), the film’s simultaneous limited theatrical run was an unsurprising bomb, making $2.3 million on an $18 million budget. Due to streaming services’ opaque system of sharing user data, its success on VOD is harder to gauge.
5. At the same time, the film’s central witch and warlock are named Adam and Lilith in reference to the Biblical first man and his first wife, an oft-worshiped figure in Wiccan traditions, suggesting a Judeo-Christian symbology nevertheless predicated on these essentializing tropes and [page 108] signaling the challenges of extricating witch lore from its deeply binary mythos.
6. The manosphere is an umbrella term used to define a loose digital cohort of ideologically distinct yet broadly aligned anti-feminist groups including “Men’s Rights Activists” and incels. This community also overlaps with white supremacists and the alt-right.
7. “‘Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?’” was published by Breitbart in February of 2016.
8. The film’s commercial failure and the backlash preceding it puts it in conversation with Ghostbusters (2016), another women-led remake whose rejection by male fans was charged with a similarly threatening brand of sexist vitriol and led to “underwhelming” box office returns.
9. As this would indicate, occultism has been a facet of fascist and ultraconservative ideological movements since the early twentieth century, most famously in Nazi Germany, whose relationship to mystical thinking has been well documented. Indeed, under Heinrich Himmler’s instruction, the SS even organized a group (the “Hexen-Sonderkommando”) to perform a historical survey of witch trials in Europe, concluding, as he said during a lecture in 1944, “The heretic and witch persecutions have cost the German Volk hundreds of thousands of mothers and women of German blood through cruel torture and execution” (Badger and Purkiss 144).
10. The Fear Street novels are episodic and, as such, don’t strictly follow a singular plotline. The premise is the same—a town is cursed when two men falsely accuse two women of witchcraft—but their protagonists and the descendants of those wronged women are men, and many stories focus on ghosts instead of witches.
11. Near the end of the trilogy, another villain is “Carrie’d,” this time with blood from those he has cursed, thus making him a target for the supernatural forces he has brought to bear against them, reaffirming the significance of Carrie as a symbol for scorned innocence and martyrdom. [page 109]
12. Before she discovers Solomon’s actions, she plans to make her own deal with the Devil (though she never has to) because the town has scapegoated them, saying, “they want a witch, I’ll give them a witch.”
13. Like Riley, Ziggy and Deena are ignored by police when they need them most, cementing this shared element of the films, continued in She Will subsequently, which focuses on the practical discrimination women and people of color face from police.
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Payton McCarty-Simas is an author, programmer, and film critic based in New York City. Their academic and critical writing focuses primarily on horror, sexuality, and psychedelia and has been featured in Horror Studies, Fangoria, Rue Morgue, and The Brooklyn Rail among others as well as spotlighted in The New York Times and on CNN and RogerEbert.com. Payton is the author of two books, One Step Short of Crazy: National Treasure and the Landscape of American Conspiracy Culture and That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film. They are a member of GALECA and the Online Association of Female Film Critics.
MLA citation (print):
McCarty-Simas, Payton. "'You Messed with the Wrong Sisters': Women Directing 2010s Witch Horror." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2026, pp. 91-111.