Widely considered to be the last time Stewart played a true romantic lead in his career (he was 50 at the time), the film is instead dominated by the icily seductive Novak, playing a Bohemian witch-about-town who decides to muck about in Stewart’s love life, chiefly for petty revenge. It’s strange to think that mere months after starring opposite each other in Hitchcock’s masterfully suspenseful Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak were reunited for a romantic comedy about urban witches. If your choices are being a good little girl or nuking the lingering spirit of your ex-boyfriend and literally sweeping his ashes out the front door while the ladies of the town cheer, then it’s not hard to see why some women choose to be witches. It’s also the way these sisters come to one another’s aid and banish the negativity from their lives. Magic is strange and dangerous in untrained hands in Practical Magic, likely to result in unforeseen consequences if used selfishly. Practical Magic may go all over the map with the plot and tone in a story about Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman’s orphaned witch sisters and their struggles with life and romance, but that subtext of reclaiming your autonomy is there throughout the whole picture. It can also be a hateful epithet, leveled at any woman who rejects the scorn society levels at the girls who won’t stay quiet and pretty and demure. The word “witch” doesn’t just describe the cackling, potion-brewing figure from folklore. Despite the decidedly silly plot, Lake’s impeccable charm is hard to resist. Regardless, you’re watching it today to see ’40s bombshell Veronica Lake at the height of her powers, looking effortlessly glamorous in her signature peek-a-boo hairstyle a year after Sullivan’s Travels made her a household name. As in the later Bell, Book & Candle, the farcical use of magic is played for laughs but is oddly sinister at the same time-it is first used to nudge a man into infidelity, and later to encourage voter fraud in an election. Amusingly, the synopsis hardly sounds like a comedy at all: The film revolves around a witch and her father who were executed in colonial America for practicing the dark arts, only to be resurrected in the 1940s, where they hound the descendent of the man responsible for their deaths. You can thank the Criterion Collection for reviving modern interest in this curious, noir-tinged little comedy, which had largely been washed away into obscurity despite the presence of stars Fredric March and Veronica Lake. So with that said, let’s count off the 30 best movies about witches.
They can star at the heart of multi-billion dollar box franchises, or go back to their roots to give us some of the best of modern, indie horror. They can start delivery services or repel the Nazis from England’s shore (provided they’re also Angela Lansbury-more on that below). Witches can be protagonists, or comic relief. The modern witch, in fact, can be whatever the story requires her (or him) to be. For one thing, they’re not always malevolent forces in cinema. You know, standard witch stuff.īut the depiction of witches really isn’t quite so simple as all that. Flying broomsticks and children in cages, waiting for the oven to adequately preheat. Malicious old crones, twisted and deformed by a lifetime (or several lifetimes) of practicing the dark arts.
When we consider the concept of “witches” in film, we tend to first fall back on the old bits of iconography.
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