A Short History of Teenage Witches

The history of teenage witches is tied to the uncanniness surrounding adolescence. Signifying metamorphosis, uncertainty, and an uncomfortable liminality, the teenage years are a period of intense biological and psychological tumult. Neither adult nor child, straining for independence yet perpetually fettered by the prohibitions of parental authority, teens exist in an ambiguous, in-between state. Adolescence is demarcated by a continuous struggle wherein attempts to mould an independent, authentic adult selfhood are invariably hampered as one is repeatedly drawn back to the dependent state of the child through the omnipresence of familial demands and constraints. At the same time, there is something frightening and unsettling about adolescence. After all, adolescence is perhaps the time when one feels most acutely, and most intimately, the horror of abjection.

In the loosest possible terms, the abject, as coined by theorist Julia Kristeva, refers to that which does not respect boundaries, those things which annihilate the distinction between inside and outside, self and other. Blood and other bodily fluids are archetypal manifestations of the abject; they arouse revulsion precisely because they transgress the boundaries of the body, signifying a breakdown between the protected core of interiority and the Otherness of the external world. In short, bodily secretions remind us that we are merely physical objects, bodies vulnerable to external penetration and violation. For adolescent girls, in particular, the advent of menstruation is a fundamentally abject encounter with one’s own body. Entering into femininity and the biological transformations associated with crossing the threshold into womanhood are often felt as a uniquely disconcerting, alienating experiencing: one’s body becomes a stranger, a distant reflection of a self that does not seem at home in its new, metamorphic physical form. Perhaps this is why we make so many horror movies about teenage girls. From Carrie (1976) through to Teeth (2007) and The Neon Demon (2016), female adolescence and its attendant bodily transformations are invariably figured as a source of terror.

 

Teenage girls in history

Beyond the immediacy of the lived experience of adolescent femininity, teenage girls often seem inherently terrifying: they speak in a shared code of strange slang and acronyms; their rituals, friendships and rivalries seem intense and fundamentally byzantine. To the uninitiated, they can seem like a strange tribe or obscure cult; their language, behaviours and dress appear obscure and inscrutable. In a 1941 article published in Life magazine, just as the teenager was emerging as a unique social demographic, the author describes the behaviour of teen girls in decidedly ethnographic terms, as though he is documenting a curious foreign culture:

“They swoop in and out of parties in noisy, cohesive gangs. They love open houses where there are plenty of records, cigarets [sic] and ‘cokes’. They never stay home on vacation nights. Their taste in companionship runs less to steadfast devotion than to a multiplicity of dates and quick turnover …. They speak a curious lingo of their own, adore chocolate milkshakes and swing music …. and drive like bats out of hell.” (Life 1941, p. 75.)

Although the teenager would not crystallise as a fully-formed cultural archetype until the affluence of the post-war economic boom, the above extract prefigures the anxieties surrounding the new phenomenon of the adolescent that would come to dominate the popular imagination in the 1950s. While the image of the juvenile delinquent – embodied by the tormented, confused teens of Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause – may have been most closely associated with drag-racing, leather-jacket-wearing boys, the teenage girl conjured up a host of anxieties of her own. Specifically, as noted in the Life piece, teen girls represented a threatening autonomy. They are on the cusp of womanhood, entering into female sexuality, but they are unrestrained by the confines of marriage and motherhood. Unregulated by the adult social institution of matrimony, they eschew “steadfast devotion” in favour of promiscuity and a “multiplicity of dates”, “quick turnover.” Considering the disapproving tone and shocked language employed by the article’s author, that the teenage girl would morph into a figure of anxiety and apprehension seems like a predictable cultural transformation. Moreover, the imagery utilised by Life — hordes of teenage girls swooping into parties and diners in noisy cohesive gangs – evokes nothing less than supernatural tumult and threat: the frantic flap of the harpy’s wing, the screech of the night hag, and, of course, the witch’s harried flight. The young women descending on parties in their boisterous groups appear threatening and possessed of some inscrutable, occult knowledge; they seem like nothing less than witches flying over silent houses on their way to some riotous sabbath.

 

Teenage girls as witches

Over the course of the post-World War II period, this construction of adolescent girls as witchlike in their appearance and behaviour did not remain confined to the subtleties of subtext. From the 1950s onwards, adolescent sorceresses began to materialise throughout both high art and popular culture.

In 1953, Arthur Miller’s powerful condemnation of McCarthy-era paranoia, The Crucible, traced the origins of the infamous Salem witch trials to adolescent spite and sexual jealousy. While, as historian Emerson W Baker has observed, Salem’s principal accusers spanned a range of demographics and included both old and young, Miller’s fictive rendering of the trials locates the source of the town’s paranoia in the vengeful denunciations of the teenage Abigail Williams. That Abigail is transformed into a hormonal adolescent by Miller’s pen is significant. In reality, the historical Abigail Williams was a child when the trials occurred. Yet despite the play’s seventeenth-century setting, Abigail behaves like a stereotypical twentieth-century American teen: she throws tantrums and lusts after unattainable “crushes”; she explicitly bullies and manipulates the coterie of young girls that encircles her, utilising her power and influence to intimidate others. Although The Crucible deals with two parallel historical tragedies, the play suggests that rather than emerging from social prejudices and perennial anxieties about difference, the witch-hunting mentality derives from petty teenage vindictiveness.

 

Ray Bradbury’s “The April Witch”

However, while Miller’s exploration of American paranoia may have presented us with one of the most iconic conflations of adolescence and witchcraft, other texts, more closely aligned with what we might term genre fiction, have also employed the archetype as part of a continuing dialogue about adolescence and femininity in modern American. A year before Miller’s play debuted, that staple of middle-class entertainment, The Saturday Evening Post, featured a short story by the science-fiction and horror writer Ray Bradbury entitled “The April Witch.” A more nuanced evocation of adolescent femininity than Miller’s paean to American anxiety, Bradbury’s tale of teenage sorcery is focused primarily on the embodied experience of adolescent femininity. The protagonist, Cecy Elliott, is a young witch, the teenage daughter in a family of ghouls and monsters. Her supernatural abilities have endowed her with the ability to inhabit other forms, to essentially project her spirit out into the world and enter the bodies of others. Cecy spends much of the story physically confined in her attic bedroom while simultaneously projecting her astral form out into the world. Dissatisfied with herself, her appearance and her lonely existence, Cecy ultimately decides to inhabit the body of an older girl, a nineteen-year-old named Anne, so that she can attend a dance, kiss a boy and fall in love.

In “The April Witch,” witchcraft thus becomes a metaphor for the experience of adolescence as well as its biological and psychological upheavals. In her work on corporeal feminism, Elizabeth Grosz discusses the psychological disjuncture between the physical body and the psychic sense of self. In particular, for Grosz, the unpredictable metamorphoses that characterise the teenage years create a dissatisfaction with biological reality and an estrangement from the physical body. Adolescents are thus more likely to escape the confusion of bodily changes and corporeal discomfort by retreating into imagination, mentally projecting themselves into a better, more attractive fantasy body. Cecy’s strangeness, her isolation and her psychic wanderings all evoke the dreamy, frustrated awkwardness of puberty. Like the experience of adolescence itself, Cecy is a fundamentally uncanny being: she is liminal, existing between flesh and spirit, body and mind. Moreover, she is abject; in her spectral form she demolishes corporeal boundaries, annihilating the barrier between interior and exterior as she flits from body to body. The witch here represents the fluidity of adolescence, its metamorphic and transgressive nature.

 

Sabrina arrives

In the years since Miller and Bradbury helped to solidify the connection between adolescent girlhood and witchcraft, teenage witches have infiltrated popular culture in a host of diverse guises. In 1962, the character of Sabrina Spellman made her first appearance in Archie Comics. A bubblier, friendlier witch removed from overt expressions of diabolism and occult menace, Sabrina has more in common with the suburbanised, domesticated witches of Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and Bewitched (1964-1972). However, while Sabrina neither engages with overt expressions of sexuality nor with more sinister incarnations of the occult, witchcraft and adolescence remain inextricably linked, both in the original comic books and in the later ABC sitcom (1996-2003), as Sabrina’s attempts to master her magical powers parallel the teenage experience of learning about adult responsibility. Over the next few decades, teenage witches would become increasingly ubiquitous fixtures in film and fiction. From Satan’s School for Girls (1973) to The Craft (1996) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), teenage witches have personified a range of social anxieties about adolescent girls and served as the locus for a myriad of intersecting cultural conversations about the role of young women at various stages of twentieth-century history. Over the decades, the conflation of witchcraft and girlhood has encapsulated a plethora of social discourses on topics as diverse second-wave feminism, the Satanic panic, and sexuality. Yet while teenage witches remained a potent and ubiquitous post-war archetype, it seems as though the intense connection between witchcraft and the embodied experience of adolescent has re-emerged most spectacularly as a quintessential component of early twenty-first-century horror.

 

The teenage witch in 21st-century horror

Echoing Bradbury’s use of witchcraft as a metaphor for the uncanny liminality of the teenage experience, a number of contemporary horror texts have employed the figure of the adolescent witch as a means of engaging with themes of maturation, puberty, repression and consent. In Robert Eggers’ 2015 period horror film The Witch, the occult enters the home of a devout Puritan family when their daughter, Thomasin, enters adolescence. Indeed, the girl’s mother explicitly states that “Thomasin hath begat the sign of her womanhood” just as malevolent forces begin to corrupt their faithful errand into the wilderness. Likewise, at numerous points throughout the film, witchcraft is associated with the abjection of bodily fluids in general and menstrual blood in particular. Thomasin milks a goat and, rather than the pure white of wholesome, innocent milk, the animal excretes blood. However, where Miller demonised the potency of frustrated Puritan girlhood, Eggers centres his film on Thomasin’s journey into witchcraft, a path which parallels her journey into womanhood. In this context the suspicion and derision directed at the teenage girl/witch becomes a means of exploring more complex issues of gender, sexuality and repression. Within the isolated homestead occupied by Thomasin and her family, witchcraft paranoia merges with sexual paranoia. The burgeoning femininity of Thomasin is a threat to the order and stability of the family home, just as the witch is a threat to the order and stability of the Puritan community and Christian values. That Thomasin is ultimately left with the decision of whether or not to abandon the restrictive confines of the Puritan family for the liberated, feminised wilderness of the witch suggests that the teen witch is here framed as a signifier of agency, choice and strength.

 

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

In a similar mode, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack’s comic series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2014 – present) utilises the adolescent witch as a means of exploring the embodied experience of young womanhood. A dark reimagining of Archie Comics’ Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Chilling Adventures figures its protagonist’s initiation into womanhood as coterminous with her initiation into witchcraft. As in the ABC sitcom remembered so fondly by many children of the 1990s, Sabrina becomes a witch on her sixteenth birthday. However, Aguirre-Sacasa and Hack’s vision of Sabrina is one enmeshed within a web of intertextual literary and artistic discourses that range from the paintings of Francisco de Goya to the EC horror comics of the 1950s.

Consequently, rather than a simple fable about learning to navigate adult responsibility, this new iteration of Sabrina engages with the anxieties of puberty, emergent sexuality and the terror of the abject. In the first arc of Aguirre-Sacasa and Hack’s comic series, Sabrina’s initiation into witchcraft and the bloody ritual that accompanies it are framed in decidedly corporeal terms, using a language of blood and lunar cycles that clearly hints at menstruation. As the girl prepares for her baptism as a full witch, her Aunt Zelda informs her that

“As discussed, the ceremony would customarily take place on the first full moon after your sixteenth birthday… but I’ve already had your astral chart prepared … and your sixteenth birthday falls not just on a full moon, but on the best kind of full moon … a blood-moon… the same night as a lunar eclipse… on Samhain…” (Chapter 3)

Deviating sharply from the comedic tone of the Archie comic books, Sabrina will pledge her loyalty to Satan on the night of a blood moon after she has ridden a goat deep into the forest and slaughtered the creature. Awash in its blood, she must then give herself over to the dark lord. Like Eggers’ The Witch, the imagery and language of Chilling Adventures suggest a continuity between witchcraft and female adolescence, between the blood sacrifice of occult ritual and menstrual blood. Moreover, both of these texts recall earlier works such as Bradbury’s “April Witch” in their use of the witchcraft archetypes – the power of astral projection, the ability to spoil the milk of farm animals, animal sacrifice – as a means of exploring the embodied experience of female adolescence.

However, while it is possible to suggest that such abject images of the teenage girl as witch serve as little more than a condemnation of that demographic and a reverberation of social anxieties about female adolescence, I would contend that the teen witch is a more complex figure. Rather than simply embodying social misgivings about adolescent femininity – the stereotypical view of young women as vicious, dangerous sexual and vindictive – the teenage sorceress ultimately interrogates and questions these simplistic constructions of young womanhood. Although Arthur Miller’s spiteful Abigail Williams may appear to embody nothing more than the popular conception of young women as superficial, cruel, and cultish in groups, other texts investigating the relationship between young girls and witchcraft delve more deeply into the psychological and biological complexities of adolescence. Foregrounding an iconography of liminality, bodily transformation and abject fluids, these works present adolescence not simply as a social construct, a convenient demarcation of the ambiguous period between childhood and adulthood, but as a profound psychic and corporeal metamorphosis. Rather than viewing teenage girls from a distance, as some inscrutable coven or cultish tribe, texts that explore the teen witch archetype often concern themselves with the intimate, embodied experience of adolescence.

In The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which was notably adapted into a live-action series by Netflix in 2018, the complex interiority of adolescence is central to the text’s narrative trajectory. In both the comic book and the Netflix show, Sabrina’s entry into witchcraft/womanhood is contingent upon her signing her name in the Devil’s book and pledging her loyalty to him. In this way, Chilling Adventures suggests that adult femininity is defined by an acceptance of an inherently patriarchal structure (represented here by the explicitly masculine Devil). Both works therefore also concern themselves with the issue of consent, following as they do Sabrina’s struggle to exercise choice and control over her own body, soul and life. Indeed, in the television series, Sabrina explicitly refutes the notion of serving an all-powerful male ruler when she would prefer to determine the course of her own life.

The teenage witch has certainly evolved as an archetype over the course of six decades. Her earliest manifestations may have been a simple fictive shorthand for anxieties concerning the newly emerging demographic of the teenage, exploring concerns about female sexuality and rebellion; but her most recent cultural forms have foregrounded the lived experience of female adolescence, its uncanniness and its metamorphic terror. Moreover, it is possible to argue that the themes of bodily autonomy, sexuality and consent that dominate both contemporary works such as The Witch and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina echo the cultural values of an era defined by third-wave feminism, #TimesUp and #MeToo. The teen witch is, therefore, a malleable figure. She adapts herself the discourses of her era, and like all enduring mythic archetypes, has the power to shift her form accordingly.

See our review of Robert Eggers’ The Witch here.

And check out a discussion of patriarchal power and witchcraft in the 1968 folk horror classic, Witchfinder General.

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Miranda Corcoran currently teaches American literature in University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She also enjoys researching and writing about topics related to horror, the supernatural and witchcraft. She blogs about horror, science fiction and pop culture at https://amiddleagedwitch.wordpress.com/.  Miranda is currently working on a monograph focusing on witchcraft and adolescence in popular culture.