Browsing Tag

witches

Posted on June 17, 2021

Carrie White as Witchcraft, Power and Fear

Guest Post

In our hands: embers embers embers
just waiting for
the opportunity
to ignite

-Amanda Lovelace, The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One (53)

The Witch in Popular Culture

In the twenty-first century, literature and film have demonstrated a compulsion to return to the figure of the witch. Witches are embedded in popular culture old and new. From the folkloric enchantresses Baba Yaga, Circe, and Morgan Le Fay to the fairytale hags who eat, kidnap, and murder children in stories such as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and Snow White, the witch is designed to reinforce men’s fear and abhorrence towards women. Modern media, however, continues to challenge the witch as a figure of absolute terror and evil. What happens, for example, when the witch is a child herself? Portrayals of the “goodhearted” child-as-witch emerged and took centre-stage in stories such as Harry Potter (2001-11) and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018). But before Hermione and Sabrina, there was Stephen King’s Carrie White.

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Posted on April 21, 2021

The Greatest Witch of All: Examining the Character and Cultural Impact of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Guest Post

The Wicked Witch of the West is perhaps the most famous incarnation of a witch on screen who also happens to be in one of the greatest films of all time. She may not have a cat, but she does have a fleet of winged monkeys. I can, of course, only be referring to the Wicked Witch of the West from the spectacularly glorious 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. Originating from the timeless and much-loved book penned in 1900 by L. Frank Baum entitled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this depiction, embodied by an unrecognisable Margaret Hamilton, has served as universal shorthand for wickedness in popular culture for decades.

The Wicked Witch of the West is ranked at number 4 on the American Film Institute’s 50 best villains of all-time list, a startling achievement in that it also makes her the highest -ranking female villain ever to bewitch our screens! Her very title, in fact, denotes her importance, for she is not just a witch, but the Wicked Witch of the West, a name that with its heavy vowel sounds and alliteration carries an air of threat and menace. Unlike her adversary, Glinda, the Witch of the North, she is not humanized with a Christian name. Read more

Sabrina
Posted on February 20, 2019

A Short History of Teenage Witches

Guest Post

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. Read more

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