Witches! A Primer

As spooky season approaches, Chris and Lizzie explore a brief history of witches. Find out how they’ve evolved in folklore, literature, and entertainment from ‘MacBeth’ to ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to ‘Weapons’ and beyond! Plus discover how ‘Practical Magic’ fits into this witchy arc, and what the upcoming sequel may bring to the cauldron. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:05Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone if you have magic on your side. Or do you? Or should we burn them? Or see if they float? Or, I don't know, I don't trust women. Lizzie, what are we talking about?

• 2:07Lizzie Bassett?

  We're talking about women. No, we're talking about witches. We're entering the very tippy top of spooky season, I would argue. And also, of course, we are covering the OG Practical Magic because of the release of the second one. So I thought, why not not just double down? Why not triple down on witches and kick this all off with a primer? I'm sorry, Chris, I'm going back to the pronunciation of primer that we all know and love about witches.

• 2:36Chris Winterbauer?

  If you want to say it wrong, you're more than welcome to.

• 2:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I do want to say it wrong. It's my right.

• 2:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It is your right. Totally fine.

• 2:43Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, Chris, what are your thoughts and feelings on witches? The vitches, if you're a celebrity? Oh, love them. Okay, great.

• 2:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, witches are great.

• 2:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Big witch fan.

• 2:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Big witch fan, big witch energy. I, no, I've always liked witches as a concept. Nicholas Rogue's adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches always made a big impression upon me, and I really liked that book as a child. And the Angelica Huston performance is very fun in that movie. I haven't rewatched Practical Magic for the podcast yet, but I saw it when I was young and I remember enjoying it. And then even things like, I don't know, Halloween Town.

• 3:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:15Chris Winterbauer?

  You know?

• 3:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Hocus Pocus.

• 3:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Hocus Pocus was a big one, Snow White, obviously going back. But we've had some great witchcraft, screen craft, witchcraft in recent years, obviously The Vitch, as you, The Vavitch, and Robert Eggers' update slash throwback. And then, most recently, Weapons was one of my favorite films of the last few years, which is a great witch entrant.

• 3:38Lizzie Bassett?

  We're gonna talk about both of those witches in this episode.

• 3:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So I'm a big witch fan. Love, love a good witch.

• 3:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Big witch guy. Love a good witch, love a bad witch.

• 3:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Love a wicked witch, love them all.

• 3:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. All right. Well, today I thought it would be maybe not fun, but at least informative to walk through a brief history of witches and more specifically, a brief history of the way witches have been depicted in literature and of course, eventually in film. And Chris, the thing that is most interesting to me about all of this research is that witches, maybe more than any other archetype, are often a bit of a canary in the coal mine. If you pay attention to how society depicts its witches, it will often tell you how that society wants to treat its women.

• 4:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Poorly.

• 4:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Badly, almost always badly.

• 4:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, not much of a plot twist, I guess.

• 4:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Not really a uniform distribution around good. It's kind of like skewed to one side.

• 4:33Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's like, how bad? How bad does it get?

• 4:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I did read one theory, I don't know if you came across this in your research, but I read a theory that, I don't know, maybe it was the 15th century, no, this would have been 17th century New England.

• 4:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Not a good time to be a witch.

• 4:48Chris Winterbauer?

  No, there was perhaps a mini, not technically an ice age, but like a sort of atmospheric event that caused a lot of crops to die. And that one of the reasons there may have been a spate of witch burnings at the time was climate change, basically, but they got the causality reversed, of course.

• 5:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's actually, I mean, we're gonna talk about that quite a bit. That's most of what was happening is that people were just looking for explanations for bad shit that was going wrong. And the easiest thing was to point it at the old lady in the corner.

• 5:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:20Lizzie Bassett?

  But Chris, I actually don't want to start in Salem, Massachusetts with a bunch of teenage girls. We will get there, but I would actually like to start in Innsbruck, Austria with a bad monk. So sometime around 1485, a Dominican friar named Heinrich Kramer marched into the town of Innsbruck with his panties in a twist because about a year earlier, the Pope had issued a papal bowl, which informed the residents of then Germany, I believe this was part of that region at this point, that their country was being overrun by witches. And this papal bowl granted inquisitors like Heinrich the right to persecute and prosecute said witches. So he's very excited about this.

• 6:00Lizzie Bassett?

  But much to his dismay, the townspeople don't really care, which is like super embarrassing. So there were rumors that a woman named Helena Schreiber and had caused the death of a local knight via witchcraft. But the thing is, nobody really seemed to think that this was the church's problem because the idea of witchcraft falling under the church's purview was actually pretty new, which I didn't know until I started really looking into this. Exodus, chapter 22, verse 18 says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." And even though some think that that may be a translation issue and may have meant poisoner Heinrich did not care and he had his work cut out for him. So he went really hard after Helena. And it didn't help that the first time she saw him in the street, she spat on him and called him a bad monk. She wasn't wrong.

• 6:44Lizzie Bassett?

  She was also a notoriously independent, outspoken woman with a rich husband. Now, if this was America, seems like everybody probably would have burned her at the stake as fast as possible, but something kind of unexpected happened here. The town kind of stood by her, or at least they just didn't really support Heinrich. He accused at least 13 other people of witchcraft and then he dug his heels in really trying to prove it. He interrogated them, tortured them, but he did not get a confession. Eventually, the local bishop was like, sir, you have zero evidence and you need to get out, get out of town. So he did eventually leave, but Chris, like all good trolls, he was not gonna give up that easily.

• 7:26Lizzie Bassett?

  So he went back to his little stone basement and he started writing up his manifesto.

• 7:31Chris Winterbauer?

  To the abbey?

• 7:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he went back to the catacombs. He wrote the Malia's Malaphicarum.

• 7:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, he wrote the Malia's Malaphicarum. Okay.

• 7:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Do you know what that, do you know what that word means?

• 7:42Chris Winterbauer?

  No, but I know of it as one of the, as like an occult text, sort of.

• 7:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Sort of. So it means hammer of witches. Cool. He wrote it in 1486. And Chris, it was a guidebook on how to identify, interrogate, and successfully convict witches.

• 8:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 8:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty, pretty cool. So this is where we get the concept of a witch's mark, which is basically just a random spot on a woman's body that the investigator was allowed to search for and that purportedly fed her demon familiar. I would have been screwed. I am covered in moles.

• 8:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Me too.

• 8:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I would have been dead so fast.

• 8:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I have a giant mole on my back. It's like so big.

• 8:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it?

• 8:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I got it checked. It's totally fine. They were actually like, it's so big, we're not worried about it. It's, we're like through the uncanny valley of mole size.

• 8:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 8:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I, they take off my shirt and they're like, oh, you're fine. Like this would have killed you.

• 8:35Lizzie Bassett?

  But also, please put your shirt back on. We don't need to say that.

• 8:37Chris Winterbauer?

  It may have its own brain, but you're fine.

• 8:42Lizzie Bassett?

  So it also outlined torture techniques and declared that torture and death were essentially the only correct ways to truly identify a witch.

• 8:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Dick Cheney style.

• 8:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Basically, most importantly, it proclaimed that witches were probably ladies. If it's a witch, it's a bitch. Trademark Heinrich Kramer, certified.

• 9:00Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Yeah. Also, like, they're not talking to me, so like, it's probably the woman.

• 9:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm pretty sure it's all women.

• 9:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, if this had happened 100 years earlier, it probably wouldn't have amounted to that much. But Chris, what civilization-altering invention had popped onto the scene around 1440?

• 9:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah, the printing press.

• 9:22Lizzie Bassett?

  The printing press. Normally thought of as a good thing, unless you're Heinrich Kramer.

• 9:28Chris Winterbauer?

  This is why we can't let people read.

• 9:29Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 9:29Chris Winterbauer?

  This is why we can't let people read.

• 9:31Lizzie Bassett?

  This is why you should have kept the masses in Latin.

• 9:33Chris Winterbauer?

  But this was also like OG fake news. This was...

• 9:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 9:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And I, I mean, even the founding fathers were pretty against magazines and, or local newspapers, I believe, for example, because they were like, yeah, they were like, this is, we're proliferating information far too quickly. We need to control this. Like, you know, ASAP. The masses will be faked out.

• 9:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's completely correct. This led to Kramer's book actually becoming a bestseller in the region, I believe, second only to the Bible for over 100 years.

• 10:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, that's a great box set.

• 10:03Lizzie Bassett?

  The Bible and Malice, Malachia.

• 10:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, the reason I'm telling you this is that this piece of essentially fanfic, I'm not exactly sure what we should call it, but it, this piece of fake news is really the beginning of the witch hunting craze. But let's back up a little bit, because witches and witchcraft were not always considered a direct threat, and they certainly weren't always considered a religious threat. Back in ancient Mesopotamia, magic was not pitted against religion in the way that I, that I at least think of it being now. Instead, it was like religion used as a way to explain the unexplainables. So this is what you're talking about with like a very cold winter, natural phenomena, unexplained deaths, illness. There was also a very widespread belief in demons. Shout out to Pazuzu from The Exorcist.

• 10:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Pazuzu, Lamashdu also, I think,

• 10:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, oh yeah.

• 10:53Chris Winterbauer?

  attacked pregnant women and babies.

• 10:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Not a lady demon?

• 10:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Not so cool. But figurines of these demons were commonly worn by people trying to protect themselves from that specific demon. So if everybody's walking around with amulets, doing spells, what makes a witch, a witch? The answer, I think, is sort of like bad intentions, because everybody's kind of doing something. Also, being a lady helped. And while there were very few mentions of benevolent witches in early texts, although there are some, most seemed to agree as time went on that when you combine women with magic, bad things happen. It's obviously also not an accident that one of the only positions in which a woman could hold any kind of power, in this case magical power, is deemed bad. So, right from the get-go, the term witch does seem to apply almost

• 11:38Lizzie Bassett?

  exclusively to more marginalized groups, most commonly to women. That's not to say that it was exclusively women. It was not. There were plenty of men who were also accused of being witches and/or potentially practicing witchcraft.

• 11:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Highlander.

• 11:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, exactly. That's the only one.

• 11:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Just, just Highlander.

• 11:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, it didn't just refer to people who cast spells. The, the idea of a witch could refer to those with, like Liam Neeson, a very particular set of skills that you can't explain. Oracles would be a great example. One of the earliest witch figures in the Bible is the witch of Endor, who was closer to a medium. She brings back the dead prophet Samuel for King Saul to have a little chat with. Samuel predicts that Saul and his son will die. This, of course, does come to pass. She's essentially whoopee and ghost. That's like as far as she goes.

• 12:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, like, George Lucas is just pulling names from everywhere, isn't he?

• 12:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, certainly.

• 12:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. This one goes out to Sharon in Australia. A little bit of a pastiche. All right, go ahead, listen.

• 12:34Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. So for most of the early days, even though belief in witchcraft was extremely widespread, it was still not viewed as a direct threat to religion. Those were very separate, nor were witches necessarily viewed as criminals. It actually wasn't until around 400 AD that St. Augustine started to make the argument that pagan gods were demonic in nature. And since paganism was more closely associated with magic and mysticism, then, by the transient property, magic must run on a demonic engine. And it also didn't help that Christianity was now positioning miracles as exclusively acts of God. So they have a bit of a catch-22 here, because they basically can't really acknowledge magic, because

• 13:14Lizzie Bassett?

  they're saying all miracles are by the hand of God. So we don't even really want to talk about the idea of black magic or witches, because then how would you explain that if God is the one doing all of the magical miracles?

• 13:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Isn't this kind of where like Gnosticism breaks off too, because Gnosticism allows for...

• 13:32Lizzie Bassett?

  A little magic to creep in?

• 13:33Chris Winterbauer?

  A little magic, an original mover, a lesser god, not just the Christian, although I know there's the three bodies. But yeah, it is interesting how that Christianity really says, we're gonna take the ball and go home, and no one else can play with it.

• 13:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 13:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And you're not allowed, everything is God, this is all God's domain, God supersedes everything.

• 13:54Lizzie Bassett?

  And if you are worshiping or even like considering the existence of something else, that isn't just like your belief, it is inherently demonic. That's, that's the shift that starts to happen at this point.

• 14:08Chris Winterbauer?

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• 16:19Lizzie Bassett?

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• 17:03Lizzie Bassett?

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• 17:29Lizzie Bassett?

  So for a lot of the medieval period, belief in witchcraft did remain pretty widespread amongst the common people, including in benevolent forms like healing magic, herbalism, and the church basically turned a blind eye. Actually, in 1258, Pope Alexander IV essentially told church investigators to like bugger off and leave your everyday witches alone, saying that the church really doesn't need to intervene unless heresy, i.e. directly working with the devil, was involved. But things start to change in the 1400s. Universities were being formed and newly educated groups of elites, you shouldn't trust those, were poring over ancient texts, particularly some ones from the Muslim world, and many of

• 18:09Lizzie Bassett?

  these described very complex magic, cosmic forces, spirits, and of course, some demons. And suddenly, an idea started to form, particularly in the Western Alps, that people practicing magic, they were not isolated spellcasters in their little huts, Chris, they were members of a secret satanic cabal. There are no new ideas. We've been doing this since the dawn of time. Can you imagine what a cesspool medieval Reddit would have been?

• 18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  It just would have been the same as our right now. There would have been no difference. It just would have been in Old English. Like, that's the only difference.

• 18:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Might have been more fun, though.

• 18:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe.

• 18:46Lizzie Bassett?

  So in the 1430s, a small group of writers, who were mostly church officials, legal authorities, they started to describe how witches would meet in secret groups, worship the devil, murder children, and plot directly against Christianity. And this is really one of the first times, at least in writing, that you see witchcraft pitted as a direct threat to the church itself. And my understanding is that it had to do with the idea that performing any kind of magic involved summoning a demon, unless you're God, who I guess gets a free pass. So if you were practicing magic, you were worshiping demons. According to historian Mimi Brock, quote, "Probably the most gruesome thing that people imagined witches to do is people imagined some witches might grind up or use parts of humans, especially parts

• 19:28Lizzie Bassett?

  of unbaptized infants, to make them into a paste, to make them into a potion, and anoint themselves in order to fly." Now, if you're wondering, how did we go from herbalism to flying baby paste? The answer may be rooted in a little antisemitism. A lot of the imagery I just mentioned was already associated with Jews. There's the killing and eating of Christian children, gathering in secret, conspiring against Christendom, et cetera. These are not new ideas either. And the idea of witches having hooked noses also does trace back to antisemitic roots as well. It's an easy way to other them, since aquiline noses are a more Mediterranean trait, and much of this was happening around Europe.

• 20:08Lizzie Bassett?

  So why start attributing this sort of thing to witches? It may simply have been that the church and some secular courts were looking for new crimes to prosecute and new ways to exert power. It's kind of like the 15th century version of the Patriot Act. You mentioned Dick Cheney. He would have loved it.

• 20:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 20:25Lizzie Bassett?

  And this is when the term witch really crystallizes into more of a defined legal category, which is fun. All right. So now we're caught up to Heinrich Kramer and his Malice Malaficarum, Hammer of Witches, et cetera. With every new town that this stupid book spread to, more witch trials followed, which was a bad thing. Obviously, it's bad for the accused witches, but Chris, any idea why this may have been bad for quite literally everyone in the town?

• 20:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, causes paranoia and distrust amongst society and divides people.

• 20:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, those are all bad things, but also, there's basically zero medical practitioners in these areas, and often, the people who are being accused of witchcraft were the only healers in the town. They were growing herbs, brewing potions, you know?

• 21:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So basically, what you're telling me is RFK showing up at all these towns right now?

• 21:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not totally dissimilar from what's going on. So this led to the European witch craze from the late 1400s through about 1782, and around 45,000 people were executed. Most of the accusations did come from people, like you said, trying to explain away their bad luck. Had they recently argued with a neighbor, received an angry look from someone, is that why all my crops died? How about the old childless lady who lives on the outskirts of town? What did she do to my crops?

• 21:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. What's she doing out there, minding her business?

• 21:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Why is she so happy out there by herself? Doesn't she want a husband?

• 21:53Chris Winterbauer?

  She must be taking pleasure in my misfortune.

• 21:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Everyone in Europe sounds like they're from the Panhandle.

• 22:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Everyone in Europe has a bad Panhandle accent.

• 22:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, as this panic grew, Chris, it also created a new job opening.

• 22:11Chris Winterbauer?

  There we go. Now we're talking about the political platform we're building, bringing jobs to your town. We've entered ICE territory now.

• 22:21Lizzie Bassett?

  We're creating jobs. And this job was the witch hunter.

• 22:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Your mother and I are not for the asteroid. We are for the jobs the asteroid is creating.

• 22:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, this was a very lucrative position, Chris. In 1644, a man named Matthew Hopkins claimed that six witches had attempted to murder him, and this launched his career, for sure, as one of the most prolific witch hunters ever to enter the game. He was responsible for at least 300 trials and executions. And of course, he charged for his services.

• 22:50Chris Winterbauer?

  This reminds me of, there's a really great article that people should look into, might have been ProPublica or something that put it out, but it was about this guy who created this completely based in nothing system to determine the guilt of individuals who have made 911 calls, basically, when they are suspects. And it is a system of, well, you need to listen to their answer and the way that their voice sounds, blah, blah, blah. And the example that's used in this article is there was this woman whose, like, 18-month-old child suffocated and is bad. And this guy said, well, according to this, my super sophisticated system, she definitely killed him. And this woman was

• 23:35Chris Winterbauer?

  convicted largely on this person or his program's expert testimony. And it's all based on nothing. It's just gobbledygook, and it's opportunistic, and he sells it as, and I have no doubt he believes it, that's fine, but he sells it to police departments, who, for whatever reason, are purchasing this thing. And so I encourage anybody out there, there's an American Psychological Association article called Guilty Caller: Real World Implications of a Flawed 911 Tool, and it's called Considering Offender Probability in Statements Scale, is what it's called.

• 24:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, that's horrifying to think that that might be something in the back of your head when you're calling 911.

• 24:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And yes, and the ProPublica article is called How Jessica Logan's Call for Help Became Evidence Against Her by Brett Murphy, published on November 20, 2022. And the detective is Eric Matthews, who's involved in this.

• 24:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Matthew Matthews, a connection.

• 24:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. It is absolutely mind-boggling, the lack of sophistication in this, which is being used to put somebody away, perhaps for life, in prison. By the way, this mother also had at least one other child. So this other child is being deprived their parent. Check out this article, Witch Hunting Remains: A Lucrative Business Within the Police Community, Apparently.

• 24:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you said something interesting, Chris, which is that you said, I have no doubt he believes it. I have some doubts that Matthew Hopkins believed what he was doing, because...

• 25:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I smoked weed with Johnny Hopkins. He knew what he was doing.

• 25:10Lizzie Bassett?

  One of his favorite tests was actually to prick the witch's marks. And if you didn't feel the prick, you were a witch. But it is believed that this worked so well for him, because he used a retractable pin.

• 25:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, of course. He's David Blaine.

• 25:23Lizzie Bassett?

  God damn it. See you in hell, Matthew. Cool magic trick.

• 25:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, this is the problem with aligning economic incentives, right? If you say, finding this thing will yield rewards, you will figure out a way to find the thing, whether or not it exists.

• 25:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, this is like the people saying that we shouldn't allow anybody to be betting on wildfires, for obvious reasons, I would say. That's happening, by the way. So other witch hunting tactics included tying suspects' thumb to their toes and tossing them in the lake. And of course, if they floated, they were a witch. If they drowned, they were not a witch, and they were also dead. So that's a great test. In 1606, peak witch hunting craze, witches officially entered entertainment, appearing as three weird sisters in what play, Chris?

• 26:09Chris Winterbauer?

  In Macbeth.

• 26:10Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, Macbeth.

• 26:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I love Macbeth.

• 26:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 26:13Chris Winterbauer?

  That's my favorite, Shakespeare.

• 26:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Very good. And so much imagery from this play has become synonymous with witches. Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. The cauldron, the three crones, that's all thanks to Willie Shakespeare. But I do want to point out, he doesn't really refer to them as witches in the dialogue. It's only in the stage directions.

• 26:34Chris Winterbauer?

  They're also not... Evil, in my opinion.

• 26:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That's correct. They're not.

• 26:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Lizzie Bassett?

  So I'm sure he didn't want a visit from the Matthew Hopkins of the world. And the fact that he used the word weird, that word is actually derived from an old English word that's closer to the idea of fate.

• 26:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 26:49Lizzie Bassett?

  So they are positioned more like ancient oracles than they are the kinds of witches that were being hunted when he wrote the play. This is also where the word weird shifts from its original meaning, I believe.

• 27:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:01Lizzie Bassett?

  And it is worth noting that at the absolute height of witch frenzy, King James, the king at the time, was publicly anti witchcraft and black magic. Shakespeare both declines to call these women witches, and he makes it very clear that Macbeth makes all of his own decisions.

• 27:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah. But Macbeth is one of my favorite stories in this tradition that we've, we continue to explore, even with all the way through like, you know, Looper and stuff like that of your fate can still exist even as you inexorably guide yourself toward it. And it's, I love that fun tension of Macbeth seems fully capable of making his own decisions. And yet, even though he's aware of his fate, he steps into it wholly with, my god, who's the man who was not born of woman? Who?

• 27:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Macduff.

• 27:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Macduff, whose name always makes me laugh. But, um, yeah, but anyway, I love Macbeth. It's such good storytelling.

• 27:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and I think, you know, to your point, like you could read the witches' lines as though they are encouraging him because they're not telling him that something bad is going to happen. They're saying, you know, basically you cannot be destroyed by anyone born of women. But

• 28:03Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a warning.

• 28:03Lizzie Bassett?

  You could also, it's a warning or it's a prophecy.

• 28:06Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a prophecy, yeah.

• 28:07Lizzie Bassett?

  They all come true. But either way, everything that happens ultimately happens because Macbeth and his wife are greedy dummies.

• 28:13Chris Winterbauer?

  You gotta watch Don't Look Now. Nicholas Rogue, Donald Sutherland, 1978, or some seventy something, I can't remember. But you have to watch it because it's kind of that idea. There's these, there's this blind woman and her sister who are maybe witchy, who are warrant, trying to warn Sutherland through Julie Christie, and it's so good.

• 28:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Ooh.

• 28:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And it all takes place in Italy. It's kind of like a Giallo, that type of Italian slasher from the sixties vibe to it. Check it out.

• 28:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I will. But I do think Shakespeare is saying something pretty pointed here, given what we know about when he wrote this.

• 28:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Lizzie Bassett?

  But just 20 years after Macbeth hit the stage, Puritan colonists who probably didn't go see that play set sail and landed in Salem, Massachusetts.

• 28:52Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they left because of those plays.

• 28:54Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. They were the least fun people possible. They were already living very strict and isolated lives before they left.

• 29:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Our ancestors.

• 29:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Good times. And now they were getting way more than they had bargained for in Massachusetts, including constant friction with Native Americans and French settlers, and of course, the ever-present threat of starving to death.

• 29:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 29:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, 1692 marked one of the coldest winters on record. This is what you were talking about. And it pushed panic in the colony to an all-time high. It, of course, reached a fever pitch when two young girls, nine-year-old Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams, started acting weird. A doctor couldn't find anything physically wrong with them, so he diagnosed it as the work of an evil hand.

• 29:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:38Lizzie Bassett?

  The girls were pressured to reveal the perpetrators or their supposed torment. And of course, they eventually accused three women. Sarah Good, a homeless woman, Sarah Osborne, an elderly poor woman, and Tituba, an enslaved woman. Tituba understandably said, fuck this, and immediately named other supposed witches in the community, kicking off what we now know as the Salem Witch Trials with a very simple concept. If you are accused of witchcraft, your best bet is to confess and name more witches. If you don't, you're probably going to hang or you're going to get smushed like poor Giles Corey.

• 30:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm going Denzel at the end of Training Day. I got files on everybody here.

• 30:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what most people did.

• 30:16Lizzie Bassett?

  By spring of 1693, over 100 people had been imprisoned and more than 200 had been accused. The madness did finally stop. Do you know what stopped it?

• 30:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Did the weather turn?

• 30:28Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I love this so much. Somebody accused the governor's wife. And he was like, well, just hold on here. Just hold on one second. Hold on. Easy now. He stepped in, suspended the special court, released prisoners, and overturned a bunch of sentences. Now, no one knows exactly what caused this mass hysteria. Some think maybe ergot poisoning, moldy bread, even some kind of mysterious brain inflammation disease, but nothing has ever been confirmed. I don't think it was any of that. I think they just freaked out.

• 30:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think this stuff spreads. We continue to see it spread, you know?

• 30:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 31:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, QAnon.

• 31:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:02Chris Winterbauer?

  QAnon is dumber than that, just saying. Like, with the amount of information we have available today, you know what I'm saying?

• 31:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That's, that's the thing.

• 31:10Chris Winterbauer?

  1692, we're dying from starvation and freezing. I can understand losing your mind.

• 31:16Lizzie Bassett?

  You're looking for reasons why.

• 31:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And you're also trying to figure out, like, is there anything we can do to fix this?

• 31:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 31:23Lizzie Bassett?

  And of course, the answer is be nicer to the Native Americans, but they can't do that. So they're going to start accusing their own people.

• 31:29Chris Winterbauer?

  But also, like, even if they were nice, it was just

• 31:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It was really cold.

• 31:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Bad times, and also you didn't, some of the Native Americans probably didn't want them there, even if they were friendly.

• 31:37Lizzie Bassett?

  No!

• 31:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So, like, you know, no guarantee.

• 31:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie Treats and Peanut Butter M&M's, and because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration too,

• 32:27Lizzie Bassett?

  so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings.

• 32:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Now thankfully, as the Enlightenment took hold and science was becoming more of a thing, witch trials began to peter out. The final execution in Europe is dated to usually around 1782.

• 33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Real bummer to be the last person.

• 33:05Lizzie Bassett?

  That would suck.

• 33:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Hold on, science, we, oh, you already did it? All right.

• 33:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, okay, that was the last one. But even though witch trials were dying out, witches in literature were just getting started. In 1812, the Brothers Grimm published Children's and Household Tales, a collection of fairy tales that they had basically compiled from oral stories that had been circulating around Europe for decades. These featured two very prominent witches, of course, the child-eating witch in Hansel and Gretel and the evil queen in Snow White. And if Shakespeare intentionally made his witches ambiguous, the Grims made theirs 100% evil.

• 33:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Ambiguous.

• 33:44Lizzie Bassett?

  They also really codified the idea that witches are solo ladies who are out to get children. Again, this is very different from Macbeth, which was previously, you know, sort of the idea of the witch. And then in 1893, a woman named Matilda Jocelyn Gage wrote a manifesto titled Women, Church, and State. In it, she stated what now seems very obvious, which is that the witch hunts were a pretty thinly veiled excuse to eradicate some powerful, independent, and intelligent women. Gage wrote, quote, "A witch was held to be a woman who had deliberately sold herself to the evil one. Anything could be used as evidence of witchcraft, possessing rare knowledge, having an unusual witch mark, suffering from mental illness, owning black cats, the use of herbs for healing, performing black magic, or having an ability to float or swim. But those condemned as sorcerers and witches as heretics

• 34:30Lizzie Bassett?

  were in reality the most advanced thinkers of the Christian ages."

• 34:33Chris Winterbauer?

  They killed all the smart people who knew how to swim.

• 34:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally. And she's right.

• 34:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. It's just, it's just, yeah.

• 34:40Lizzie Bassett?

  For the first time ever, the witch was being reframed as a victim. And Matilda's influence did not stop there because in 1900, her son-in-law wrote a book, a series of books, actually, that introduced a brand-new concept, the good witch.

• 34:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 34:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Who was her son-in-law?

• 34:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, L. Frank Baum?

• 34:58Lizzie Bassett?

  L. Frank Baum, yes.

• 35:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I was like, is it Frank L. or L. Frank? I always get them reversed.

• 35:04Lizzie Bassett?

  I always mix them up. It is L. Frank Baum. The book was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which of course pits a good witch versus a bad witch. Visual depictions of witches also started to change around the turn of the century. Suddenly, they weren't always crusty old hags. They were often young, soft, and very beautiful. Now, when The Wizard of Oz hit the big screen in 1939, Glinda reflected this new good witch. But its depictions of the wicked witch hearkened back to the old days with a few existing tropes. So let's talk about what the wicked witch looked like. You have the hooked nose. We talked about this. The warts, these are dating back to the witches' marks in the Malia's Maleficarum.

• 35:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Pointy shoes, this one's a bit weirder. Apparently, both the Catholic and Anglican churches regarded pointy shoes as, quote, "contributing directly to people's sexual proclivities," according to Andrew Miller of the Museum of London. So I guess the wicked witch is horny.

• 35:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm. They turn me on.

• 35:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, the black pointy hat, this one is thought to be linked to early anti-Quaker prejudice. Um, I guess this kind of hat was very common in the 17th century, but Quakers actually refused to take their hats off when preaching.

• 36:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:08Lizzie Bassett?

  And people were not stoked on Quakers because they believed in things like gender equality. So naturally, a lot of them were accused of witchcraft. And then, of course, there's the broom.

• 36:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Lizzie Bassett?

  No one's really sure where this came from exactly. It may have been an easy way to connect women to witches since household duties tended to fall to women more than men. But this was a long-held attachment to witches. It may have also been associated with a pagan fertility ritual or with a belief that witches gooed up staffs with hallucinogenic ointments and rode them around for a good time. That's a real

• 36:40Chris Winterbauer?

  How's that? Okay. We're gonna

• 36:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Just go ahead and leave that there.

• 36:46Lizzie Bassett?

  But there, there is one quintessential evil witch trope that the Wizard of Oz added on its own.

• 36:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Greenskin?

• 36:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Greenskin, yes. The filmmakers did this because they wanted to show off technicolor. That is why they made her green.

• 37:00Chris Winterbauer?

  The technicolor on, I mean, 1939.

• 37:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's so good.

• 37:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's crazy.

• 37:06Lizzie Bassett?

  It is so good. That's also why they changed the shoes to the ruby slippers from silver. Also why the Emerald City is green. But for whatever reason, the greenskin really stuck. For bad witches, that is. Just three years later, the good witch was morphing into the hot witch. And in 1942, Veronica Lake starred in I Married a Witch, where she plays Jennifer, a 17th century witch who dooms all men in the family of her accuser to constantly marry the wrong woman. What a curse. Flash forward, she's been freed from her ethereal bonds and she decides to use a love potion. Yada, yada. Of course, obviously, you know, she makes this man fall in love with her to torture him. And it has unexpected results.

• 37:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Did you see The Love Witch?

• 37:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Love Witch is great. Love Witch is very fun.

• 37:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 37:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Definitely pulling on this big time.

• 37:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Even visually, it hearkens back to that.

• 37:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Sixties, but yes, yeah. But there are some big changes here. Jennifer is blonde. She's super hot.

• 38:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Super hot.

• 38:01Lizzie Bassett?

  But at the end of the day, she seems to believe that love is the greatest power of all. And she trades her witchy skills to basically become a domestic housewife. So a lot of the messaging is the same, though. Witch is bad.

• 38:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of the Little Mermaid.

• 38:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, basic housewife is the goal.

• 38:16Chris Winterbauer?

  The woman has to trade her power for the bliss of domesticity at the end of the day.

• 38:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, which is an ongoing theme with witches. So in 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. And among many other things, this did address the anger that a lot of women felt at the time. Because during World War II, they had experienced more independence than ever. And then they were told to go back home right after, in many ways mirroring what I Married a Witch was pushing. Encouraging domesticity over independence. And Friedan's book was a watershed moment. And then one year after it came out, what TV show hit screens across America?

• 38:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Bewitched.

• 38:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Bewitched, yes. Did you ever watch it?

• 38:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I did. And also, kind of I Dream of Jeannie is kind of the same thing.

• 39:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, but she's a genie.

• 39:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, but I'm just saying it's kind of, you know, we're potato potato here. But yeah, Bewitched. I watched reruns of Bewitched on like Nick at Night as a kid.

• 39:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Nick at Night, me too. I really loved Bewitched.

• 39:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It was super fun. Bewitched is the, the.

• 39:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, the nose.

• 39:15Chris Winterbauer?

  The nose. I always forget, because I Dream of Jeannie is the body wiggle.

• 39:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, the body wiggle. Elizabeth Montgomery is in Bewitched and she wiggles her nose very well.

• 39:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Like really well.

• 39:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. Nobody else can do it.

• 39:27Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 39:27Lizzie Bassett?

  And she's amazing in that show at playing the comedy of being this, you know, all powerful, being married to just a bumbling, basically useless idiot.

• 39:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Well.

• 39:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Played by Dick York, who's also very funny.

• 39:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, a common trope that would continue for 50 years through the Judd Apatow films.

• 39:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, indeed. So there are two sort of main readings of Bewitched. I think both of them are valid. One is that it is a staunchly feminist show. You know, it's tracking a talented, in this case, magical young woman. She's struggling to balance her own ambitions and she's having this awakening of power. And then also has to juggle that with the idea of being a suburban housewife and that it's kind of walking that line. Another read is that it shows, yes, a talented, powerful young woman with a substantially less talented husband. And that what the show is really saying is that it's in her best interest to hide her power in order to survive in what is still clearly her husband's world.

• 40:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's both.

• 40:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Both are true.

• 40:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think it's 100% both. It's a reflection of the time during which it was made. I think it's probably as subversive as it could be to still reach such a huge audience.

• 40:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 40:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's what makes it interesting.

• 40:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm. So throughout the rest of the 60s and 70s, we did see a real reclamation of the witch. It was now a positive and even a feminist figure. And of course, also in the late 60s and 70s, there was an occult boom in cinema, think The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby. But the 80s saw a real dearth of big budget, high end spooky witch or witch adjacent content. You have any guesses why?

• 40:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Were we just moving away from women centered stories in general towards like the action movies and stuff like that? I'm, I'm not sure. Horror movies, we're moving towards slashers as a way, you know, opposed to witch stuff?

• 41:07Lizzie Bassett?

  So it does seem to track pretty directly with the reaction to free love, civil rights and feminist movements of the 60s and 70s, mainly Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, which was campaigning very hard against a perceived corruption of, you know, good folk, particularly by Hollywood.

• 41:26Chris Winterbauer?

  There's some, a lot of witch stuff, interestingly, in Italy around this time. So if you get like Suspiria, right? And then also 70s and then Phenomena with Jennifer Connelly. And then Don't Look Now was shot in Italy largely, even though it's a Nicholas Rogue movie, 70s. So you've got that, yeah, all in the 70s happening. But yeah, 80s. But when was The Witches? Was that 90?

• 41:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, The Witches of Eastwick is 80s, but basically there's very little sort of like high end occult content.

• 41:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that's what I mean. It's all on the fringe. It's not in Hollywood specifically.

• 41:58Lizzie Bassett?

  No, there's a lot of B movie. There's obviously Evil Dead. There's a lot of classics. But you're not seeing these sort of major Hollywood productions in the same way that you were. But by the end of the decade, the tides do start turning again because of girl power. And as the girl power movement of the 90s took hold, we start to see the advent of the teen witch. Kicking off with 1989's camp classique, Teen Witch, which is amazing. I don't know if you've ever seen it. The idea of a teen witch was of course not new to the 90s. Sabrina Spellman first appeared in Archie Comics in 1962. But according to scholar Miranda Corcoran in Witches and the Cultural Construction of Female Adolescence or A Short History of Teenage Witches, teenage girls often seem inherently terrifying. They speak in a shared code of strange slang and acronyms.

• 42:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Their rituals, friendships and rivalries seem intense and fundamentally Byzantine. To the uninitiated, they can seem like a strange, uncontacted tribe or obscure cult. Their language, behaviors and dress appear obscure and inscrutable. You can draw a line from something like The Craft right back to The Crucible and even The Salem Witch Trials themselves. Everybody's scared of teenage girls.

• 43:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 43:05Lizzie Bassett?

  And speaking of The Craft, 1996 is The Craft. It was a watershed moment for the popularity and accessibility of witchcraft. Chris, have you ever seen The Craft?

• 43:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 43:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so fun.

• 43:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Farouche Balk.

• 43:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, Robin Tunney.

• 43:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Robin Tunney back in the day, who's not really aged very much.

• 43:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 43:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I haven't seen The Craft since middle school or high school, but I enjoyed it.

• 43:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I loved it.

• 43:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I had a couple of girlfriends who really, not girlfriends, but friends who were girls who really, really liked it. I, I, the one that.

• 43:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Did they think they could be witches after watching it? Because I did.

• 43:38Chris Winterbauer?

  100%, yeah. The one that stuck with me more, just because of the scope and the tone was so unusual to me. It was not a teen witch one was, um, I technically would put Death Becomes Her in this category, kind of.

• 43:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Kind of, yeah. Isabella Rossellini is sort of a sorceress in that.

• 43:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Lizzie Bassett?

  So The Craft is important in terms of onscreen witches. It's, obviously, it's a teenage wish fulfillment story. And even though the movie got mid to bad reviews, it became kind of an instant classic. And it propelled a new generation's interest in witchcraft and paganism. And the timing was perfect because it coincided with the earliest days of the internet. Suddenly you could look up spells. You could find where to buy Wicca books. And Andrew Fleming, director of The Craft, made sure to hire a Wicca consultant for the film who helped authenticate the narrative and also made sure that the spells used would be recognizable to anybody with access to a spellbook, for example. I certainly thought that I could be a witch after watching it. And The Craft managed to distill both the power and the fear of teenage girls into one movie

• 44:41Lizzie Bassett?

  that also made witchcraft pretty cool. But if the crach, if the crach.

• 44:47Chris Winterbauer?

  If, but if the crach was gonna change the world.

• 44:51Lizzie Bassett?

  If The Craft broke through the broomstick ceiling, shows like Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Charmed really softened the image of witches, making them even more accessible while also building on the power of sisterhood and positioning witches as full blown heroes at this point.

• 45:11Lizzie Bassett?

  So by the time Practical Magic was released in 1998, we were fully in the era of, I would say, the fun and games witch. This movie is based on the 1995 novel by Alice Hoffman, and it builds on a lot of the groundwork that we've already laid with a few important twists. It leans all the way into the sisterhood angle by focusing on a multi generational family of witches. The two witchy leads are the heroes of the film and succumbing to their magic and power is what eventually saves the day. Love is initially pitched as being at odds with magic. In fact, the film opens with a 17th century witch cursing, not unlike I Married a Witch. She curses her own descendants, though, not the accusers in this version, with the inability to maintain love.

• 45:52Lizzie Bassett?

  And this time it's because anyone who loves an Owens woman is destined to die, which feels really impractical. But whatever, I guess she was mad. Of course, eventually it's love that breaks the curse. Or does it? We'll find out in Practical Magic 2. But there are a few things this movie does pretty differently. And I think one of the big ones is the aesthetics of it. If The Craft made witches cool, Practical Magic made them Nancy Meyers, like the production design, it's so good.

• 46:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the Williams Sonoma-ification of witchcraft.

• 46:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I love it. Barbara Streisand loved it so much, she tried to buy their house. It wasn't a real house. We'll get into that in the episode.

• 46:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very aspirational witchcraft.

• 46:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, everybody wanted to live in the Owens house. It's organic. It's full of flowers. It's a kind of kitchen built from midnight margaritas. It's amazing. It also differentiates between Sally and Jillian's powers without really diminishing either of them. Sally may be the stronger witch. Her magic may be more powerful. But Jillian arguably has stronger empathy, intuition and social skills. And the movie doesn't necessarily prioritize one over the other, which I do really like. I like this movie a lot. I'm very excited to get into it in Monday's episode because the backstory is a lot more interesting than I expected. So more about that on Monday. Other works, of course, reimagine the backstories of famous witches like Maleficent

• 47:14Lizzie Bassett?

  or of course Wicked reframing them as not inherently evil, but just complicated. Then you have obviously things like Harry Potter also reimagining the idea of a witch and wizard in general and looking at them in their childhood. But the friendly, relatable witch of the late 90s and early 2000s faded as we all collectively realized that perhaps the fight for women's rights needed to kick it back up a notch. And by the 2010s, the onscreen witch was once again far more serious and way more political. Think of movies like The Witch, a Suspiria remake, even Midsommar, which I think you could argue is in this realm. They seem to reimagine witches as complicated beings pushed to the outskirts of society by society. The Witch

• 47:56Lizzie Bassett?

  in particular was called wildly feminist by Wired, and Jex Blackmore, a spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, said that The Witch was more than just a horror movie, but a film about female rebellion and what it means to be seen as an outsider, and the impact of patriarchal societies creating witches out of women who don't fit the rules. I think that that idea of creating witches is very important for this, this era of the onscreen witch. So the rise of the powerful, complicated, and serious witch coincided directly with Me Too and Time's Up, and a feeling, at least I felt for sure, that real progress was being made. Which did all kind of come crashing down when the 2020s hit. Peyton McCarty Simas, author of That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, points out

• 48:40Lizzie Bassett?

  that as conservatism rises, our onscreen witches change pretty dramatically. They often go in a more cartoonish, sometimes even comedic, direction, and they tend to lose any complexity, or more specifically, any humanity. As of the 2020s, they point out, backlash to feminism has returned with a vengeance cloaked in a conservative defense of traditional, read, conservative, cis, white, or religious femininity, from tradwives to Sydney Sweeney. And Chris, there's one movie in particular that Peyton McCarty Simas believes marks a not-so-fond farewell to the feminist witches of the 2010s. It's a movie you and I both really enjoyed from 2025. What is it, Chris?

• 49:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Warpens?

• 49:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Warpens, better known as Weapons. Now, McCarty Simas told Phantasmag, quote, "Sporting a face full of clownish white pancake makeup with a shock of red lipstick smeared over her mouth, Gladys is an equally textbook kind of witch, an evil child-eating crone. The feminist opening passage turns out to be Krieger's real head fake, because as it turns out, the conservative parents are right. There really is a witch out to get the kids in this town. She just doesn't look like Anya Taylor-Joy anymore." Now, McCarty Simas is not saying that Weapons is a bad movie at all. In fact, she says she really enjoyed it. And I don't think that she's saying there's anything inherently wrong with this portrayal. I think her point is, it seems to be marking a change in the

• 49:59Lizzie Bassett?

  way that we are depicting witches on screen. And I want to close with this quote from her. "When talking about witch movies, I tell my audiences to follow the rage. Who is it directed towards and to what end? Where witch-adjacent hag-exploitation films like The Substance direct that rage outwards, towards patriarchy, here that rage is boomeranged back again onto that perennial anti-feminist boogeywoman, The Witch." It is interesting.

• 50:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting. I do not have the same read on The Substance. I don't think The Substance is nearly the feminist film that other people portray it as.

• 50:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting. Shots fired at The Substance.

• 50:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I do not, do not. I like The Substance, but I, I don't think it is as progressive in certain ways as a lot of people have said it is.

• 50:42Lizzie Bassett?

  We'll hold that for another episode, because I would love to hear more about that. I, this did get me thinking, though, because I, I really love Weapons. I still, I, I think, you know, obviously, it opens with Julia Garner's character being quite literally accused of being a witch and being the one who has, who is doing something to the children. And this is an interesting point, that like, they are correct, there is an actual witch, but the witch is not a complicated person. It is this absolutely horrifying clown demon that, you know, is like, holding a pizza gate in her basement.

• 51:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I mean, I think the cosmic joke of what they're saying, that, I think that's kind of the point, is what if Pizza Gate was real, is kind of the, you know, the joke at the end. But really, I would argue it's more complex than what she's saying. I think that we have reason to believe that Josh Brolin's character is borderline abusive, especially with the way his child acts at school and with the anger management problems that he has. Like, nobody, this movie does not end well for anyone. And I think that's kind of the point. The town kind of tears itself apart, and then literally the witches, everybody is torn apart at the end in some way or another.

• 51:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I, I think it's holding up a, a mirror. I don't think it's advocating for anything. And I don't think that she's saying it is. I think she's saying that it is functioning as a reflection of more of where our society is today than, for example, when The Witch came out.

• 51:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But I also think Krieger's a far less obviously political director than other directors. Like, I'm, he may have a political position, but I think he tries to hide the ball, you know what I mean, on that stuff, pretty effectively, generally speaking. Whereas certain other folks, I think, I think, for example, I think Eggers is very specifically saying, like, look how, look how, oh, look how Anya Taylor-Joy is constructed through the abuses of her family and their inability to process.

• 52:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. He's essentially saying she doesn't have a choice, like, that this, or, I guess she has a choice, but it's being mauled by Black Phillip, or, you know.

• 52:33Chris Winterbauer?

  There is also a witch in the woods who we see eat their baby in his movie. So I don't see how they are that fundamentally different, I guess is my point, The Witch and Weapons.

• 52:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Fair enough. I guess it's because we get the origin story through The Witch, and Weapons, we see it fully realized without more exploration of that. But I'm fine with that.

• 52:53Chris Winterbauer?

  There's still a young woman who is suffering arguably at the hands, or the perceived hands, of like, an older outsider creature.

• 53:01Lizzie Bassett?

  But she's not a witch, and she doesn't become a witch.

• 53:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Julia Garner does not become a witch, but in The Witch...

• 53:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Because of the internet, she has more options. I get it. I see. All right. Chris disagrees with everything.

• 53:11Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I, I think it's a great point. I just don't think it's quite as black and white. I would be, I wouldn't draw steep conclusions necessarily from that.

• 53:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I agree with you, but I do think that it is a valid thing to consider that, I think what Krieger is doing is very smart, and I think that if the whole joke and idea is what if Pizza Gate was real, that is a different reflection of what we are seeing today and of how witches, as it were, are being treated. So I think it's a very valid point, that that movie marks a change in the way that we are seeing this portrayed.

• 53:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. I just had more money spent on Wicked and Wicked 2, and we have Practical Magic 2 coming out this next month. I'm just saying, like, it just seems like Weapons remains more an aberration than a trend.

• 53:59Lizzie Bassett?

  We'll see. All right. Well, I think that sets us up decently well to talk about Practical Magic on Monday. Um, listen, it's not the most transcendental of witch portrayals, but I think that the movie itself and the story behind it, particularly with the director Griffin Dunn, is very, very interesting, very moving. And I'm really excited to get into it, and I'm excited to see what they do with Practical Magic 2. Burn the witches.

• 54:26Chris Winterbauer?

  What if we go into Practical Magic 2, and it is a complete continuation of Weapons, and it has become so retrograde?

• 54:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It's like hardcore MAGA. Yeah. Oh, that would be amazing.

• 54:37Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Well, thank you so much, Lizzie. That was fascinating. I didn't know much about witches. And now I know what to look for.

• 54:44Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 54:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And I appreciate it.

• 54:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Now you know to poke them with your retractable pen, and you'll find them fast.

• 54:48Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. Well, we will see you on Monday for our coverage of Practical Magic.

• 54:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't wait.