One of the trickier parts of being a critic is that, while you’re attempting to frame and write meaning onto trends and texts, the world moves on and gives you more material to grapple with. In summer of 2025, I was assigned to review Payton McCarty-Simas’s That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film. The book is an accessible work of pop scholarship that traces the cyclical tropes of the witch film, moving from the countercultural works of the 1960s to the girl power witches of the 1990s to the monstrous feminine of the 2010s. In examining the cultural history of the witch film, McCarty-Simas frames the work with two questions:
- What was the state of feminism at this point in American history?
- How do the witch films of this era illustrate this era’s feminist struggles?
They argue that “[e]ach era takes up this ‘monster’ and imbues her with the concerns du jour, transforming her from housewife to homewrecker, hippie to mall goth, and, fascinatingly, back again.” McCarty-Simas links the portrayal of the witch, be it positive or negative, to how feminist discourse and concerns are being received by society at any given time.
But 2025, y’all. It was one of those years that felt like centuries and witches were everywhere. Folks are out here hiring Etsy Witches to speed up evictions of houseguests on Big Brother, or to curse political figures. [1] AMC continues to expand its Immortal Universe, and the girls of Yellowjackets fleshed out their cannibalistic survival rituals in season 3. With 2026 opening on a new war for oil, it feels like we’re in for more of the same cultural chaos, and more permutations of the witch, as the gyre widens. The difficulties in projecting the book’s patterns onto this rapidly accelerating future is evident in That Very Witch’s epilogue, which offers three possibilities for the witch film in the 2020s:
- The witch “will continue her run as a symbol of women’s empowerment in the broadest sense,” lacking much to chew on in terms of meaning;
- The witch, in an increasingly conservative media environment, will simply be a comedic figure or object of ridicule;
- The witch will revert to the more traditional hag or crone.
McCarty-Simas, writing for Phantasmag shortly after their book’s release, returns to these concerns and settles on one definitive text for our era: Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025). Aunt Gladys, the movie’s parasitic witch villain, bridges the second and third possibilities. McCarty-Simas describes her as:
an unnatural, anti-feminine interloper to this upper-middle-class neighbourhood who turns a contented family home into a pizzagate-style nightmare where zombielike children huddle in the basement and windows are boarded up with newspaper. Her magic is arcane, unsightly, selfish—she seems to feed on souls, preferably children’s (adrenochrome, anyone?), to keep herself alive.
Yet Gladys is also funny, blaming a parent’s absence on “a touch of consumption” and never quite managing to color in the lines with her old-lady drag. Gladys’s motivations and backstory are never quite clear; [2] the witch, in this film and in the 2020s, has reverted to fairy tale villain onto which we can project all our fears of the feminine, the other, the unknown. It’s a prime example to affirm That Very Witch’s thesis, particularly as child abuse and exploitation remains at the forefront of our consciousness with the Epstein files. Yet I’d argue that it may be too early in the decade to try to nail down what the witch means now, especially if we consider two films in counterpoint: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (also released in 2025) and Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). Although McCarty-Simas perhaps rightly points out that we risk ascribing “so many meanings [to the witch], that she … becomes a solipsism” or “remains a fractured signifier,” I think that, if we are to consider witchcraft in film as representative of our political moment, it is worthwhile to consider these texts more closely. They present an opportunity to reshape not only the conceptualization of the witch as a cis white woman but also to reconsider the function of magic itself, as a response to a need for community and transformation.
Yvonne Chireau, a professor of religion and Hoodoo consultant for Sinners, emphasizes that the film is not merely a vampire movie but is concerned with “connecting with the beyond-human, the no-longer-living human” in an ancestral space that transcends social, geographic, temporal, and religious boundaries. Sinners opens with a narration from Annie describing people across cultures (griots in West Africa, firekeepers among the Choctaw, filí from Ireland) who can “conjure spirits from the past and the future.” This magic is neither good nor bad, black nor white—it is an open door through which people might find healing but may also attract evil. Archaeologist Chris Gosden, meanwhile, describes magic as participation in the universe, a belief that “there is a continuity between the human will or actions and the world around us. The converse is also true: magic allows the universe to enter us … We exist in a complex mutual interaction with the world.” [3] Although opening themselves to the world creates an ultimately tragic vulnerability for the characters in Sinners, the exchanges of magic also provide the protection and support of community. There are two witches who facilitate this community: the rootworker Annie, who is respected as a tradition bearer and whose knowledge offers some ability to combat the vampires, and the Blues musician Sammie, whose song draws people to the juke joint and creates the space in which ancestors past and future can join in communion with the present.
Prior to Sinners, depictions of Hoodoo were often inaccurate, seen “through the lens of superstitions, primitive behavior, demonic implications, or sensationalizations of Voodoo”—and Chireau credits a younger, digital generation for a generally increased awareness and understanding of traditions. McCarty-Simas’s work acknowledges how witches of color have long existed at the margins of cinema: “Much as mainstream American feminism has historically sidelined the struggles of women of color, witch films have largely overlooked or scapegoated them while appropriating their cultures’ folklore, religion, and history to titillate white audiences.” While the book opens with a brief discussion of Tituba of Salem to frame how depictions of witches are linked to histories of racism and misogyny, That Very Witch only examines one Black witch film in depth, Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997). Lemmons’s film presages the solidarity found in community that anchors Sinners, both in how it acknowledges history and folkways and in how the characters turn to magic for wisdom and protection. But while Eve’s Bayou and its magic is fueled by rage against sexual violence and misogyny, the witchcraft of Sinners responds to social and political violence by seeking refuge within the sacred space of the collective.
If Sinners is emblematic of a need for community as response to a political cycle that seeks to isolate and harm marginalized individuals, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair offers a glimpse of the rituals by which people may seek out belonging and autonomy in order to transform both the cycle and themselves. Although Schoenbrun’s film keeps a tight focus on two characters—a young teen named Casey who participates in the RPG “World’s Fair Challenge” and JLB, a much older man who watches and comments on Casey’s videos—interspersed throughout are clips of other people engaging in a ritualized challenge which creates bizarre and sometimes frightening changes in the bodies and minds of participants. The virality of the challenge speaks to a broad community of youth seeking out a sense of belonging in digital spaces. Scholars Jett Allen and Teddy Pozo write that within “the World’s Fair Challenge possibilities are created by the players, with infinite branching paths.” [4] While Schoenbrun has described their desire to capture the sensation of “their experiences on the internet as a young queer kid in the early 2000s … a space where you spend all day staring at a box that’s reflecting you back at yourself,” there are any number of lonely individuals scrying with the same mirror, engaging in the same rituals to create a more bearable form of reality. The practitioner may feel alone, but they are part of a broader coven.
As the editor-in-chief of Nerdist Rotem Rusak argues, since witches exist outside of normative culture, “the narrative of the witch is, almost definitionally, a queer one,” yet there are few overt representations of queer and trans characters in witch films. McCarty-Simas notes in That Very Witch that Second Wave feminism was not accepting of queer and trans characters—if the witch film until this point has been largely concerned with feminism, it mirrors the movement. But if, as they also say, the movement has pushed forward and witches are “allowed to be, at least on the surface, nuanced. They’re allowed to be queer. They’re allowed to be Black” then the cycle of the witch film of the 2020s necessarily includes these representations. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, alongside the other entries in Schoenbrun’s Screen Trilogy—A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024)—gives us witches who are probing their realities for hidden potentialities, seeking spaces where queer ways of being are affirmed, even if finding and accessing those spaces means submitting the self to radical change. The viewer is themself drawn into a liminal space fostered by the use of real YouTube creators and the ambiguity over the nature of the transformations and relationships in the story. It remains unclear whether we are “outside the game” or not, but there is freedom within the narrative to craft the story that we need.
Shortly after I was assigned this book to review, I found out I was pregnant. It was a surprise—a happy one, but frightening because I have a heart condition that had me concerned not only for my baby’s health but my own. When I learned I was having a girl near the end of a difficult first trimester, my best friend’s first reaction was “the coven has a new member!” It was the first time I had allowed myself to think of my daughter and who she might be, not only outside of my body and as an individual, but also as a member of a community. What connections might she form, what power might she draw from family and friends, what gifts might she give and receive? As readers and critics, we all naturally bring ourselves to the experience of a text. I study folk horror and keep a reproductive medicine garden. I also live in America and I’m pregnant with a daughter at a time where those are increasingly dangerous prospects, due to forces that exist outside of my body. Although perhaps fated to have its theses disrupted due to rapid social changes alongside compelling new releases, I found That Very Witch worthy of consideration because a fractured signifier can be remade; a broken mirror can become a mosaic. The figure of the witch can be taken up by creators and critics in order to understand not only our position within the present political moment but also used as a framework for disruption and resistance. The witch’s power lies beyond media representation and in the collective, in communities which find a way to support and restore and transform the world into something more livable for all of us.
Endnotes
[1] Jezebel had the unfortunate timing of publishing the (now-scrubbed) article “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk” two days before his assassination. [return]
[2] Though there are rumors of a prequel that may offer some answers. [return]
[3] Chris Gosden, Magic: A History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), p. 9. [return]
[4] Jett Allen and Teddy Pozo, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: On t4t Potentiality,” Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 2025, p. 103. [return]