Despite the decidedly silly plot, Lake’s impeccable charm is hard to resist. Regardless, you’re watching it today to see ’40s bombshell Veronica Lake at the height of her powers, looking effortlessly glamorous in her signature peek-a-boo hairstyle a year after Sullivan’s Travels made her a household name. As in the later Bell, Book & Candle, the farcical use of magic is played for laughs but is oddly sinister at the same time-it is first used to nudge a man into infidelity, and later to encourage voter fraud in an election. Amusingly, the synopsis hardly sounds like a comedy at all: The film revolves around a witch and her father who were executed in colonial America for practicing the dark arts, only to be resurrected in the 1940s, where they hound the descendent of the man responsible for their deaths. You can thank the Criterion Collection for reviving modern interest in this curious, noir-tinged little comedy, which had largely been washed away into obscurity despite the presence of stars Fredric March and Veronica Lake. So with that said, let’s count off the 30 best movies about witches. They can star at the heart of multi-billion dollar box franchises, or go back to their roots to give us some of the best of modern, indie horror.
They can start delivery services or repel the Nazis from England’s shore (provided they’re also Angela Lansbury-more on that below). Witches can be protagonists, or comic relief. The modern witch, in fact, can be whatever the story requires her (or him) to be. For one thing, they’re not always malevolent forces in cinema. You know, standard witch stuff.īut the depiction of witches really isn’t quite so simple as all that. Flying broomsticks and children in cages, waiting for the oven to adequately preheat. Malicious old crones, twisted and deformed by a lifetime (or several lifetimes) of practicing the dark arts. When we consider the concept of “witches” in film, we tend to first fall back on the old bits of iconography.
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