A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) and Under the Shadow (Babak Anvari, 2016) use the magical and the monstrous to explore issues of femininity in diasporic Iranian horror films. Set in the fictitious Iranian ghost town of Bad City, Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night pushes the boundaries of the B-movie horror genre, place and the female body. Through its main character, Girl (Sheila Vand) – a veiled vampire who stalks the streets of Bad City using her magical and supernatural powers to feed on bad men – the film complicates the image of the veiled woman and subverts the assumption of victimhood suggested by its title. Under the Shadow also engages with the notion of “magical”, this time set in Iran during the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88. The film is about a mother and daughter who are haunted by a Jinn, a supernatural creature found in Islamic mythology and theology configured here as a grotesque, malign, feminine spirit shrouded in a veil. Through the evil Jinn and the conceit of the little girl’s missing doll, Under the Shadow offers a complex and shocking exploration of femininity in Iran, using the horror genre to explore the anxieties of motherhood, religion, and war.

The figures like the vampire from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and the mother and the Jinn from Under the Shadow function as “hybrid figures” that allow the filmmakers to explore hybrid identities. In doing so, the two films use the grotesque magical feminine figure to explore the limitations and possibilities available to women characters. While they comment on contemporary women’s issues in Iran, they also challenge oppressive and reductive stereotypes often associated with the non-Western woman in European and American media.

Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow are Persian-language films and use in different ways Islamic and theological symbolism through the Jinn and the “chador” (a cape-like black veil that covers the hair and the body). In both films, the veil is used as a motif to comment on the female figures and their embodiment of the magical and the monstrous (both the vampire and the Jinn are veiled). While the concept of veiling and unveiling predates the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, the discourse and the visualisation surrounding the hijab shifts under the new regime of the Islamic Republic ushered in by the Revolution. This Islamic regime sought to create an entirely new identity for Iran by imposing new laws and codes regulating various aspects of life. These practices impacted the country’s cinema as well; censorship laws were enforced to ensure that the films aligned with an ideology that mandated that the “media would disseminate and observe Islamic norms and promote the interests of the country”.[1] Here, the woman’s body and its visualisation was central to the censorship guidelines, which is indicative of the Islamic Republic’s social, cultural and political ideologies. For example, many of the restrictive laws prescribed that “women have to appear veiled” at all times.[2] Subsequently, the female body and its representation in media and film also became reflective of cultural anxieties around gender and sexuality. As Negar Mottahedeh argues, for Ayatollah Khomeini (the leader of the Islamic Revolution) “women’s bodies marked the site of contamination. They were the very fissures through which foreign impurities were introduced into the nation”.[3]

Therefore, women’s bodies became central to the “cleaning-up” and purification of Iranian cinema and the reclaiming of the country’s “lost” Islamic identity, serving as a rejection of the Western and Pahlavi ideals. Here, reforming and redefining of Iran’s national cinema focused on women’s bodies to aid such purification and reclamation. This “cleaning-up” of the country’s cinema, and its close association with issues of gender and sexuality, itself reveals the anxieties and the mission of the Islamic Republic. Under the Islamic regime, women were (and are) mandated to abide by the so-called Islamic laws which enforce the veil in all public spaces, including the public space of the cinema screen. In addition to obligatory veiling, any close-up shots of a women’s face or body became forbidden when the new regime took over. Discussions around Iran’s post-Revolutionary cinema and the notion of women’s bodies as “sites of contamination” illustrates the desire and need for the containment of female sexuality.[4] Within this cultural context, female monstrosity is a powerful and subversive notion. As argued by Barbara Creed, “all human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject”.[5] In the context of post-Revolutionary Iranian society, femininity and sexuality are seen as “abject” and “sites of contamination” that have to be tamed and controlled. Veiling becomes the means through which this happens.

The containment and purification of female sexuality is not unique to Iranian cinema or Islamic culture. Looking at the genre of horror and thinking about the monstrous feminine, we witness the ways in which the two Iranian diaspora films challenge the pure/monstrous dichotomy set up by the restrictive categories of the regime. The Girl vampire and the Jinn have the veil in common, employed differently in both films as a way to explore the “shocking” and “abject” of the female body in two very different societies. The notion of hybridity and the in-between explored in both films becomes an important way to reject and problematise these polarisations, which are challenged through form, genre and character in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow. The filmic identity of both films necessitates an understanding of diasporic Iranian films and what Hamid Naficy refers to as an “accented cinema”.[6] Driving from two different, and possibly opposing traditions, the diasporic identities of the films allow for a much more nuanced discussion around the monstrosity and femininity of their female characters.

Hybridity in Diasporic Iranian Horror Films

The notion of hybridity plays out in various ways in both A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow. Both films are diasporic films, scripted in the Persian language and made outside of Iran. Both Amirpour and Anvari explore social issues in Iran without the constraints of the Islamic Republic’s censorship laws through the medium of horror – a genre less popular amongst Iranian filmmakers. In many ways, both directors reimagine the construct of Iranian national cinema through horror, while still engaging with prominent social issues and themes. Whilst the theme of war, social issues and gender politics are common in Iranian cinema, by reimagining their audience through the horror genre, both Amirpour and Anvari bring to the screen something new: a cinematic hybrid that enables a complex exploration of gender politics and the magical woman.

In his book The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha explores the idea of the “in-between”; for Bhabha, these are spaces that “provide terrain for elaborating strategies of self-hood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself”.[7] In both A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow the “interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy”.[8] This sense of hybridity that Bhabha describes manifests itself in both films through genre, place and the monstrous-feminine. The diasporic contexts of Amirpour and Anvari’s identities and works invite an examination of hybridity and the in-between as productive ways to explore “Third space” and “the politics of polarity”.[9]

In his work on accented cinema, Naficy also considers alternatives spaces and ideas of hybridity: “if the dominant cinema is considered universal and without accent, the films that diasporic and exilic subjects make are accented”.[10] For Naficy, “although there is nothing common about exile and diaspora, deterritorialized peoples and their films share certain features”.[11]

He describes such cinema as follows:

Accented films are interstitial because they are created astride and in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices. Consequently, they are simultaneously local and global, and they resonate against the prevailing cinematic production practices, at the same time that they benefit from them. As such, the best of the accented films signify and signify upon exile and diaspora by expressing, allegorizing, commenting upon, and critiquing the home and host societies and cultures and the deterritorialized conditions of the filmmakers. They signify and signify upon cinematic traditions by means of their artisanal and collective production modes, their aesthetics and politics of smallness and imperfection, and their narrative strategies that cross generic boundaries and undermine cinematic realism.[12]

The issues of exile and postcolonialism are entangled in the discourse of diasporic cinema that both A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow explore. Even at the production level, the two filmmakers and their works embody the hybrid identity that is often associated with accented and diasporic films – of being Iranian-American, or British-Iranian, as “neither here nor there”. Like the identity and ethnicity of their directors, the films themselves are hyphenated and, as described by Naficy, critical of both their home (Iran) as well as their host countries. However, what makes this even more significant is that the sense of hybridity and in-betweenness goes further than the identity of the film and is explored at the textual and generic level of the films as well, embodied and heightened through the magical woman figure.

Generically speaking, the films are not conventional horror films, but rather a tongue-in-cheek horror-western-coming-of-age story and a pseudo-realist war-horror and social film respectively. The feminine bodies in these films also become symbolic and suggestive of the hybrid. These bodies rise out of the prescribed identities given to “Other” women. Through their hybridity, they function as a rejection of the “pure” and homogenous set out both by the Islamic regime and also by the political discourse of veiling in the West – a point I will explore in further detail in the next section.

As already mentioned, horror films are not very popular in Iran, so both A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow delve into a new territory for the Iranian and non-Iranian audience. An exception of a horror film made in Iran is Girl’s Dormitory (Mohammad Hossein Latifi, 2005).[13] Discussing the film, Pedram Partovi contends that “the sources of the ‘horror’ in the film very much had its roots in Iranian popular (religious) culture, partly drawing inspiration from Islam”.[14]

While A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow are made outside of Iran, their source of inspiration is also rooted in, and in response to, the cultural, religious and societal conventions of the country. The use of the chador in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and the Jinn figure in Under the Shadow are key examples of how both Amirpour and Anvari engage with cultural and religious symbols, and yet, the way in which they are employed differs in the two films. About Girl’s Dormitory, Partovi posits that part of the “magic” in the film is its invitation for the viewer “to consider Iranian women in very different roles than those found previously in much of Iranian popular cinema”.[15] This is a sentiment that also plays out in the two diasporic horror films, as the two films challenge the role of Iranian women in the Islamic regime, while also questioning the representation of the “Othered” female body on the international stage.

Inspired by many Western pop-culture references, Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night sits comfortably in between various genres and places. Although it is filmed in California, the film is set in a fictional Iranian ghost town called Bad City, at once embracing and rejecting the idea of place and identity. As Emily Edwards argues, “Bad City is representative of a liminal land to such an extent that it departs from our terrestrial world all together”.[16] Bad City is reflective of cultural and social issues that closely pertain to Iranian society but functions as a stand-in for patriarchal structures and social problems more broadly, not just those of Iran. The wide suburban streets feel very much like a conventional Hollywood horror-genre movie. The film’s genre is not so easily definable however: it is a vampire film that borrows from the western genre, with elements of comedy and coming-of-age drama, and ultimately tells a love story. As Mark Kermode observes about the film in his review for The Guardian: “cinematically, it exists in a twilight zone between nations (American locations, Iranian culture), between centuries (late 19^th and early 21^st), between languages (Persian dialogue, silence cinema gestures) and, more importantly, between genres”.[17]

Whilst always interested in complicating notions of place and genre, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night also utilises cliché and archetypal characterisations – hyper-exaggerated at times – as a way of exploring Girl’s identity and place within Bad City. This idea is heightened by the depiction of Saeed (Dominic Rains). Covered in tasteless tattoos (“SEX” on his neck and “Jakesh”, which translates as “pimp”, on his body), he represents the drug-dealer, the pimp, the “bad” man. Atti (Mozhan Marno) on the other hand, is the victim of Saeed and the patriarchal society of Bad City; Atti plays the prostitute to his pimp, her body marking the brutality of male violence. Then there is Arash (Arash Marandi), who is part everyman, part western hero and features heavily in the opening of the film. He is from a different cinematic realm to the vampire. And yet, Arash and Girl become close, and the film explores their burgeoning relationship.

Though A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night relies on familiar visual motifs and stock characters, such as the pimp and prostitute, through its genre and diasporic identity, the film resides in between such categories. The sense of hybridity and complexity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night extends to its main character, Girl, and it is through her that the film explores the magical and the monstrous, especially in the context of global politics. The chador-wearing, Iranian vampire on a skateboard carries with her visual, cultural and political significance. First, her very “nature” as a vampire situates her within a space of liminality. The figure of the vampire exists “between life and death” – “a hybrid being” by nature.[18] The film situates her fluidity in a world of labels and archetypes, yet Girl is resistant to these ideas; her hybridity is unique in this world, and this is her magic. As Tabish Khair and Johan Hoglund claim:

The vampire has always been a traveller and the vampire story frequently explores and transgresses national, sexual, racial and cultural boundaries. Appearing in many cultures during different epochs, the vampire is not only a wandering creature but also a shape changer.[19]

Girl herself occupies an interesting space which marks her as a “shape changer” within the film – feeding on and killing bad men, as well as subverting the image of the passive veiled woman. But also, as described here, her vampiric identity serves political and visual significance.

Here, the film’s introduction to Girl is worth noting. In this scene, the film sets up the character and her purpose, but most importantly, through the Saeed character, subverts ideas of oppression often attached to the veiled woman. Shortly before Girl appears, Saeed and Atti are in the car, and Atti asks for her money. Saeed responds to her violently, pushing down her head. Standing nearby and hidden in the dark, Girl watches this exchange take place and also sees Atti violently being pushed out of the car. In the next scene, as Saeed walks to his flat, Girl follows him. It is obvious from their interaction that Saeed does not fear her. For him, the girl walking in a black chador represents the “good” girl. She continues to follow him, and this intrigues Saeed, causing him to invite her over and suggesting his desire to unveil her. In his flat, Saeed approaches her. Girl takes his finger into her mouth, in a sexually suggestive manner. What happens next is unexpected. The “good” veiled woman sucks the blood out of his finger, biting it off and spitting it out, leaving the once confident Saeed in a state of fear and shock. She then attacks and kills her victim.

In this scene, Amirpour reverses the power dynamics between Girl and the pimp, subverting the image of the veiled woman as a victim, oppressed or passive. Also, Girl’s violence functions here as revenge for his violence towards Atti, affirming the vampire’s feminist mission. As well as violently killing him, the biting of the finger is suggestive of Saeed’s castration, which signifies Girl’s feminine power. For Edwards, “as a vampire, and an allegorical outcast in society, the girl in the chador represents Amirpour’s conception and criticism of identity.”[20] She is, Edwards goes on to say:

A personification of the vampiric nature of diasporic identity. She is both dead and immortal, like the timeless yet shifting connection diaspora communities parse out between home and host country. Diasporic membership confers the benefit of belonging even in exile, but this membership proves to be a barrier to new forms of self-actualization.[21]

The magic of the vampire figure is that she remains liminal by her very nature, representing a state of in-betweenness. In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the vampire’s feeding on bad men becomes a feminist statement (shown best in the scene where Girl saves Atti); and so, while the veiled female is not “contained” or tamed, her monstrosity is used for the greater good. With this, Amirpour questions moral polarities, and instead delves into the complexities of morality. Later in the film, for example, Arash knows that Girl has killed her father (another “bad man”), and yet the two reunite and leave Bad City together as lovers.

Anvari’s Under the Shadow also explores the hybrid figure, albeit in an entirely different way and through a different kind of monster – the Jinn. Like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, this is also a diasporic film, engaging with the world of in-betweenness through its very form. The Jinn, like the vampire, is difficult to define. As Mark Peterson states, “in Islamic cosmology, the universe is structurally divided into a seen and unseen world”, and the Jinn occupies a “special, liminal status; they are of the earth, yet unseen on it”.[22]

Set in Tehran, during the Iran–Iraq War (1980-88), Under the Shadow uses genre conventions to tell the horrifying story of war. The film begins with Shideh (Narges Rashidi), a former medical student, as she tries to convince the officials to permit her to complete her education. In this conversation, the audience learns of her involvement with student leftist groups, meaning she is prohibited from resuming her studies. Returning home heartbroken and angry, she packs her books, but holds on to A Book of Medical Physiology gifted to her by her mother, who has passed away. The film is mainly set in a Tehran apartment block, focusing on Shideh and her young daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi). Shideh’s husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi), a doctor, must leave Tehran for military duty. Leaving the family behind, he asks Shideh to consider moving temporarily to the north where his parents reside – far away from the bombings and missile attacks, but she is reluctant. Before he leaves, Dorsa tells Iraj that she will be scared, and he reminds her that Kimia, her beloved doll, will take good care of her.

Using the war as its backdrop, Under the Shadow delves into the anxieties of a polarised nation and, through the character of Shideh, questions the patriarchal forces of the Islamic regime. Rejected by her country’s law that bans her from pursuing her dreams, her pain and her anxiety as a mother are made manifest through the horrors of war. The possible existence of a Jinn which seemingly haunts Shideh and Dorsa – whether it is real or a figment of Shideh’s imagination – is questioned throughout the film and is used to blur the line between dreaming and reality, religion and superstition. The demonic forces that drive the plot of Under the Shadow become a means through which the film explores the consequences and trauma of war and the religious state. Shideh’s one-time dream of becoming a doctor is turned into a living nightmare, entangled with her identity as a mother and a woman.

Shideh’s anxiety and suffering is explored throughout the film – the Jinn symbolising the monstrous and functioning as a metonym of the restrictions Shideh faces as a woman in this new post-Revolutionary Iran. Outside of the home, Anvari shows these restrictions through the legal system, and inside the home, the Jinn becomes the figure of angst for Shideh – giving her no place to run. In the opening scene, as Shideh returns home after being told that she cannot continue her studies, her car is stopped by guards. She pulls down her window, addresses the guards, and is then cleared to drive on. Shideh then bursts into tears. In this short sequence, the film demonstrates the restrictions and the pressure placed upon women in Iran – always under control and anxious about the possibility of reprimand from state actors. The security of the home, which for many Iranians functions as a non-politicised place and their only refuge from the oppression of the regime, slowly breaks down in Under the Shadow. The backdrop of war terrorises civilians and brings violence and trauma into these personal spaces, depicted literally in the film through the missiles and bombs that break into the house, leaving it scarred and broken. The film shows Shideh constantly taping up broken windows and crumbling walls, as if she is blocking out evils from the outside world. Through its genre and narrative, Under the Shadow shows how Shideh’s world is haunted by a triangulation of events: the revolution and its aftermath, the war, and the Jinn which brings these traumas to the surface.

The magical Jinn figure functions as an important symbol, allowing the film to explore the deep-rooted issues of the patriarchy in Iran and to comment on motherhood and the war. Through the Jinn, Under the Shadow also questions reality: that which is believed versus that which we end up believing. Most importantly, the presence of the Jinn creates a sense of doubt through its hybrid nature. According to religious texts, Jinn are not necessarily evil, offering moral ambiguity. Taking into account “Islamic writings, Jinn live alongside other creatures but form a world other than that of mankind. Though they see us, they cannot be seen”.[23] Similar to the vampire, they too, through their very existence, reject the notion of purity. In Under the Shadow the Jinn figure is understood to be real by Shideh’s religious neighbour: “they appear in the Quran”, she proclaims. She continues to tell Shideh that once they take a personal belonging from you, they never leave you alone. And despite Shideh’s disbelief in Jinn, she begins to look frantically for Dorsa’s missing doll.

As shown thus far, the vampire and the Jinn both represent the hybrid and in-between, becoming central figures within these works, as well as the films’ gateways into exploring gender and femininity. In both A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow, the magical is used as an essential symbol for what is feared – or, in other words, the “Othered” body, the monstrous. With the veil in common, both the Girl vampire and the Jinn are used as ways to explore the “shocking” and “abject” of the female body.[24]

Veiling and Unveiling: The Horrors of the Female Body

The vampire from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and the Jinn in Under the Shadow function as the magical and super-natural creatures that reveal the purported horrors of the female body and femininity in general. In these films, the veil is fundamental to both figures’ identities and, with their magic powers, marks them as an “Other”, characterised by a subversive monstrous feminine. As Shohini Chaudhuri suggests, “the monsters’ Otherness is often configured as a bodily difference”.[25] Monsters and their visualisations serve a purpose, reflecting “the anxieties of their times” and responding to their political conditions and contexts.[26] In other words, “monsters become a frame for understanding the cultures that produce them, exemplifying specific cultural moments, as well as ideologies surrounding Otherness”.[27]

At stake here is how both A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow use the magical, monstrous-feminine characters of Girl and the Jinn to respond to and challenge their cultural moments. The representation and visualisation of a character as complex as Girl is significant in a post-9/11 era, where “the (American) battle with evil entails a conflict with the (un-American) monstrous or ‘terrorist’ body”.[28] The image of the Muslim woman as oppressed, vilified and victimised fits well within these ideologies. Amy Farrell and Patrice McDermott argue:

The very representation of non-Western woman ‘in need’ constructs and reinforces a narrative in which all that is Islamic/Muslim/non-Western is painted as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbaric,’ the women are seen as ‘victims,’ and Westerners, as providing a ‘civilizing’ effect.[29]

While maintaining aspects of the monstrous-feminine figure, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night shifts this paradigm, challenging the representation of the veiled vampire. Girl rejects notions of passivity and oppression, with the film’s title and her initial vulnerability both proving to be red herrings. Additionally, Amirpour redefines the idea of the “barbaric”. Girl is, after all, still a veiled vampire with teeth and blood-lust, but her strong moral compass channels her barbarism into a benevolent vigilantism.

Amirpour’s A Girls Walks Home Alone at Night is not interested in clear-cut imagery and depictions. The film is daring in its exploration of femininity and the “Othered” body, where even the notion of monstrosity is challenged. This is also the case in the treatment of the film’s exploration of Atti, the prostitute. Her interaction with Girl demonstrates a sense of camaraderie between the two female characters. Seeing Atti in trouble, Girl takes matters into her own hands. In return, Atti helps her hide the dead body. In a brief scene, the two women engage in a conversation. “Are you religious or something,” Atti asks, to which Girl responds: “No”. Atti’s room has a map, and we learn that she is planning her escape from Bad City. This scene grants Atti cinematic space and time, elevating her well beyond her archetypal role as a prostitute. The exchange between the two women serves as a special moment in the film, confirming Girl’s moral mission and feminist agenda.

The characterisation and visualisation of Girl as a chador-wearing, skateboarding vampire situates her within the framework of the magical woman: a feminist “baddie” with a noble cause, feeding on bad men in a direct attack on the vile patriarchy of Bad City. In addition, Girl responds to current representations of the Muslim and “Othered” woman through her depiction as a vampire. Amirpour’s narrative and visualisation of the female character challenge conventions of religiosity, Muslimness and femininity. Within this context, where the Muslim female body is constantly subject to veiling and unveiling, exhausted by a discourse of “liberating”, Girl brings to the screen something new: the magical, the monstrous, and the rebellious. Fearlessly cruising the dark streets of Bad City on her skateboard, the chador-wearing Iranian vampire shatters any assumptions of pity. The veil, flapping behind her like a superhero’s cape, allows her to float with power and adopts an entirely new meaning.

Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night subverts the image of the veil in response to its political moment. In Under the Shadow, while the veil adopts a different meaning, it still sheds light on its own social and historical context. Girl’s chador allows her to stand out, but Shideh’s obligatory veil is a burden and stands in for the oppressive regime that bans her from pursuing her dreams. Under the Shadow also uses the veil to comment on the monstrous, but with a different twist. As discussed above, the idea of monstrosity is closely linked with sexuality in the Iranian context, as women’s bodies become “sites of contamination” in need of control, purification and cleansing. The film uses the Jinn as its clear-cut supernatural and monstrous figure, as a way into the more complex interior world of Shideh, whose autonomy and sense of self are controlled and whose behaviour grows frantic and unpredictable as a consequence. In the post-Revolutionary society of Iran, Shideh herself is deemed a monster. The film’s narrative alludes to this. Shideh is to be blamed for Dorsa’s missing doll; even her maternal role and capabilities are questioned.

Under the Shadow also dares to explore the notion of the monstrous in the context of Islamic culture, drawing its inspiration from the Jinn figure. As Francesca Leoni argues:

Monsters and monstrosity are mostly uncharted subjects in the context of the Islamic cultural sphere. This is fairly surprising given the wealth of creatures populating the related material, and specifically artistic, production that could be considered ‘monstrous’.[30]

And yet, interestingly, the Jinn in Under the Shadow remains completely veiled and concealed. The veil links Shideh to the Jinn figure as a symbol of her internalised fears and the violence done to her. In the film’s climatic scene, the Jinn appears as an all-consuming veil, pulling Shideh’s daughter away from her. Earlier in the film, Shideh took Dorsa from the house, with both of them running out into the street and Shideh forgetting to wear her obligatory headscarf. The two are stopped by the guards and taken into custody, where Shideh is given a black chador. Returning home, she sees her reflection in the hall-way mirror and jolts, not recognising herself. In this scene, she becomes the very image she fears, and her reflection and her imagination of the Jinn merge into one.

In both films, the veil functions as a visual motif, used to comment on the horrors of the female body and society. In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night the chador visibly marks Girl, redefining her on the international stage, serving as a rejection of the stereotypes often associated with the image of the Muslim woman. In Under the Shadow the veil is also used to grapple with the complexities of Iran’s post-Revolutionary cultural and political context, to comment on attitudes towards women and their bodies, and to hint at the prevalent conceptions of the female body. The Jinn becomes a gateway, a visual motif through which the film explores the patriarchal forces of Iran and, also, the scars of war. As her home is terrorised by external demonic forces, Shideh is shown obsessively taping her cracked windows and walls. The intrusion of the Jinn figure that enters the confines of her home is used to critique the Islamic regime and its intrusion into the private sphere and personal space of Shideh’s home. What is more, through the Jinn, Under the Shadow takes its criticism even further, commenting on the external forces of the Iran–Iraq War, hinting at and problematising Western intervention.

Where The Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is about claiming hybrid identity, Under the Shadow explores the anxieties of in-betweenness and the scars of war. Through the magical figures of the vampire and the Jinn, both films confront the attitudes of the monstrous feminine in the Iranian diasporic context. In his book Vampires, Race and Transnational Hollywoods, Dale Hudson says:

A film with an Iranian American perspective, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night exemplifies how vampire stories migrate and mutate to convey ever-shifting identities and orientations in a world where the United States and Iran might not be as distant or as different as once imagined.[31]

Using the fictitious Bad City, Amirpour reimagines and complicates place and borders. Amirpour’s magical vampire lives somewhere between the cultural references of America and Iran – between life and death, always in the liminal. What connects Girl to Anvari’s Shideh character is her rebellion. Despite the shackles of an Islamic regime and the super-natural forces of the Jinn, Shideh consistently represents and embodies a fierce rejection of the Islamic Republic and its patriarchal ideologies.

Notes

[1] Eric Egan, “Regime Critics Confront Censorship in Iranian Cinema,” Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (2011), 48.

[2] Josef Gugler, Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (2011), 10.

[3] Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2009), 1.

[4] This also demonstrates that the authorities were well aware of cinema’s power and influence, using the visual culture as a form of propaganda for its new messages around piety and modesty. While Iranian cinema continues to be subject to censorship, filmmakers have found ingenious ways to combat and challenge its red lines. Iran’s reception on the global cinematic stage attests to its success.

[5] Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” The Dread of Difference, (2015), 37.

[6] Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001)

[7] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (2004), 2.

[8] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5.

[9] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 56.

[10] Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 4.

[11] Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 3.

[12] Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 4-5.

[13] The film is about two friends, Roya (Baran Kosari) and Shirin (Negar Javaherian), who leave the familiar and over-protected environments of their homes to attend college outside of Tehran. The girls’ dormitory, however, is under construction, which means that the two friends along with several other female students have to temporarily reside elsewhere, close to the college. Their new home is run-down, next to an even more dilapidated and abandoned house. Their creaking temporary residence is run by an older woman who warns them against entering the neighbouring house, marking it off-limits from the start, and sparking curiosity. The house is where “Jinn” live, she tells them.

[14] Pedram Partovi, “Girls’ Dormitory: Women’s Islam and Iranian Horror.” Visual Anthropology Review (2009), 187.

[15] Partovi, “Girls’ Dormitory” 187.

[16] Emily Edwards, “Searching for a Room of One’s Own: Rethinking the Diaspora in ‘Persepolis’, ‘Shahs of Sunset’, and ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.|” Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation (2017), 19.

[17] Mark Kermode, “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night review – exhilarating vampire girl power”, Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/24/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-review-mark-kermode.

[18] Tabish Khair and Johgan Hoglund, Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood. (2013), 5.

[19] Khair and Hoglund, Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires, 1.

[20] Edwards, “Searching for a Room of One’s Own”,20.

[21] Edwards, “Searching for a Room of One’s Own”, 21.

[22] Mark Allen Peterson, From Jinn to Genies: Intertextuality, Media, and the Making of Global Folklore (2007), 94.

[23] Najat Khalifa and Tim Hardie, “Possession and Jinn,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2007), 351.

[24] Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” The Dread of Difference, (2015), 37.

[25] Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists (2006), 92.

[26] Bernadette Marie Calafel, Monstrosity, Race, and Performance in Contemporary Culture, (2015), 9.

[27] Shadee Abdi, and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Queer Utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian Vampire: A Critical Analysis of Restrictive Monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Critical Studies in Media Communication (2017), 359.

[28] Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen Lugo-Lugo, “The Monster within: Post-9/11 narratives of threat and the U.S. shifting terrain of terror 243-256 in Monster Culture in the 21^st Century A Reader (2013), 244.

[29] Amy Farrell and Patrice McDermott, “Claiming Afghan Women: The Challenge of Human Rights Discourse for Transnational Feminism.” Just Advocacy: Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation (2005), 51.

[30] Francesca Leoni, “On the Monstrous in the Islamic Visual Tradition” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), 51.

[31] Dale Hudson, Vampires, Race and Transnational Hollywoods (2017), 5.

Bibliography

Abdi, Shadee, and Bernadette Marie Calafell. “Queer Utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian Vampire: A Critical Analysis of Restrictive Monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 358-370. DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2017.1302092.

Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.

Bloodsworth-Lugo Mary K, and Carmen Lugo-Lugo, “The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. Shifting Terrain of Terror.” In Monster Culture in the 21^st Century A Reader, edited by Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui, 243-256. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Calafell, B. Marie. Monstrosity, Race, and Performance in Contemporary Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2015.

Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Second Ed), edited by Barry Keith Grant, 37-67. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.

Chaudhuri, Shohini. Feminist Film Theorists. London: Routledge, 2006.

Edwards, Emily. “Searching for a Room of One’s Own: Rethinking the Diaspora in ‘Persepolis’, ‘Shahs of Sunset’, and ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, no. 3, (Summer 2017): 1-28. DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2017.3.3.

Egan, Eric. “Regime Critics Confront Censorship in Iranian Cinema.” In Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence, edited by Josef Gulger, 37-62. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Farrell, Amy, and Patrice McDermott. “Claiming Afghan Women: The Challenge of Human Rights Discourse for Transnational Feminism.” In Just Advocacy: Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation, edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, 33-55. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Gulger, Josef. Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Hudson, Dale. Vampires, Race and Transnational Hollywoods. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Kermode, Mark. “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night review – exhilarating vampire girl power.” In Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/24/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-review-mark-kermode (Spring 2015).

Khalifa, Najat and Tim Hardie, “Possession and Jinn,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 98, (Summer 2005): 351-352.

Khair, Tabish, Johan Hoglund (editors). Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Leoni, Francesca. “On the Monstrous in the Islamic Visual Tradition.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, 151-172. Ashgate Publishing Company: 2012.

Mottahedeh, Negar. Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Duke University Press, 2009.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Partovi, Pedram. “Girls’ Dormitory: Women’s Islam and Iranian Horror.” Visual Anthropology Review 25, no. 2 (2009): 186-207. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7458.2009.01041.x.

Peterson A Mark. “From Jinn to Genies: Intertextuality, Media, and the Making of Global Folklore.” In Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture, edited by Sharon R. Sherman and Mikel J. Koven, 93-112. University Press of Colorado, 2007.

Filmography

A Girls Walks Home Alone at Night. Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. USA: Studiocanal, 2014. DVD.

Under the Shadow. Directed by Babak Anvari. United Kingdom: Wigwam Films: 2016. DVD.

Girl’s Dormitory (Khabga-he Dokhtaran). Directed by Mohammad Hossein Latifi. Iran: 2005.

About the Author
Zahra Khosroshahi has recently completed her PhD dissertation (University of East Anglia) on visual representations of women in contemporary Iranian cinema. Her research focuses on how Iran’s cinematic movements and productions respond to the country’s social conditions, and how the visual culture, specifically cinema, provides a platform for resistance and activism. Her research interests also include feminist studies, world cinema, women’s films and Iran’s women’s movements.

“I Conjure Thee to Speak to Me”: Introduction

As the recent success of television shows including American Horror Story (2011–present) and Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) and the critical lauding of films ranging from A Dark Song (2016) and The Love Witch (2016) to Hereditary (2018) demonstrates, contemporary audiences still express a concerted interest in the ideologically, pragmatically, and theoretically complex figure of the witch – be it filtered through the lens of specifically occult predilections, revivalist aesthetic and narratological interests, or surreptitious social commentary presented as camp pastiche.[1] Robert Eggers and Lukas Feigelfields’ respective takes on Occidental folklore concerning witches and witchcraft, The Witch (2015) and Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse (2017), engage with historical, cultural, and cinematic frames through which the figure of the witch has been presented, persecuted, and lauded. When placed in critical proximity with one another, the protagonists in each film – The Witch’s Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Hagazussa’s Albrun (Aleksandra Cwen) – represent a gamut of witch-related issues and debates pertaining to the transition from girlhood to adulthood, the non-magical to magical subject positions of a witch. Such issues include the relationship between burgeoning and mature female sexuality. Here, the psycho-sexual trauma, abuse – within the context of its 15^th-, 16^th– and 17^th-century phallogocentric suppression through Judeo-Christian morality – isolation, fear, and madness of a witch without a coven are also central. Relatedly, the magical necessity of personal sacrifice – both psychological and physical – in the process of becoming a witch and accruing magical power necessarily frames the issues and debates concerning the emancipatory and/or malign use of said power. Lastly, there is the relationship between the magical life (the Left-Hand Path – a term familiar in the modern occult, circumscribing various typically non-Abrahamic practices and beliefs), death, and becoming. By the term becoming, I refer to the psychological, emotional, and physical development of an adolescent into an adult and, also, into the figure of a witch.

This paper uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian to perform a dialogic close reading between Eggers’ The Witch and Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa, critiquing the manner in which moral and magical forces are shown to affect the minds, hearts, and bodies of witches in each text. While also gesturing to occult literature, this primarily Nietzchean reading seeks to offer a critical reassessment of the figure of the witch as a paradoxical one – of both transformation and overcoming, as well as trauma and tragedy. Implicit in this bifurcated view of the figure of the witch is also a concern with how magic, sexuality, girlhood, and womanhood both aid and impede upon the psycho-emotional becoming and power of a witch as portrayed in contemporary horror-folk cinema.

This analysis opens with a brief excursus on the critical reception and persistent comparison of the two films and the implications of each director’s interpretation and presentation of the figure of the witch. After a brief contextual presentation of the concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, a Nietzschean reading of Thomasin’s emancipation and transition into both adulthood and witchery is developed. It then analyses the relations between excessive Dionysian forces, overcoming, and sexuality in The Witch and how these relate to the image Eggers paints of the figure of the witch – through the symbol of the goat – as an emancipatory one. I then turn to Feigelfeld’s depiction of the figure of the witch as one of excrescent illness and tragedy, and conclude my analysis with close readings of illness, trauma, sexuality, and toxicity in the film, again with a particular focus on the auteur’s use of the symbol of the goat. Ultimately, the overarching goal of this paper is to explore how each text treats the underlying dichotomy of the witch in contemporary folk-horror cinema, as a figure of both excess and excrescence.

“You Cannot Serve God and Mammon Both”: The Witch and Hagazussa as Two Sides of the Figure of the Witch

There are some overarching ideas permeating both of these films, the shared presence of which institutes a dialogue between their respective interpretations and presentations of contemporary Western cinema’s figure of the witch. While I lay them out in full for the purpose of contextual orientation without much initial discussion, I will return to all the points raised in the following quotations and extracts in my subsequent analysis. Since the films’ releases, there have been numerous and expected comparisons between Eggers and Feigelfelds’ respective explorations of witches. Brad Miska describes Hagazussa as “Germany’s answer to The Witch that has stunning atmosphere mixed with brooding terror from start to finish.”[2] Marko Stojiljković echoes this sentiment, stating that:

A comparison with The Witch might seem superficial, but the two films share a deliberately slow pace, eerie atmosphere and undertones of female empowerment created via the humanisation of the subjects. But while Eggers’ film is all about the paradigm of time and place, which also plays a certain role in Hagazussa (the villagers firmly believe that witches exist and that Jews are the plague-bringers), the German-Austrian film focuses on the psychological side of things, dealing with delusions, sexual and other tensions and mental illness when faced with solitude.[3]

Similarly, Andy Crump notes the intermodulation between the (in)credulous and the hallucinogenic at the heart of the figure of the witch in Hagazussa, by asking:

Are Albrun’s visions real, or figments of her imagination? Is witchery truly afoot, or is she just losing her marbles at the business end of ignorant mob persecution? The last of these is the only question with an emphatic ‘yes’ answer, though the idea that the real monster here is Woman is pedantic bordering on boorish. Movies like this function because the monster exists, not simply because people historically treat outsiders like stray dogs at best, vermin at worst.[4]

In an interview with Jul Marie, Feigelfeld comments on the common associative link between his and Eggers’ respective films. When asked about these inevitable comparisons between the two texts, he responded somewhat critically by stating:

I am not sure that The Witch and Hagazussa aim in the same direction, when it comes to the depiction of a so-called witch. I also must add, that I had not seen Robert Eggers’s film until after Hagazussa was finished. In Hagazussa, it was important that the balance between reality and magic was very blurred and that in the end it is the story of a woman struggling with a mental disorder. Eggers’s film did the opposite, in portraying the ‘emancipated woman’ again as a mystical and magical creature, which is a very male point of view. So-called witches in those times were, of course, just human; women who did not fit into the moral codex of those times. It was the church that twisted the perception and found ways of hunting down and mass murdering them as ‘enemies.’ Nowadays, with a growing number of young women finding their empowerment within the witch metaphor, this can and should be used to emancipate yourself from these old values, ultimately from the prevailing patriarchy in the world.[5]

When asked about the tensions inherent in the idea of a male director behind a film about a woman’s trauma, Feigelfeld states:

As I started to work on the subject of witches, it became quickly clear that it is the story of women, throughout the ages, being tormented by men, religion, and society. The prosecution of people, especially women, who think or believe differently, is still even a very important topic in today’s society. I worked a lot on finding a delicate understanding for this kind of suffering, working very closely with the main actress (Aleksandra Cwen) on creating a strong picture of what kind of woman Albrun was, as well as with the cinematographer (Mariel Baqueiro). Of course the fact that I am a male director is something that can never be forgotten in this process. It was a big aim for me to try to break away from the classic male (outlook) on the witch topic, like the ‘evil woman,’ but instead, to depict a woman, whom is struggling with her own place in society, but ultimately finding it with herself and nature.[6]

Marie notes not only the importance of both films’ respective takes within broader, and indeed often still dichotomous, discourses concerning the redemption of the historically (unjustly) persecuted figure of the witch, but the power of this figure in contemporary issues and debates surrounding gender and sexuality. She notes that:

More often than ever before, modern women are taking control of the witch metaphor by removing its demonized implications and turning it into a symbol of empowerment – it just appears that both Feigelfeld and Eggers saw this phenomenon coming. Like The Witch’s Thomasin, Albrun also takes back her power that was stripped from her as she turns to the dark arts, however, the horrific ways in which she chooses to do so leave more of a bleaker ending than Eggers’s film, which will not only haunt you, but will also emote sadness and empathy, as it comes full circle from the film’s beginning.[7]

While subtly and importantly different in their respective manifestations, Albrun and Thomasin are faced with similar repressions and constraints, in terms of the socio-political and cultural force exerted against their respective agencies. For Thomasin, the overbearing father – adherent to and promulgator of a patriarchal, phallogocentric Judeo-Christian morality – is the primary signifier and source of her repressive and subjugative trauma. For Albrun, it is the ill and potentially magical mother whose beliefs, practices, and misfortunes conspire to conform to an image of the figure of the witch – an image that precipitates the manufacture and allocation of a label and, with it, pervasive deprivations in the form of socio-cultural ostracisation and abjection.

Eggers’ exploration of the figure of the witch is predicated on dichotomies where latent forces of chaos and overcoming threaten those of sober reserve and repressive piety with their excess. Similarly, Feigelfelds’ exploration of the same figure is primarily concerned with the tension between magic and madness, between the Left-Hand Path – a path to the freedom of darkness or the excrescences of madness – and the fear of darkness and death. Critics have noted this central tension between magic and madness, witchery-as-curse contra witchery-as-power. Dennis Harvey states: “drawing upon her presumably inherited ‘witching’ powers at last, Albrun is avenged, and then some. But as so often seems to be the case in such tales, deploying the ‘dark arts’ requires payment in return – as exacting a terrible toll from Albrun and her child.”[8] This constant tension between the sane and the insane, the character’s traumatically addled worldview and the atmospheric tautness in which it occurs, is the product of a joint achievement: the expansive yet intimate eye of cinematographer Mariel Baqueiro and Greek dark ambient duo MMMD’s immersive score. It binds together the mutually differentiating forces in the film and is precisely the source of the creativity behind its interpretation of the figure of the witch.

In view of the above critical attitudes, it is not unreasonable to propose that the lives of Albrun and Thomasin can be read simultaneously as reflections and extensions of one another in terms of age and developmental trajectories. Thomasin’s narrative focusses on the important psycho-emotional, physical, and, in the case of a young witch, magical period marked by various symbols of transition. These include the following: emancipation from Christian ideology and embracing the Left-Hand Path – that is, relinquishing her identity as a parishioner and embracing her new subject position as a witch; a change of agency from passive receptacle of repressive phallogocentric patriarchal Judeo-Christian ethics to wilfully making a deal with the Devil in pursuit of her own pleasure, knowledge and power; the transition from church to coven; the transition from daughter to orphan; the transition from child to adolescent/young woman marked by her first menses; the transition from demurity and indirect sexuality to the full embracing of her burgeoning sexuality marked by not only her joining the witches at their mass and their orgasmic ascensions into the night at the conclusion of the film, but also disrobing, nudity, blood, fire and maenadic singing – all as inextricable elements of the Dionysian transition to the “delicious life” of the Left-Hand Path; and the transition from innocence to knowledge through the death of her entire family. In this sense, Thomasin’s transition from fey child to wilful witch is pithier and more immediate than Albrun’s transition, which is marked by very traumatic and incisive psycho-emotional transitions along a different trajectory but one ultimately book-ended by the similar antipodes of death and sexuality.

For Albrun, the coming-into-knowledge of her own power(lessness) and the power(lessness) of witchcraft are shown to have subtle manifestations that are all inescapably propelled and engendered by her experiencing abject trauma – from being sexually abused by her mother, to being indirectly raped by her assumed friend, protector, and fellow villager Swinda (Tanja Petrovsky), to being persecuted by the village youth as being both a witch and the daughter of one. In each instance, both films’ respective discussions of the becoming of a young witch make decidedly, albeit narratively different, pronouncements about this process. Subtending these differences is a shared understanding that witch-becoming is marked by specifically sexual or libidinal forces, traumatic forces expressed as violence and death, and that the experiential commingling of these forces is an inescapable price said individuals must necessarily pay as a type of ordeal or rite of initiation into broader occult mysteries, real or imagined. However, one difference between the two films is paramount and should be stressed here. Thomasin’s journey toward the Left-Hand-Path, for all its trauma and death and paranoia and loss, is presented to the viewer as an emancipatory process through which she ultimately gains a type of radical independence. The opposite is true of Albrun’s journey, which ends in isolation, trauma, persecution and ultimately death.

Ye Shall Not Suffer a Witch to Bloom: Nietzsche, Dionysus, and The Left-Hand Path

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche suggests that ancient Greek tragedy, and life by extension, was the direct result of a conflict or struggle between two fundamental forces or drives he refers to as the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo “embodies the drive toward distinction, discreteness and individuality, toward the drawing and respecting of boundaries and limits; he teaches an ethic of moderation and self-control.”[9] Apollo, therefore, is symbolic of the “healing powers…of all the arts through which life is made possible and worth living.”[10] The redemptive power of the Apollonian cannot be attained without “freedom from wilder impulses” whereby Apollo is a symbol of “that wise calm of the image-making god”.[11] Opposing the Apollonian force is the Dionysian force. “The Dionysiac”, Nietzsche states, “is the drive towards the transgression of limits, the dissolution of boundaries, the destruction of individuality, and excess”.[12] The Dionysiac emerges through the disruption of “all the rigid, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or ‘impudent fashion’ have established between human beings, break asunder”, resulting in a “blissful ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man…of nature itself”.[13] According to Nietzsche, the most intense and purest expression of this force in art can be found in the “quasi-orgiastic forms of music, especially of choral singing and dancing” in ancient Greece, similar, in its Maenadic, sparagmotic quality, to Thomasin’s initiation into the Left-Hand Path at the end of The Witch.[14]

What is important to note about the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces is the creativity said tension produces. For Nietzsche, “the continuous evolution of art is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in much the same way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes which co-exist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconciliation”.[15] Despite Nietzsche’s insistence on balance between the two fundamental forces, the Dionysian force is privileged throughout The Birth of Tragedy. This is because it is only through Dionysian music that the individual is shaken to his or her “very foundations”. Through the power of the:

Dionysiac dithyramb [,] man is stimulated to the highest intensification of his symbolic powers; something that he has never felt before urgently demands to be expressed: the destruction of the veil of maya, one-ness as the genius of humankind, indeed of nature itself. The essence of nature is bent on expressing itself; a new world of symbols is required, firstly the symbolism of the entire body, not just of the mouth, the face, the word, but the full gesture of dance with its rhythmical movement of every limb. Then there is a sudden, tempestuous growth in music’s other symbolic powers, in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony. To comprehend this complete unchaining of all symbolic powers, a man must already have reached that height of self-abandonment which seeks symbolic expression in those powers.[16]

When transposed to the context of Eggers’ film, Thomasin’s literal and figurative ascension through dark illumination is dependent on Black Phillip (Charlie, the goat), the melanistic buck goat that acts as the terrestrial embodiment of the Devil husbanded by Thomasin’s family, guiding her to the borne between the over-Apolline rigidity of her father and the image of his faith which he desperately clings on to in the face of the very real Dionysiacal forces around him, and the wild dithyrambic ecstasies of the coven. Crossing over this ontological borne, overleaping this existential splitting, from the chastity of liturgical veils into the bright dark of embodied passions, chants, dancing, and indeed flying, is the prerequisite for Thomasin not only to become a witch, but also to become herself. In this sense, despite the horrific deaths of her family, Thomasin, through Black Phillip’s guidance, finds “metaphysical comfort embodied in [her] tragedy and which is [later] incarnated in the satyric chorus [of] pure pleasure [performed by the coven] – pleasure in its indestructible power that, despite the changing character of phenomena, affirms life”.[17] It is through this ecstatic initiation that Thomasin reconciles her loss, to affirm it, to “[look] boldly into the terrible destructive forces of history and nature”, “[admit…] the universal suffering, accepts and assumes it, but transfigures it in the affirmation, in the Yes to life”.[18] It is this paradoxical view of tragedy, combined with witchcraft, that symbolically allows Black Philip to simultaneously console and seduce Thomasin to not only continue to live, but to live deliciously; that is, not only to advance, but advance down the Left-Hand Path.

Thomasin’s initiation into the coven and the ways of The Left-Hand Path. From The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)

This Nietzschean Apollo/Dionysus tension manifests throughout the film in terms of fundamental divisions. While it may initially appear as if this splitting is inaugurated by the family’s banishment as a result of William’s (Ralph Ineson) refusal to “be judged by false contented Christians under an un-separated church, an English king’s church”, Thomasin’s family is split long before any obvious trouble with Black Phillip emerges in the narrative.[19] As Puritan Separatist Pilgrims, William and his family are split in several ways: 1) as Calvinists from the Holy Mother Church (Roman Catholic Church) and the English state church, 2) from England, its history, sociocultural, political and economic praxes, traditions, upheavals, and prosperities, 3) from the New England plantation, further separating them from all cultural, economic, and religious markers of organised Christendom and Englishness more broadly. This religious framework – both within the auspices of the church and without it, as adhered to by William and his family – is as unrelenting and ostensibly as rigid as the land to which they are banished to. It can be summed up in Thomasin’s penitential prayer at the beginning of the film:

O most merciful father: I here confess I have lived in sin. I have been idle of my work, disobedient of mine parents, neglectful of my prayer. I have, in secret, played upon thy Sabbath and broken every one of thy commandments in thought…followed the desires of my own will, and not the holy Spirit.  I know I deserve all shame and misery in this life, and everlasting hell-fire. But I beg thee, for the sake of thy Son. Forgive me. Show me mercy. Show me thy light.[20]

William and his family are also split from the land of their banishment itself. On top of their fledgling farm, incomplete barn, and ramshackle cottage, the signs of failed harvest, rotted and emaciated cornstalks, and the odd scarcity of game indicate at the land itself has rejected them, refused them even its most basic resources. The most interesting and indeed Nietzschean divisions pertain to Thomasin, her coming-of-age, coming-into-knowledge, both numinous and imminent, concerning the world beyond the stricture and control of Apollonian beatific church doctrine. While the goal of the former is to maintain order, provide moral rearmament, and make life worth living, the latter, with its wild, explosive, and simultaneously creative and destructive potential, always-already threatens to expose the truth of onto-existential being: life is a confluence of temporary assemblages, bricolage, and interplays between ekstatic chaos and sobering order that simultaneously ensure and prevent the human experience of both internal and external bifurcation, in themselves and in the world at large.

After Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), Thomasin’s younger brother, dies, Thomasin’s split from the rest of the family is all but complete. William accuses Thomasin of witching Caleb as all evidence points to her: she found him “naked as sin, pale as death and witched”, going as far as to suggest that at this point in the narrative, Thomasin has already bargained her soul away, and even urges her to confess that she is a witch.[21] This leads to an interesting effect of truth, one that leads to further sundering between father and daughter. Thomasin enumerates all the truths at the core of the family’s misfortunes, revealing that said misfortunes are predicated on hypocrisy, not witchcraft:

You and Mother are planned to rid the farm of me. Aye. I heard you speak of it. Is that truth? You took of Mother’s cup and let her rail at me. Is that truth? You took Caleb to The Wood and let me take the blame of that too. You confessed not till it was too late. Is that truth? You let Mother be as thy master! You cannot bring the crops to yield! You cannot hunt! Is that truth enough? Thou canst do nothing save cut wood![22]

This leads to William completely changing his views of his child, calling her a “bitch” and a “creature”, and, eventually, her imprisonment in the goat enclosure along with the twins, Jonas (Lucas Dawson) and Mercy (Ellie Grainger), who also stand against her and accuse of her of witchcraft. Thomasin has no recourse but to accuse them in turn, stating:

The Adversary oft comes in the shape of a he-goat. And whispers. Aye, whispers. He is Lucifer, you know it. The twins know it. Twas they and that goat what bewitched this whole farm. Was’t a wolf stole Sam? I never saw no wolf. Mercy told me herself by the stream ‘I be the witch of the wood!’ Jonas and Mercy… they made covenant with The Devil in the shape of Black Phillip.[23]

In this sense, Puritanical Christianity is an Apollonian force opposed by the libidinous Dionysian force whose agent is Black Phillip, Thomasin’s psychopomp and seducer to the excesses, luxuries, pleasures, violence, loss, and triumphs of life. Black Phillip, who, like a satyr in the retinue of the twice-born god, represents the triumph of the Dionysian over the ossifying rigidity and self-denial and self-deception of the Apollonian, can be described as a type of Gospel of Becoming or the Ethic of Living Deliciously.

Black Narcissus: The Goat as Chief Dionysian Symbol of Overcoming in Relation to Burgeoning Sexuality in The Witch

In the context of Eggers’ film, sexuality – albeit latent and burgeoning – plays a key role in Thomasin’s development both as a woman and a witch. It also factors into Thomasin’s relationship with her brother Caleb, the latter of whom is shown to be sexually curious about his older sister, whose sexual maturation he observes and cannot escape; Thomasin is the only example of young womanhood available to him in his family’s desolate and isolated existence. Here, these incestuous “unholy” relations evoke the scene involving the luring or seduction of Caleb by the young witch in a particularly noteworthy, dreamlike, and terrifying sequence in the woods, as well as the gyrations and ekstasis of the witch coven at Sabbath at the end of the film, which are equally laden with sexual undertones.

The connection between witches and sexuality reflects Thomasin’s experience of a splitting that no other member of the family experiences, an onto-existential one involving the psycho-emotional and physical split between youth and young womanhood inaugurated by puberty. This process results in Thomasin’s splitting from Caleb, which is predicated on her sexual development as Katherine (Kate Dickie) reveals to her husband that their daughter “hath begat the sign of her womanhood.”[24] Along with Thomasin’s first menstruation and the occult connections between the moon, menstrual blood, and magical potency, these themes manifest in the film’s symbolism in the form of one of the family’s white does lactating blood from its udders, along with Thomasin and the twins witnessing a witch suckling said blood when boarded up in the goat enclosure as a desperate punishment meted out by their increasingly unstable father. Her development into a woman causes Caleb to notice her in a sexual manner. He stares at her bare legs as she washes her father’s clothes on the banks of a small stream. She catches him watching her work, staring at the bare part of her chest at the top of her bodice. Here, in developing, she is splitting, moving away from a relationship predicated on platonic sibling interactions and love to one of a potentially sexual nature. At the end of the film, Katherine’s confrontation with Thomasin reintroduces the theme of incestuous relations when the former states “you bewitched thy brother, proud slut! […] Did you not think I saw thy sluttish looks to him, bewitching his eye as any whore? And thy father next!”[25] Here, sexuality is seen as an uncontrollable, potent, and dangerous force that cannot be sublimated by puritanical Christian doctrine or even so-called natural taboos. In this regard, Thomasin’s development into a beautiful young woman, and the latently Dionysian energy that is an inextricable part thereof, threaten not only to the teachings of virtue, chastity, and demureness lauded in ecclesiastical views on female deportment, but also the image of the Apollonian integrity of the God-fearing family itself.

However, Eggers seems to have a more celebratory or at least sympathetic view regarding this force and its development. The liberating power of what remains an undefined psycho-sexual force is beautifully rendered in the film’s final scene, in which Thomasin experiences a kind of jouissance that not only causes her to laugh and cry but also fly, as she both enters into it and it into her as a symbolic marker of her dark ascent, or indeed descent up/down the Left-Hand Path. This dichotomy belies the truth of Thomasin’s condition as well, not only as an intelligent, spirited, and beautiful pubescent young woman who is enamoured of beauty, jollity, and gaiety, but as a daughter, scapegoat, failure, and problem-child within the untrue framework of confusion and suspicious paranoia of both her microcosmic family and her macrocosmic family in Christ/Christendom. In this sense, Black Phillip is to Thomasin what Virgil is to Dante: a guide, catalyst of emancipatory self-discovery and change, and symbol of overcoming and independence. He offers Thomasin a choice and a (sinister, that is left-hand) path to that truth, one he, in his mostly occluded anthropic “Devil form”, describes as one of “butter” and “pretty dresses” and world-seeing, all of which are symbols for sensual experience, pleasure, growth, and knowledge.[26]

The only way Thomasin can be at peace and have any sense of harmony in herself as an individual is to acknowledge and accept her desires once so prohibited and gainsaid by the punitive, ascetic, anti-life mandates of both her earthly and heavenly fathers’ houses. In order to attain the sort of truth associated with Nietzsche’s figuration of Dionysus, Thomasin has to acknowledge and accept all opposites within herself and all alterity kept forbidden from her. She has to invert, disrupt, and/or destroy certain ideas and constraints in order to overleap them as Black Phillip would overleap a fence. She has to rebuke her merciless fathers and reclaim all the myriad manifestations of life considered sin and, in her body and mind, reify, embody, and live them. She must relinquish work and tasks that turn her spirit idle in an ossified frame that delimits the possibilities of being, and neglect all in her young life that is not full of life, fertility, fecundity, growth, power, and pleasure. She must split from her parents’ house and its laws and lies. In this sense, like the productive tension predicated on the paradoxical split integration of Apollonian and Dionysian forces, to split, as well as to (re)integrate forbidden forces, is, for Thomasin, also to grow. She must declare openly all the playfulness the Lord’s Sabbath forced into secrecy, one that the Witches’ Sabbath can draw out in the breaking of all covenants with Christ based on commandments and, instead make covenant with Older, or at the very least Other, Forces. She must embrace the paradox of the desire of her own will and sign away her soul to Black Phillip, paradoxically, for the purpose of following her own spirit openly, fully, and truly. In the last instance, this is what Black Phillip offers her: shameless imminent Joy in everlasting night with no need for divine substantiation of feeling, nor for penitence, mercy, or forgiveness, in its experience. Black Phillip offers to show her a darkness in which to be true, whole, and free. Latent in all her family’s misfortune, from Thomasin’s perspective, is the notion that all of the aforementioned can only be attained if she sheds all pretence and un- or half-truth of Apollonian superficiality. While the witches (in terms of killing her brothers, absconding with the youngest twins, and eviscerating the ewes to frame her as a witch) and Black Phillip’s help in this (killing her father, William), she also has to get her hands dirty so to speak by killing her mother (albeit in self-defence) in order for her to be under no direct influence save her own nature, her will, and her desires. What Black Phillip offers her is a choice: to live a life of sensual pleasure and knowledge at the cost of not only the lives of her entire family, but ultimately, her own soul. Ultimately, this is what Eggers reveals Black Phillip’s purpose to be, but also what it means to be a witch, and the harrowing and liberating psycho-emotional costs thereof.

Mad Magic: The Witch as Figure of Physical and Psycho-Sexual Illness in Hagazussa

While Thomasin is shown to tread a path that leads her to her eventual emancipation and what I have called her dark ascension, Albrun’s turn down the Left-Hand Path leads her to death and madness. In short, Hagazussa offers a sobering take against the ecstatic image of the witch as a figure of emancipation, agency, knowledge, power, and sexual liberation. Feigelfeld shows that not all Left-Hand Paths lead to the same destination in as much as not every witch who treads them is the same. Feigelfeld’s exploration of the figure of the witch interpolates some of the figure’s associative links with folk-horror as a way into a more incisive and timely deconstruction of the label witch being deployed violently, as a judicial, medical, and spiritual diagnostic against women of earlier centuries. Hagazussa, therefore, is less concerned with whether or not Albrun is a witch or not in a factual sense, but more so with the psycho-emotional consequences of both she and those around her believing that she is. In an interview, he confirms this logic, stating:

I had been thinking about this topic for a very long time. Part of my family comes from this particular place in the Austrian Alps, around Salzburg, where there are
still quite alive traditions  that are mostly rooted in Pagan folklore. The classic witch character, that we know from fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm for example, is something that formed around this area […] I did a lot of research on this field and the story grew into something much bigger in the writing process, exceeding the classic horror witch character and dealing more with the perception of “different” women in those times and their struggle with society and sanity.[27]

The associative link between isolation and madness is heralded by the film’s narrative premise, and specifically its setting. The young Albrun is shown to live with her mother Martha (Claudia Martini) in a small log cabin, alone on the side of a scenic albeit isolated mountain. They are ostracised by the rest of the villagers of the valley below, being perceived as abject on account of being suspected witches. The persecution they undergo and endure is shown to be extremely traumatic. In a scene in the opening of the film, a few men of the village-folk are shown to carry torches while wearing horned fur masks as they threaten to burn down Martha’s cabin on account that she, and Albrun by association, are accused of being witches. This persecution and seclusion combines with the presence of illness and the burden of responsibility as forces acting against Albrun’s agency and well-being. This sense of oppressive psycho-emotional weight is further compounded by Albrun’s transition from childhood to adulthood. In one scene, the child Albrun is shown to change her bedding during which she discovers a spot of blood signalling her first menses. Ashamed and frightened, she hides the sheets beneath the floorboards of the cabin. This fearful transition is compounded by illness in another scene where the pubescent Albrun is shown to witness her mother collapse while out collecting firewood. Being shown to be terribly ill, Albrun nurses her, trying as she is able to reduce her rather excessive symptoms, which include vomiting, fever, and delirium. In this way, Albrun, under the imperative of dire and tragic circumstances, is shown to forcibly undergo a transition from the passivity of a child to the activity of a caregiver. She has to empty her mother’s sick bucket, tend to the house, prepare meals and medicines for her, all the while tending to their livestock (goats) as well as herself. Unlike Thomasin, Albrun has no other family, regardless of how close or estranged, no salve, no aid or help, and no succour to help ease this transition.

When a cadre of local nuns and priests visit Albrun’s sick mother, they perform a thorough physical inspection during which they discover that she is marked by large boils and pustules under her left armpit. While their deliberations are, on account of the film’s subtly effective sound design, kept undisclosed to the viewer, the suggestions is that they are deliberating as to whether her symptoms are signs of plague or witchery.[28] This scene does the work of clearly associating the figure of the witch with illness, thereby joining spiritual illness or abjection with physical (and later mental) decay. As Father Gore notes, the plague’s appearance in Hagazussa is another element involving religious superstition. Many saw the Black Death as a punishment from God, meaning anybody who took ill must have strayed from God. Martha becomes sick with the plague and that acts as confirmation for the villagers she was, indeed, a practitioner of witchcraft. The illness drives her completely mad, so much so she appears witch-like to her own daughter, who, at a young age, was susceptible to  superstition, and this goes on to convince Albrun she’s also a witch.
In a wider sense, superstitions involving the plague throughout Austria took on misogynistic forms via the folklore of the ‘Pest Jungfrau’ a.k.a Pest Maiden. People believed a female spirit flew across Germany, spreading the Black Death, taking the form of a deathly pale maiden when seeking its next victim— this made many people refuse to help young women who came knocking at their doors, leaving them to die outside for fear it was the Pest Maiden coming to infect them.[29]

In a later scene, Albrun experiences perhaps the formative transitionary trauma in her development not only as a woman but as a witch. As Albrun sleeps, her mother, with a completely changed voice, one strong and healthy, calls out to her. Her mother’s hair is changed from wispy, wiry grey and dry, to lush, straight, and jet black. Pale and spectral, she invites her daughter into her bed. While mother and daughter lay close together, Martha begins rutting herself against Albrun’s head, hair, and face. Martha then reaches between Albrun’s legs, and subsequently withdraws her hand, which is shown with the suggestive glistening darkness of the girl’s menstrual blood. Martha brings her fingers to her nose and snorts and sniffs them maniacally, wiping her hand across Albrun’s face while continuously and menacingly sniffing her. Albrun breaks free her mother’s hold and flees while her mother rubs her hand across her open mouth in a state of ekstatic trance. While Albrun takes shelter, cowering in the goat pen, she can hear her mother begin howling and screaming in the cabin. Here, the differences/similarities of the role played by menses, particularly the reaction of each character’s mother to it in The Witch and Hagazussa is ostensibly similar, but importantly different. In Thomasin’s case, the onset of menses is met with both anger and later an incestuous Elektran jealousy on the part of her mother who sees her now sexually mature daughter as both rival and temptation for her husband, Thomasin’s father’s, affections. While this is traumatic, particularly in engendering feelings of shame for Thomasin, her menses is not accompanied by molestation and abuse. Ostensibly, the same is true for Albrun. When inspecting her sheets alone, Albrun appears ashamed and frightened. However, once her mother senses, indeed ‘smells’ its arrival, she treats not only the menstrual blood itself but the body from which it is discharged, her own daughter’s, as both appetitive and erotic. Ultimately, the entire experience of her molestation, which is in and of itself, in an occult context, can be read as a test, is, however read, portrayed as entirely traumatic. In this way, there are no Apollonian countermeasures to temper the increase of the malignant admixture of illness, paranoia, trauma, and burgeoning sexuality which, if taken as Dionysian in contrast, are certainly the darkest and/or excrescent manifestation of the excessive overcoming energy thereof. However, this energy is not enough to disrupt the chain of trauma produced and passed on by Martha to her daughter.

Milk and Horn: Sexuality and Trauma in Hagazussa

The bestial nature of Albrun’s paraphilic sexuality as symbolised by the figure of the goat. From Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse (Lukas Feigelfeld, 2017)

The adult Albrun’s zoophilic inclinations manifest most starkly in a scene in which she milks one of her does, placing her face against its flank as she does. In an overtly sexual display, she sensually strokes its udders while spurting its milk over her hands and fingers. She begins masturbating while sensually taking her free milk-wet hand, rubbing her nose and lips, and placing it into her mouth. Both films approach the symbolic value of goats in relation to witches. Goats in The Witch are associated with secret knowledge and sinister mischief, but ultimately rebelliousness and violent aggression. In Hagazussa, this symbolism is reversed, and the goat, which is also feminized, is made symbolic of sensuality and sexuality. While goats are colloquially associated with licentiousness, Albrun’s relation to her goats is marked by sensual richness, of milk and fur, and of the physical pleasures derived from these sensations, thus affirming the sensuality of the goat as a totem of onanistic, hermitic sexuality in the film. Moreover, Albrun treats the secretions of the goat – its milk being, in terms of sensual richness, equivalent to the pubescent Albrun’s menstrual blood – in exactly the same way as her mother treated her blood. It is enjoyed primarily for its olfactory qualities, both blood and milk being brought to the nose and the mouth, not fully ingested but still sensually taken in. This scene is, in terms of pure, taboo-overcoming excess, perhaps the most Dionysian moment in the life of Albrun shown. However, Albrun’s sexuality manifests in ways that can be read as excrescent, as a pathological, psycho-emotional salve against oppressive supernatural forces that seemingly manifests all around her as a type of haunting. For example in one scene, Albrun is called into the forest by the sound of her mother’s voice calling her. After investigating, she returns to her cabin, but, instead of sleeping indoors in her room, she sleeps in the goat pen where she lays on her stomach and masturbates as a means of escaping/assuaging her torment.

While Eggers presents Thomasin’s burgeoning sexuality as inextricable from her burgeoning agency, independence and womanhood, Feigelfeld presents Albrun’s sexuality as always-already traumatic. In The Witch, the libidinal forces of Dionysian excess that typically orbit the figure of the witch, magic, and sexuality in contemporary folk-horror cinema, while subtle, are indeed represented as such in Eggers’ effort. For Feigelfeld, Albrun’s complex and, when measured against even the most controversial examples of Dionysian sexuality and witches in mainstream Western cinema, excrescent sexuality is presented as an attempt to counteract the psycho-emotional and indeed sexual trauma inaugurated and passed down by her mother. In this way, Albrun’s sexuality is divested of anything resembling the triumphant and Dionysiacally Nietzschean sense of overcoming and joy (jouissance) Thomasin gains access to. In contrast, Albrun’s zoophilic sexuality cannot be disentangled from both trauma and illness. Commenting on the psycho-sexual aspects of Albrun’s trauma and subsequent behaviour, Feigelfeld states that:

She pleasures herself as a means to cope with her repressed sexuality – in fact, like The Witch, goats are also prevalent in this film, but this time, she is using them as a means for temptation. A reoccurring snake also slithers its way through crucial scenes–another indication of temptation and sexuality – further implicating her so-called sins as a woman who craves physical pleasure.[30]

What is clear that both Albrun’s goats and Thomasin’s Black Phillip occupy the symbolic position of tempters or seducers-to-life. Each represents the potency of libidinal forces, repressed or otherwise, and their potential as fuel for overcoming psycho-emotional and indeed physical traumas through pleasure.

Witchwrath: Magic, Illness, Agency and Toxicity in the Witch Body

Following the scene of her rape at the hands of Swinda and a male villager, Albrun’s revenge against the villagers is equally sensual – that is, her magic is not literary, nor is it predicated on the knowledge of signs and tinctures, or the reading of grimoires and the memorization and recitation of spells, simple or complex. Her magic, for lack of a better term, can be described as pragmatic toxicity. For example, as part of her revenge, Albrun kills a rat in her cabin, takes its corpse and drops it upstream in the river supplying the village. She is also shown to squat over the dead rat and urinate on it and into the river, doubly poisoning the river with both her own effluvia and the rat corpse. As she performs this directly indirect act of vengeance, her nose begins bleeding. The implication of Feigelfeld’s deployment of natural fluids – as be it milk, blood, and urine – is that, when issuing from the body of a witch, all all shown to have inextricably necrotic qualities. Not only are they associated with so-called “black” magic, wherein which, in certain traditions such as the Thelemaic tradition established by the infamous occultist Alistair Crowley, the use of bodily fluids, specifically human semen, vaginal secretions and menstrual blood, were necessary ingredients in workings of the most potent types of magic. In Hagazusa, Feigelfeld presents these fluids as hermeneutically bifurcated, simultaneously representing power and poison. This concept of the witch as the embodiment of toxicity is also reaffirmed in an earlier scene in which Albrun struggles to breastfeed her baby, Martha Jr., who refuses her nipple. Here, the enervating, life-giving, vocational, and pleasurable qualities of goat’s milk are contrasted with the symbolically toxic qualities of witch’s milk.

For both Thomasin and Albrun, the stability of their lives begins to unravel following the onset of their first periods. The implication here is that for both witches, but more so for Albrun, their respective witchery, power, sexuality, and the cycle of isolation and distrust each experience in their respective ways are inextricable from the cycle of menses, a cycle traditionally, especially for oestrocentric schools of witchcraft, associated with strength and lunar power and beauty. In Hagazussa, wherever there is blood, there is magic, and according to Elphias Levi, Moncure Daniel Conway, and Charles Upham, luminaries in occultic philology, practice, and hermeneutics, blood magic is typically considered the darkest kind.[31] In this sense, while it is tempting to consider whatever agency Albrun is able to gesture to through the toxicity of her witch-body as Dionysian, it cannot be thought of as life-giving or engendering life. Its fundamentally necrotic character makes whatever magic is emanating from her witch-body, in Feigelfeld’s presentation, inescapably anti-life.

The Left-Hand Path, Dark Ascensions, and Dead Ends: Conclusion

In the last instance, one has to question some of the seemingly emancipatory rhetoric with which Feigelfeld speaks about his portrayal of Albrun quoted above. Hagazussa expressly shows that Albrun’s life is not delicious. Eggers presents Thomasin as eventually attaining a radical means of expressing an equally radical agency by choosing to make a deal with Black Phillip (the Devil) to change the agential and experiential aptitude of her life from one as submissive and repressed by the oppressive Judeo-Christian ideologies of both her fathers, terrestrial and heavenly, to one of occult supernatural freedom, excess, pleasure and power. Feigelfeld presents Albrun’s experiences as firmly delimited by isolation, trauma, madness, and unwanted responsibility. The contrast between the two auteur’s respective presentation of the figure of the witch redounds to the witch as a symbol of the delicious life and/or the cursed life. In Hagazusa, the witch is not portrayed as a figure of emancipation but one of suffering and tragedy. This is not to say that Thomasin does not experience and overcome tragedy in The Witch. The resonant difference between the two young witches is the function of tragedy in their lives and on their respective trajectories down their respective Left-Hand Paths. For Thomasin, tragedy is part of the cost she pays for power, knowledge, and emancipation, and is a harrowing force that brings with it a dark enlightenment. For Albrun, tragedy is a seemingly inextricable part of the curse of being a witch that benights any and all expressions of agency she exhibits with an inescapable sense of the necrotic. A comparison of both films thus reveals that the Left-Hand Path is not ubiquitous, or, put slightly differently, the Left-Hand Path does not lead all who walk it to the same destination.

Notes

[1] That is, narratives whose aesthetics – from sets to performances – are deliberately presented as theatrically over-exaggerated. In so doing, as is the case in The Love Witch for example, contemporary witch narratives can pastiche, that is emulate, mimic, and mock, the depiction of the figure of the witch prevalent in California during the American “Summer of Love” in the 1960s.

[2] Brad Miska, “Blood Disgusting Presents ‘Hagazussa’, Germany’s Answer to ‘The Witch’,” Bloody Disgusting, last modified September 13, 2017, accessed October 12, 2019, https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3527938/bloody-disgusting-presents-hagazussa-germanys-answer-witch/.

[3] Marko Stojiljković, “Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse: The witch of the late medieval Alps,” Cineuropa, last modified October 20, 2017, accessed October 12, 2019, Cineuropa, https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/340057/.

[4]  Andy Crump, “Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse”, Pastemagazine, last modified April 17, 2019, accessed October 13, 2019, https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/04/hagazussa-a-heathens-curse.html.

[5] Jul Marie, “Interview with ‘Hagazussa’ writer/director Lukas Feigelfeld, ” Horrormonal, last modified April 15, 2019, accessed October 13, 2019, https://horrormonal.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/interview-with-hagazussa-writer-director-lukas-feigelfeld/.

[6] Marie, “Interview.”

[7] Jul Marie, “Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse’ is one of 2019’s first horror masterworks,” Horrormonal, last modified April 15, 2019, accessed October 13, 2019, https://horrormonal.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/hagazussa-a-heathens-curse-is-one-of-2019s-first-horror-masterworks/.

[8] Dennis Harvey, “Film Review: Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse”, Variety, last modified April 18, 2019, accessed October 13, 2019.   https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/hagazussa-a-heathens-curse-review-1203192272/.

[9] Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, ed., Cambridge Texts In The History of Philosophy: Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy and other writings by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xi.

[10] Ibid, 16.

[11] Ibid, 16.

[12] Ibid, xi.

[13] Ibid, 17-18.

[14] Ibid, xi.

[15] Ibid, 18.

[16] Ibid, 21.

[17] Roderigo de Almeida Miranda, Nietzsche and Paradox. trans. Mark S. Roberts (Albany, NYC: University of New York Press, 2006), 5.

[18] Ibid, 5.

[19] Robert Eggers, The Witch. DVD. Directed by Robert Eggers. Los Angeles, U.S.A: A24, 2015

[20] Ibid, 2015.

[21] Ibid, 2015.

[22] Ibid, 2015.

[23] Ibid, 2015.

[24] Ibid, 2015.

[25] Ibid, 2015.

[26] Ibid, 2015.

[27] Jul Marie, “Interview.”

[28] This scene is reminiscent of processes of witch detection elaborated in the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (1497), a Latinate witch-hunt manual. Translated as “The Hammer of Witches”, the text was written by James Sprenger and Henry Kramer and functioned as a judicial case-book employed in the detection and persecution of witches for over three hundred years both in England and continental Europe.

[29] Father Gore, “Repressed Rural Women and The Horrifying Effects of Medieval Misogyny in HAGAZUSSA,” Fathersonholygore, last modified April 23, 2019, accessed November 1, 2019, https://fathersonholygore.com/2019/04/23/repressed-rural-women-and-the-horrifying-effects-of-medieval-misogyny-in-hagazussa/.

[30] Marie, “Interview.”

[31] See Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie: Vol 1 & 2. (Paris: G. Baillière, 1816); Moncure D. Conway,  Demonology and Devil-lore (London: Henry Holt and Co., 1879); Aleister Crowley, “Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts I-IV,” Vsociety, http://files.vsociety.net/data/library/Section%201%20%28A,G,M,S,Z%29/Crowley%20Alester/Unknown%20Album/Book%20Four%20%28Liber%20ABA%29.pdf; and Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft with an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects Vol. 1. 4th ed. (London: Prederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1969 [1867]).

Bibliography

Conway, Moncure D. Demonology and Devil-lore. London: Henry Holt and Co., 1879.

Crowley, Aleister. “Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts I-IV.” Vsociety, Accessed October 14,  2018. http://files.vsociety.net/data/library/Section%201%20%28A,G,M,S,Z%29/Crowley%20Alester/Unknown%20Album/Book%20Four%20%28Liber%20ABA%29.pdf.

Crump, Andy. “Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse.” Pastemagazine. Last modified April 17, 2019. Accessed October 13, 2019. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/04/hagazussa-a-heathens-curse.html.

Geuss, Raymond and Ronald Speirs, ed., Cambridge Texts In The History of Philosophy: Nietzsche –       The Birth of Tragedy and other writings by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Gore, Father. “Repressed Rural Women and The Horrifying Effects of Medieval Misogyny in HAGAZUSSA.” Fathersonholygore. Last modified April 23, 2019. Accessed November 1,      2019. https://fathersonholygore.com/2019/04/23/repressed-rural-women-and-the-horrifying-effects-of-medieval-misogyny-in-hagazussa/.

Harvey, Dennis. “Film Review: ‘Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse’.” Variety. Last modified April 18, 2019.   Accessed October 13, 2019. https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/hagazussa-a-heathens-curse-review-1203192272/.

Éliphas, Lévi. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie: Vol 1 & 2. Paris: G. Baillière, 1816.

Marie, Jul. “Interview with ‘Hagazussa’ writer/director Lukas Feigelfeld.” Horrormonal. Last modified April 15, 2019Accessed October 13, 2019.             https://horrormonal.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/interview-with-hagazussa-writer-director-lukas-feigelfeld/.

—., “‘Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse’ is one of 2019’s first horror masterworks.” Horrormonal. last modified April 15, 2019. Accessed October 13, 2019.   https://horrormonal.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/hagazussa-a-heathens-curse-is-one-of-       2019s-first-horror-masterworks/.

Miranda, Roderigo de Almeida. Nietzsche and Paradox. trans. Mark S. Roberts. Albany, New York: University of New York Press, 2006.

Miska, Brad. “Blood Disgusting Presents ‘Hagazussa’, Germany’s Answer to ‘The Witch’.” Bloody Disgusting. Last modified September 13, 2017. Accessed October 12, 2019. https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3527938/bloody-disgusting-presents-hagazussa-germanys-answer-witch/.

Stojiljković, Marko. “Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse: The witch of the late medieval Alps.” Cineuropa. Last modified October 20, 2017. Accessed October 12, 2019. Cineuropa.        https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/340057/.

Sprenger, James  and Henry Kramer. “Malleus Maleficarum.” Sacredtexts. Accessed October 13, 2019. http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/mm/#sect1.

Upham, Charles W. Salem Witchcraft with an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects Vol. 1. 4th ed. London: Prederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1969 [1867].

Filmography

Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse. DVD. Directed by Lukas Feigelfeld. Berlin, Germany: Forgotten Film, 2018.

The Witch. DVD. Directed by Robert Eggers. Los Angeles, U.S.A: A24, 2015.

About the Author
Kwasu David Tembo is a PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh’s Language, Literatures, and Cultures department. His research interests include – but are not limited to – comics studies, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, particularly the so-called “prophets of extremity” – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. He has published on Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, in The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, ed. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (Columbia UP, 2015), and on Superman, in Postscriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies (2017).  

Introduction

Since the early modern European witch trials, the hag witch has existed as a monstrous incarnation of the aging female body. Non-reproductive and anti-family, she is a spectacular embodiment of the abject excesses of the category Woman that threaten hetero-patriarchal order, and must be controlled. While primarily depicted as an image of patriarchal horror, since at least the 19^th century the hag witch has also been appropriated by feminists, who have framed her as an affirmative figure of female resistance and liberation. In this essay, I focus on one of the most prominent instances of this appropriation by second wave radical feminists in the late-1960s. First, I examine the relationship between radical feminism and the hag witch, suggesting that the movement served to legitimise an alternate reading of the hag witch as an affirmative figure of unruly femininity, celebrating non-reproductivity and the destabilisation of the hetero-patriarchal family. Thus, the image of the hag witch became a site of ideological contestation in this period of widespread socio-political turmoil in the United States, one that was articulated and negotiated through horror cinema. In order to assess how the hag witch was used to negotiate this unrest, I interrogate the horror films Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Cry of the Banshee (Gordon Hessler, 1970) and Season of the Witch (George A. Romero, 1972). Ultimately, I argue that these three films capitalise upon the anxieties of the period, superficially acknowledging the new “feminist” dynamic of the hag witch whilst minimising her antagonistic power and disruptive excesses. Nevertheless, the slightly different ways in which these films manage the hag witch is significant for interrogating the rapidly changing cultural landscape at this time. In the films of the late-1960s the strength of the radical feminist movement is apparent in the construction of the hag as abject, while from 1970 onwards the hag is increasingly positioned as sympathetic, but her threat is weaker, softened by a cultural feminist framing.

Witches for Women’s Liberation

The witch has always been a potent symbol of female transgression. Gerhild Scholz Williams explains that, from their inception during the early modern witch trials, “witches embodied the essence of disorderliness, for they subverted the order of sexual and procreative practices, family structure, and the divine institute of the state”.[1] It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that feminists appropriated the witch, and have used her as a politically productive symbol since at least the 19^th century. At the height of feminism’s “second wave”, radical feminists continued this trend. In New York, 1968, the activist group WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) was first established, and was soon followed by “covens” across the United States.[2] The alliance between second wave radical feminism and the witch is understandable, in that the ideology of radical feminism was that of liberation, the destabilisation of traditional values and societal systems. This is evident in Shulamith Firestone’s call for the elimination of the sex distinction in The Dialectic of Sex,[3] as well as in Valerie Solanas’s infamous “SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto”, in which she describes radical feminists as those “who have free-wheeled to the limits of this ‘society’ and are ready to wheel on”.[4] In her antagonism to social order and her refusal to conform to gendered norms, the witch was the perfect symbol for this ideology. Accordingly, the New York WITCH manifesto states that “witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, non-conformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary”.[5]

Central to radical feminism’s harnessing of the witch’s politically productive potential were three key aspects. Firstly, it relied upon a reframing of the witch in history, constructing the myth of the feminist witch. Here, the radical Witches called upon a revisionist history of the early modern witch trials that had been central to feminist appropriations of the witch since being propagated by suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage’s 1893 work Woman, Church and State.[6] This revisionist history is outlined in the Chicago WITCH coven’s essay, “Witches as Women’s Hidden History,”[7] which describes a utopic pre-patriarchal society in which marriage did not exist and women were the most respected members of society. This society, the radical Witches claimed, was destroyed by agents of patriarchal Catholicism, against whom proto-feminist witches struggled. Thus, the early modern “witches” were re-framed affirmatively as “the original female rebels, hounded, persecuted, and burned at the stake because they had knowledge men wanted suppressed”.[8]

Secondly, radical feminism specifically invoked the archetype of the hag, symbolic of the non-reproductive and anti-maternal woman who violently eschews gendered norms. As argued by historian Alison Rowlands, the construction of the witch as hag was informed by “a fear of the bodies of older women who were no longer fertile”.[9] Thus, the hag witch embodies the excesses of the category Woman, a transgressor of gendered boundaries specifically in her lack of feminine beauty and non-reproductivity. This fear of non-reproductive femininity becomes clearest in images of the hag witch as monstrous mother, devouring infants or grinding them into a paste for use in wicked spells and potions.[10] In the context of the late-1960s, the archetype of the hag witch is implicated in the radical feminist focus on reproductive rights, in which the right to abortion and contraception was framed as a fundamental aspect of dismantling patriarchal structures dependent on the categorisation of Woman-as-reproductive-body.[11] In response, radical feminists “frequently were accused of harbouring antimale attitudes and promoting antifamily values,”[12] accusations which echo centuries-old constructions of the hag witch as anti-mother, perverting gendered norms, destabilising the family, and threatening all order.

Thirdly, radical feminism utilised the hag’s excess and spectacle. The hag witch can be considered doubly transgressive for refusing to take up the mantel of invisibility required of aging women. Instead, she embraces her barren body as a source of power, spectacle and magic, becoming an image of unruly excess. The hag witch makes a mockery of the laws and boundaries that structure the symbolic order through her spectacular magic, frequently expressed as flight on broomstick or animal back, transfigurations of herself and others, making potions in smoking cauldrons, or inciting chaos in nature.[13] The hag witch is thus also implicated in the radical feminist Witches’ emphasis on spectacular antagonism. As explained by Alice Echols, WITCH favoured anarchic “zap” tactics and guerrilla theatre over more orderly educational work, such as consciousness-raising and discussion.[14] For example, the New York coven’s first action was to dress up as archetypal witches and descend on Wall Street to “hex” the financial district, and a year later they protested a Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden by appearing in black veils, singing a chorus of “Here come the slaves / Off to their graves”.[15]

This relationship between the radical feminist and the hag witch is significant in complicating the ways in which we can read the image of the hag witch. Constructed within patriarchal discourses, the hag witch can historically be read as an image of abjection, as outlined by Julia Kristeva. The hag witch is horrific because she “disturbs identity, system, order. [She] does not respect borders, positions, rules”.[16] A model of Barbara Creed’s “monstrous-feminine,” abject specifically in her threat to gendered order, the hag witch expresses patriarchal fears of a threatening femininity, which can then be contained or excluded to reinforce the symbolic order.[17] However, feminist work in the late-1960s helped to legitimise an alternate reading of the hag witch as an affirmative figure of disorderly femininity, antagonistic to the oppressive patriarchal construction of Woman-as-reproductive-body, as self-sacrificing Good Mother. From this perspective, in all her monstrosity, excess, and spectacular transgression of boundaries, the hag witch can be read in terms of Mary Russo’s “female grotesque”.

Drawing on Bakhtin’s carnival theory, Russo reimagines the disorderly woman, the monstrous-feminine, as a powerful symbol of liberation, an image that serves to “resist, exaggerate, and destabilise the distinctions and boundaries that mark and maintain high culture and organised society”.[18] During the short period of radical feminism’s activity during the late-1960s and into the early 1970s, the image of the witch became ideologically multiplicitous, contested and almost uncontainable, her meaning evading the boundaries of categorisation, suggesting that she might never be able to be fully recuperated by the patriarchal discourses in which she was initially constructed. At the same time, the abject horrors of the hag witch would have felt more tangible than ever to those who opposed radical feminist ideology. Arguably, horror cinema provided a mechanism through which to negotiate these opposing impulses: the patriarchal fears and feminist fantasies invoked by the image of the hag witch.

As has been discussed at length by film scholars including Andrew Tudor and Rick Worland, in the late-1960s the American horror film was changing. In part, this was in response to widespread socio-political turmoil, the “immense social shifts crystallizing around the Civil Rights movement and growing protests against America’s immersion in the Vietnam War”.[19] In response, as Tudor suggests, horror films increasingly looked inward, “expressing a profound insecurity about ourselves”.[20] At the same time, in 1968 Hollywood censorship collapsed in favour of the first ratings classification system, giving way to a new “freedom of the screen”.[21] Consequently, horror filmmakers began to respond to and indulge in the anxieties of the tumultuous cultural climate with new emphasis on shock and spectacle, perhaps best exemplified by the popularisation of the exploitation film. Worland thus characterises the horror cinema in the late-1960s and early-1970s as unleashing “outrageous scenes of gore, sadism, and sexual violence in often coldly ironic films that seemed to feed off the energy and fears of the time,”[22] implicating the horror film as a key site of negotiation for the excesses and anxieties of the time.

That the horror cinema of this period was specifically a site of negotiation for anxieties around radical feminism is perhaps demonstrated by the boom in witch-centric horror films, or “witchsploitation” films. While witch-centric films of any genre were few and far between in the first half of the 20^th century, Tudor points to a growing number of films about witchcraft and the occult throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, specifically within the horror genre.[23] The majority of these witchsploitation films focus on the archetype of the temptress, engaging with fears and desires around women’s sexuality brought into the spotlight by the so-called “sexual revolution”. However, a small number of these films also deal with the threat of the hag witch. These range from the highly regarded and commercially successful Rosemary’s Baby, to the low budget B-movie Cry of the Banshee, and the cult director George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch, which was re-cut several times as it tried, unsuccessfully, to find an audience. In order to assess the ways in which the threat of the unruly non-reproductive woman was confronted and negotiated, I thus turn to analysis of these three films, interrogating the extent to which they articulate the patriarchal fears and feminist fantasies embedded in the polysemic image of the hag witch.

Rosemary’s Baby and the Abject Witch-Midwife

In Rosemary’s Baby, young couple Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) move into a gothic mansion turned apartment block, the Bramford, to start a family. Immediately, they attract the attention of their eccentric old neighbours, Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) and her husband, Roman (Sidney Blackmer), who are members of a Satanic witch cult living in the building and plotting to use Rosemary as a vessel for Satan’s child. Rosemary’s Baby is significant due to its engagement with feminist revisionist histories of the witch, presenting Minnie Castevet as the kind of hag witch envisioned by radical feminists at the time. As part of their wider revisionist history of the early modern witch trials, radical feminists reframed the hag by constructing the image of the witch-midwife. Christian conceptions of Satanic witchcraft were merged with vague ideas about pre-Christian folk healers to suggest that witch-midwives were “living remnants of the oldest culture of all […] before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over”.[24] Within this new mythology, the witch-midwife became a symbol of the oppression of a utopic pre-patriarchal culture, of which the right to abortion and women’s bodily autonomy were a fundamental part. Minnie speaks to this mythology in her witchcraft practices, interfering with and manipulating Rosemary’s reproductive body through homeopathic charms and potions made from the herbs grown and dried in abundance in her apartment, a behaviour which alludes to a form of folk healing magic that pre-dates patriarchal medical practices.

This is explicitly positioned in opposition to the patriarchal religious order of Christianity, most clearly presented during the Castevet’s first dinner with the Woodhouses when Minnie and Roman openly and loudly mock the pope. Furthermore, Minnie’s status as transgressive hag is immediately announced in her appearance and behaviour. She is excessive, flamboyant and eccentric, with pink-hued grey hair, and dressed in bright colours in clashing patterns, laden with sparkling jewellery. Her face is thick with garish make up that accentuates her old age, and she is unapologetically loud, constantly spluttering, laughing and shouting in her harsh, hoarse voice. As such, Minnie embodies age-old hag witch characteristics but within a framework of new feminist revisionist histories. She is an ideologically ambiguous symbol, potentially able to open up spaces for appropriation by radical feminist perspectives.

Arguably, though, Minnie is largely depicted in terms of abject threat to patriarchal order, a culturally-specific model of the monstrous-feminine. Particularly, in her role as witch-midwife, she invokes a mythic pre-patriarchal feminine power over reproduction. Minnie becomes a figure of what Barbara Creed refers to as the “archaic mother”, a patriarchal construction of woman as “the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end,” threatening to re-engulf what she once birthed.[25] This image reinforces the construction of woman-as-reproductive-body, threatening when in control of her authority over life and death, an authority which pre-dates, eclipses and is beyond patriarchal order. Minnie can be read as a culturally-specific avatar of the archaic mother in the ways in which she links life with death, nurturing with decay. She possesses power over the processes of reproduction while her own body is non-reproductive. Her role in creating life is linked with death and decay through associations with Satanic power, and her homeopathic potions which are used for nurturing are also linked with the abject (they are “filled with snails and puppy dog tails”) and ultimately poison Rosemary’s body.

The scene in which the devil rises from hell to impregnate Rosemary is indicative of how the film expresses the horror of the abject archaic mother, comparing the bodies of the transgressive hag and other coven members with that of the youthful, fertile Rosemary. In her exploration of the archaic mother in the horror film, Creed finds a similar dynamic in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) undresses for the camera: “Ripley’s body is pleasurable and reassuring to look at. She signifies the ‘acceptable’ form and shape of woman,” in comparison to the monstrous, boundary-defying archaic mother.[26] In Rosemary’s Baby, this sequence is shot to emphasise this opposition. The camera takes Rosemary’s point of view. Her naked body is stretched out on the bed, where her breasts become emphasised in the foreground, highlighting her sexual desirability and fecundity. The older coven members, also naked, stand facing her at the end of the bed, and the low angle camera emphasises and exaggerates their sagging, bent bodies. The camera then roams over Rosemary’s body, revelling in its reassuring qualities. Rosemary’s body, like Ripley’s, represents the clean and proper feminine body, characterised by youthful desirability and potential motherhood, re-emphasising the horror of the unruly aging woman.

In presenting the witch-midwife as abject hag, Rosemary’s Baby articulates a fear of a mythic primordial maternal power, speaking to contemporary fears and anxieties over radical feminist efforts to gain control over reproductivity. While Alien works to “repress the nightmare of the archaic mother,”[27] what is particularly threatening about Minnie is that her transgressiveness cannot be contained. Instead, it contaminates and corrupts, initiating Rosemary into abject motherhood. Firstly, Rosemary’s defilement is depicted in this sequence when she hallucinates an image of corrupted Christianity – the pope offering her his ring, recognisable as the Tannis root pendant given to her by Minnie. The moment of conception is thus marked by the corruption of a symbol of patriarchal order, by a symbol of the witch-midwife, the archaic mother. Furthermore, when Rosemary wakes up the next morning she is covered in red scratches, a physical defilement of her reassuring body. Secondly, in her discussion of the film as a narrative about perverted motherhood, Rhona Berenstein highlights Rosemary’s increasing androgyny, suggesting that “her haircut, boyish features and the eradication of sexual desire and desirability […] point to a neutralization of [sexual] difference”.[28] In this way, the film depicts Rosemary’s move away from a reassuring femininity towards becoming “an ambiguous figure of motherhood”[29] like Minnie.

The ending of the film offers Rosemary a choice. Having delivered a demon child under sedation, she wakes up and goes looking for it, wielding a kitchen knife, and finds that it has been taken by the coven. Initially horrified at the sight of the child (“what have you done to it?”, she cries), Rosemary is urged by Roman to “be a mother to your baby”. Rather than disavow or destroy the demon child, the last moments of the film depict Rosemary rocking the child’s crib, nurturing him, accepting her role as abject mother to the monstrous child. Here, horror is produced through the uncontainability of the hag witch, the inability to expel the abject and restore hetero-patriarchal order, articulating patriarchal anxieties of the late-1960s over the growing influence of radical feminism.

The film’s ambiguous ending may also speak to the new excesses of meaning embedded in the witch image, allowing them to run free of conventional narrative structure, and perhaps consequentially allowing for an oppositional interpretation that celebrates the destabilisation of the hetero-patriarchal family. Ian Olney has argued that the early-1970s cycle of Euro-horror possession films articulate a similar sense of the horror of the archaic mother’s contaminating excess, which agents of patriarchal order are powerless to prevent. For Olney, these films celebrate transgressive femininity and transmission of excess, partly due to the inability to expel the abject, but also due to the use of aesthetics of excess and spectacle, which serve to destabilise the viewing experience in a “short-circuiting of the narrative machinery of mainstream cinema”.[30]

This idea of disruptive spectacle and excess, central to the witch’s affirmatively transgressive power as female grotesque and to WITCH’s activism, is present in the hallucinatory sequence of Rosemary’s rape, marking her induction into abject motherhood. Utilising an unstable handheld camera, abrupt changes in mise-en-scène, and experimental sound editing, the scene is disorienting and disruptive to narrative coherence, perhaps opening space for oppositional interpretation, as Olney describes. It is notable, though, that the majority of Rosemary’s Baby maintains a cold and restrained tone, by utilising stable camerawork, cause and effect editing, and a slow, steady narrative pace, working to minimise the cinematic excessiveness of the hag witch. The excesses of the dream sequence are confined here, justified and controlled by the logics of classical American cinema. This moment of excess is “allowed” within the normative narrative structure as drug-induced vision, separate from Rosemary’s perception of reality. Lastly, the transgressive potential of this disruptive aesthetic is undermined by the content of the scene, which depicts the violent subjugation of a woman through rape, a cornerstone of patriarchal dominance.

In these ways, Rosemary’s Baby denies or manages any cinematic excess that might work to short-circuit the conventional narrative and normative positioning of its characters, or invite visual pleasure in unruliness and transgressive female power, even as it acknowledges and capitalises on the anxieties of the wider cultural climate. This is particularly evident in the film’s construction of the hag witch as mythic witch-midwife and in its ambiguous ending.

Capitalising on Counter-culture

One of the ways in which witch-centric horror films of the period could speak to a cultural climate of social change and political turmoil, but with minimal engagement with methods of destabilisation and subversion, was to use the aesthetics and values of the late 1960s counter-culture. Broadly speaking, as Timothy Miller explains, hippie counter-culturalists were those who opposed the values of dominant society and responded by “dropping out” to build new societies based on the core values of freedom, egalitarianism, community, hedonism, peace, and love.[31] While sharing an opposition to dominant society with contemporaneous political movements, the counter-culture movement differed in that it “proposed not so much a confrontation with mainstream culture as a simple withdrawal from it”.[32]

By 1970, this counter-cultural ideology had intersected with feminist politics, leading to radical feminism’s softening into what Alice Echols terms “cultural feminism.” Echols succinctly describes the difference between these two ideologies, writing that “radical feminism was a political movement dedicated to eliminating the sex-class system, whereas cultural feminism was a countercultural movement aimed at reversing the cultural valuation of the male and the devaluation of the female”.[33] Thus, cultural feminism depended on the binary sex dichotomy that radical feminism sought to deconstruct, championing the adoption of alternate lifestyles for personal liberation rather than challenging socio-economic structures to enact widespread political change.[34] In this way, cultural feminism perhaps had more in common with the broader hippie movement, which largely “reaffirmed time-tested American values and tendencies, albeit sometimes in new clothing”.[35]

By the early 1970s hippie culture had succumbed to “the crass commercialization of its ideas and values”.[36] Arguably, counter-culture was a prime target for commercial mainstream media because it could be used to appeal to “modern” cultural attitudes and a growing youth market without giving voice to any radical, destabilising ideology associated with political movements of the time. In this sense, hag witch-centric horror films of the 1970s continued to use feminist revisionist histories, capitalising upon the cultural turmoil invoked by radical feminism, but without casting the hag as abject threat. Instead they spoke to counter-cultural and cultural feminist ideals, appealing to “modern” liberal attitudes whilst continuing to minimise any sense of truly disruptive or destabilising excess.

A particularly clear example of this is Gordon Hessler’s film Cry of the Banshee, exploiting the success of the British film Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968) by focusing on a tyrannical witch hunter, Lord Edward Whitman (Vincent Price). The film presents a witch coven, led by the hag Oona (Elisabeth Bergner), in white flowing gowns with flowers in their wild hair, dancing barefoot in a woodland clearing on the outskirts of a town, evoking the counter-culture’s “natural” aesthetic and valorisation of nature as a space where freedom from the Establishment could be found. In this film, witchcraft is referred to as the “old religion,” acknowledging a contemporaneous view of the counter-culture as an alternate religion, drawing on and incorporating various spiritual practices and values from a range of sources, including Wicca and other forms of Neopaganism.[37] This idea of witchcraft as the “old religion,” with Oona as the “Mother” who was “born in fire,” also invokes feminist revisionist history, suggesting a primordial matriarchal culture associated with nature that was violently erased by the “Imperialist Phallic Society”.

Instead of casting Oona as abject monstrous-feminine, the film filters radical feminist tactics through an apolitical counter-cultural aesthetic, suggesting a desire to safely capitalise upon feminism instead of condemning it completely. Cry of the Banshee, though, does not eliminate all sense of conflict. The witch coven is explicitly positioned as an alternative to a cruel hetero-patriarchy, symbolised by Lord Whitman and his family, comprised of his submissive wife, Patricia (Essy Persson), and his sadistic son, Sean (Stephan Chase). Brenda Gardenour Walter argues in part for a reading of the film as speaking to contemporary feminism, writing that “Oona and her coven only turn to Satan when they have been raped and tortured by the true source of evil in the film, the tyrannical patriarch Lord Edward Whitman” and that the film is sympathetic to the hag, allowing her to confront “an abusive and misogynist patriarchy” and enact her revenge upon it.[38] Arguably, though, the film simply uses this narrative strategy to capitalise on the popularity of modern social movements whilst minimising the genuinely disruptive potential of the unruly non-reproductive hag.

This is perhaps best displayed in the way that the film uses the new “freedom of the screen” and engages with the horror film’s increasing penchant for shock and spectacle. The film contains extended sequences of the aggressive victimisation and sexual assault of young women, inviting viewers to gaze at these women’s violently exposed bodies even as the acts of patriarchal oppression are supposedly condemned by the narrative. Here, the film evidences Tudor’s assertion that horror filmmakers in the 1970s, “freed from the constraints of earlier censorship,” sought to titillate heterosexual male viewers, indulging their “fantasy desires to voyeuristically contemplate aggressive, perverse […] and visually explicit sex”.[39] This suggestion that the new, liberal “freedom of the screen” was more useful in undermining political movements than in giving voice to them speaks to counter-cultural ideology, which espoused the value of sexual freedom, but was largely focused on enhancing male pleasure, doing little to challenge conventional gendered power dynamics.[40]

Moreover, while privileging the spectacle of sexual violence, Cry of the Banshee almost completely denies the potentially disruptive spectacle of the hag witch, keeping her excesses of meaning strictly under control. Oona is only introduced halfway through the film, and her unruly power is communicated through orderly, ritualistic magic. The witches often talk to the Whitmans about taking flight, or engaging in other unruly magical activities, but these images of spectacular excess are never seen. This use of spectacle and shock is similar to that of Rosemary’s Baby, in that they are only used during sequences depicting violence against women. So, while Cry of the Banshee does not so straightforwardly articulate patriarchal anxieties by positioning the hag as monstrous threat to a sympathetic patriarchal order or normative femininity, by no means does it speak to feminist ideology. The film capitalises upon radical feminist revisionist histories, presented in terms of counter-cultural aesthetics, safe in the knowledge that these do little to destabilise traditional patriarchal values.

Following the general trend of the 1960s and 1970s horror film, the ambiguous ending acknowledges the potentially radical disruptive excesses of the hag witch, suggesting the threat of contamination and uncontainability. Oona is killed at the climax of the film (displaying a need to destroy the unruly, non-reproductive female body, regardless of how sympathetically she has been portrayed), but her magical power over Whitman’s servant, Roderick (Patrick Mower), is left intact. Thinking that Roderick has also been killed, and with the intention to mock his corpse, Whitman opens his coffin to find it empty. The final image of the film reveals that the possessed Roderick has killed and replaced Whitman’s coach driver and is driving him into the unknown, to continue enacting Oona’s murderous vengeance. What is emphasised here is that the witch’s destructive magic does not answer to patriarchal law, and that it can transgress the boundary between life and death and transcend the body, exceeding narrative order, unable to be controlled.

Even while the film largely minimises the potentially feminist excesses of the unruly hag witch by evoking the broader, safer, more conservative aesthetics and values of the counter-culture, there is a sense of the fundamental destabilisation of a hetero-patriarchal order that cannot even confront that which threatens it, let alone destroy it. As with Rosemary’s Baby, while this potentially speaks to patriarchal anxieties concerning the strength of the radical feminist movement, in Cry of the Banshee’s ambiguous ending the hag’s excesses of meaning are able to run wild, opening up space for an oppositional interpretation that revels in the lingering effects of disruptive feminist ideology, celebrating that these disorderly ideas and values cannot be so easily suppressed, even if the bodies are subjected to a controlling order.

One of the last hag-witch-centric horror films of this period is George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch, which follows dissatisfied and isolated housewife Joan (Jan White), who seeks out witchcraft as a form of personal empowerment and an escape from suburban family life. This film is significant as a conclusion to this cycle of hag witch films, consolidating the move from the spectacularly antagonistic radical feminist WITCH to the almost apolitical, safely antagonistic, cultural feminist witch.

Of particular interest is the way in which Season of the Witch manages its cinematic excesses, which appear throughout the film in Joan’s narratively disruptive dream sequences. For example, the film opens with an image of Joan’s husband, Jack (Bill Thunhurst), walking through a barren woodland while reading a newspaper, followed meekly by Joan. As they walk, Jack pushes through branches that hit Joan in the face as they swing back, leaving bloody scratches on her skin. They pass a baby on the ground, which Joan surveys apprehensively. The sequence expresses Joan’s invisibility in her lifeless marriage, her perception of Jack as violently neglectful, and her ambivalent feelings towards her role as mother. Tanya Krzywinska has noted the disruptive style of these sequences, writing that “the distinctiveness of the film lies in its use of jarring jump cuts, montage and odd camera angles often shot with an anamorphic lens. Such devices […] reflect the conflicted and hysterical interior state of the central protagonist”.[41] Unlike in Rosemary’s Baby, these fantasies are not carefully delineated from narrative “reality”; they are rarely preceded by establishing shots to mark the distinction between spaces. Additionally, Tony Williams has described the ways in which the dream sequences are frequently displaced within the wider narrative structure, suggesting that these fantasies deliberately disturb the chronological flow of the plot.[42] Furthermore, it is significant that these disruptive aesthetics are not used to underscore sequences of violence against women but to express Joan’s own fantasies, fears and desires.

Within the narrative, witchcraft is a tool that can be used to give voice to Joan’s desires, “a symbolic language through which women can articulate the hidden and the unspoken,”[43] allowing Joan to go from inarticulate and invisible hysteric to a hag witch with agency and autonomy. Considering the disorderly, excessive style of her hysteric fantasies there is a potentiality for the process of their articulation to give voice to the spectacular disruptions of the female grotesque, opening up space for the appropriation by a radical feminist perspective.

Certainly, transgression of women’s proper social role within the patriarchal order is key to Joan’s transition to witchcraft. Returning home one evening she listens in to her 19-year-old daughter, Nikki (Joedda McClain), having sex with Gregg (Raymond Laine), and masturbates on her bed until she is interrupted by Nikki appearing in the doorway. Appalled at her mother’s display of sexuality, Nikki leaves home. Later, as Joan becomes more involved with witchcraft, she performs a spell to call Gregg to her and has sex with him. In becoming a witch, Joan rejects the role of passive, self-sacrificing mother, acting on her sexual desires at the expense of her family, which steadily collapses. Additionally, Joan’s expression of sexuality as an aging woman is inherently transgressive; she rejects the boundaries of feminine sexuality within the hetero-patriarchal family that deem it only acceptable for reproduction or according to male desire. But while this representation of witchcraft provides sympathy for the hysteric aging woman and her transgressive desires, its disruptive, antagonistic potential is ultimately minimised.

Witchcraft is presented as an alternative to the hetero-patriarchal family, an all-female coven led by bourgeois matriarch Marion (Virginia Greenwald), who describes it as “a religion, really,” evoking connotations of the counter-cultural commune and feminist revisionist histories of witchcraft as the “old religion.” The counter-cultural appeal of witchcraft is highlighted in the film’s use of Donovan’s psychedelic rock song Season of the Witch (1966), during the scene in which Joan browses occult supplies. Rather than dancing barefoot in the wilderness, though, Marion’s coven dwell in comfortable suburban homes, and perform strictly controlled and subdued rituals, with a cinematographic style to match. Witchcraft allows Joan a personal liberation, but in the process of the articulation of her fantasies, her move from hysteric to witch, Joan goes from disorderly and potentially disruptive, to methodical and ritualistic, confined within an orderly counter-cultural space.

The conservatism of this cultural feminist construction of witchcraft is evidenced in that it involves reinforcing normative boundaries around the category Woman, including the patriarchal paradigm of youth as power and age as decline, based on the notion that a woman’s value directly correlates to her sexual desirability and reproductive capacity. Joan’s status as in decline is emphasised early on in the film, when she has visions of herself as an iconographic hag. Joan is horrified at these hallucinatory images of herself with red-rimmed eyes, pallid wrinkled skin, and grey, unkempt hair, often staring lifelessly into the distance. Instead of embracing the transgressive hag of her fantasies, she rejects this potential self in favour of seeking youth and power, which are uncritically equated. As the film progresses, Joan’s growing confidence and self-empowerment are displayed through her increasingly fashionable hair, make-up and clothes, suggesting that increasing involvement in witchcraft manifests in terms of normative patriarchal standards of youthful feminine beauty.

Unlike Rosemary’s Baby and Cry of the Banshee, the ending of the film, during which Joan is officially initiated into Marion’s coven, is definitive rather than ambiguous, providing a sense of social inequality being “solved” by counter-culture. This is an orderly and ritualistic affair, during which Marion asks Joan why she wants to join the coven. “I would know myself for what I am,” Joan responds, suggesting a fixity of the category Woman and empowerment through “knowing” this essential femininity. Thus, even while Season of the Witch is unprecedented in terms of centralising a sympathetic hag as the protagonist, the film speaks to a cultural feminist ideology that foregrounds female experience, personal liberation, and traditional norms of fixed sexual difference, rather than a radical feminist ideology of deconstruction and widespread liberation.

The film is perhaps more complex than this. Tony Williams, for example, argues that the film’s witchcraft-as-religion formulation critiques the counter-culture as simply “another socially fashionable path rather than a radical alternative designed to question programmed behavioural patterns”.[44] While this suggests the need for a fuller evaluation of Season of the Witch’s negotiation of feminism in the early 1970s, viewing the film as critique does not erase the fact that it is tonally cold and ironic, never offering the radical alternative that would be Joan embracing her hysteric fantasies and becoming the excessive, unruly hag. As such, it still works to capitalise on cultural negotiations of counter-culture and cultural feminism, without giving voice to any genuinely destabilising ideology.

Conclusions

What, then, can be concluded about the ways in which this these horror films address and negotiate the hag witch? In their representations, the three films discussed here do not deviate heavily from the archetypal hag witch, featuring transgressive aging women who are non-reproductive but refuse to fade into invisibility, thus posing a direct threat to the hetero-patriarchal family. As such, they suggest a need to confront and negotiate the threat of the second wave radical feminist movement and its theatrical campaigns for women’s right to be unruly, to be non-reproductive, to eschew the role of Good Mother. Indeed, the direct link between the radical feminist woman and the hag witch (due in large part to WITCH’s appropriation of her image and myth) is drawn upon in these films in the invocations of feminist revisionist histories, positioning witchcraft as the “old religion” of a pre-patriarchal culture. Further, the ambiguous endings of Rosemary’s Baby and Cry of the Banshee suggest an excess of meaning now embedded in the witch that cannot be controlled by narrative order, opening up spaces for the potential celebration of the destabilisation of categories and boundaries represented by the hag witch, which is the lingering effect of the female grotesque, prompting new ways of thinking about social order.

Writing about the horror film in the neoconservative 1980s and 1990s, Christopher Sharrett reflects on Robin Wood’s argument that horror films of the 1960s and 1970s “became steadily more progressive, constantly challenging the legitimacy of capitalist, patriarchal rule”.[45] Superficially, we might see this emerging progressiveness in the way in which these hags are increasingly sympathetic. In 1968 Minnie Castevet is the primary antagonist, the abject archaic mother, whereas in 1972 Joan Mitchell is the protagonist, a victim of a violently neglectful patriarchy who finds empowerment through witchcraft. However, it is my contention that these later films simply capitalise on the contemporary socio-political turmoil, using counter-cultural aesthetics and values to appeal to the “modern” sensibilities of the growing youth market, whilst continuing to minimise and control the radically disruptive potentiality of the witch’s excesses, stripping the radical feminist hag witch of her power and speaking to an almost apolitical cultural feminist ideology instead.

Why is it that hag witch films of previous decades, such as The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), allow and even invite some visual pleasure in unruliness and transgressive femininity, whereas the spectacular excess of the hag witch and WITCH’s activism is almost entirely absent from the films released from 1968 to 1972? In her essay on the lesbian vampire, another model of the unruly non-reproductive woman in horror film, Bonnie Zimmerman suggests that when feminism was not perceived as a fundamental threat, the unruly “thrills” of the lesbian vampire could be enjoyed on screen, since the filmmakers “must have felt secure enough in their power and that of their primary male audience to flirt with lesbianism and female violence against men”.[46] While many of the specifics of this essay do not align with the films discussed here, this central suggestion is a useful one. The other side of Zimmerman’s argument is that when feminism does pose a fundamental threat to order, when patriarchal society is unstable and insecure, the thrills, excesses and spectacles of the unruly female monster will be minimised, moderated, or strictly controlled. This is a notion that helps to explain why the hag witches explored here, representing a movement that “transformed the cultural and political landscape,”[47] are so underwhelming in the threat they pose.

Despite the lack of spectacular excess, these hag witches implicitly demonstrate the strength of the radical feminist movement in a wider cultural context. This is particularly significant because, as Ellen Willis suggests, while the radical feminist movement ended in the early 1970s, “its imprint is everywhere in American life”.[48] In a similar manner, the new feminist excesses of meaning embedded in the hag witch, evident superficially in these cinematic constructions, suggest that she might never be fully recuperated by the patriarchal discourses within which she was initially constructed, just as wider American culture could never return to a state untouched by radical feminism. That is, the hag witch was primed for cinema to engage more fully with her radical potentials, to give spectacular voice to the female grotesque.

Notes

[1] Gerhild Scholz Williams, cited in Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 58.

[2] Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 96.

[3] Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970), 11.

[4] Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 579.

[5] Ibid., 605.

[6] Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State (New York: Humanity Books, 2002).

[7] Morgan, Sisterhood, 606-10.

[8] Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (London: Aurum Press, 1999), 49.

[9] Alison Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany”, Past & Present no.173 (November 2001): 57-58.

[10] Deanna Petherbridge, Witches and Wicked Bodies (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2013), 21.

[11] Kathleen Berkeley, The Women’s Liberation Movement in America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 62-65.

[12] Ibid., 5.

[13] Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), 122-25; Petherbridge, Witches, 58.

[14] Echols, Daring, 97.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

[17] Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 2; Kristeva, Powers, 210.

[18] Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 62.

[19] Rick Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 94.

[20] Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 48.

[21] Worland, The Horror, 94.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Tudor, Monsters, 54.

[24] Morgan, Sisterhood, 605.

[25] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 17.

[26] Ibid., 23.

[27] Ibid., 24.

[28] Rhona Berenstein, “Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby and Mothering”, Journal of Popular Culture 24, no.2 (Fall 1990): 63.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ian Olney, “Unmanning The Exorcist: Sex, Gender and Excess in the 1970s Euro-Horror Possession Film”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31, no.6 (August 2014): 567.

[31] Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1991).

[32] Ibid., 8.

[33] Echols, Daring, 6.

[34] Ibid., 6-7.

[35] Miller, The Hippies, 126.

[36] Ibid., 3.

[37] Ibid., 16-19.

[38] Brenda Gardenour Walter, Our Old Monsters: Witches, Werewolves and Vampires from Medieval Theology to Horror Cinema (Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), 121-23.

[39] Tudor, Monsters, 65.

[40] Miller, The Hippies, 54.

[41] Tanya Krzywinska, A Skin for Dancing In: Witchcraft, Possession and Voodoo in Film (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000), 131.

[42] Tony Williams, The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), 50.

[43] Krzywinska, A Skin, 132.

[44] Williams, The Cinema, 53.

[45] Christopher Sharrett, “The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 254.

[46] Bonnie Zimmerman, “Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (London and Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1984), 156.

[47] Ellen Willis, in Echols, Daring, vii.

[48] Ibid.

Bibliography

Berenstein, Rhona. “Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby and Mothering”. Journal of Popular Culture 24, no.2 (Fall 1990): 55-73.

Berkeley, Kathleen. The Women’s Liberation Movement in America. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. London: Aurum Press, 1999.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970.

Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Women, Church and State. New York: Humanity Books, 2002.

Gardenour Walter, Brenda. Our Old Monsters: Witches, Werewolves and Vampires from Medieval Theology to Horror Cinema. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Krzywinska, Tanya. A Skin for Dancing In: Witchcraft, Possession and Voodoo in Film. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000.

Miller, Timothy. The Hippies and American Values. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Morgan, Robin. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

Olney, Ian. “Unmanning The Exorcist: Sex, Gender and Excess in the 1970s Euro-Horror Possession Film”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31, no.6 (August 2014): 561-71.

Palmer, Bryan D. Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Petherbridge, Deanna. Witches and Wicked Bodies. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2013.

Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. London: Routledge, 1996.

Rowlands, Alison. “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany”. Past & Present no. 173 (November 2001): 50-89.

Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Sharrett, Christopher. “The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture”. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 253-76. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Williams, Tony. The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003.

Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film”. In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 153-63. London and Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1984.

Filmography

Alien, directed by Ridley Scott. 1979.

Cry of the Banshee, directed by Gordon Hessler. 1970.

Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski. 1968.

Season of the Witch, directed by George A. Romero. 1972.

The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming. 1939.

Witchfinder General, directed by Michael Reeves. 1968.

About the Author
Amelia Crowther is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex, researching the changing face of the witch through cinematic history in the United States, exploring how these images construct, re-construct, and negotiate the category Woman, particularly in cultural moments of socio-political turmoil. Amelia is habitually attracted to the gothic, the horrific and the monstrous, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality. Previous research has focused on the lesbian vampire film trend in the early-1970s Anglo-American cinema, the cinematic history of the artificial woman, and women in 1990s Japanese horror film.