Wicked: How cinema re-invented the witch and restored her powers

Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in 'Wicked'

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

A quote from Victor Fleming’s 1939The Wizard of Oz, it’s a question that has been played with throughout popular culture for centuries, the binaries becoming increasingly blurred.

Many of us will first remember being scared of witches, primarily through their fairytale hag guises: the long crooked nose and toothless grin of the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or Margaret Hamilton’s melting, sickly-skinned Wicked Witch of the West.

It was a vision of the latter in the clouds that inspired American author Gregory Maguire to write "Wicked" in the early 90s, turning one of cinema’s most infamous villains into a heroine to explore the nature of evil.

"Wicked" tells the backstory of Elphaba before she became the Wicked Witch of the West, and her friendship with Galinda, who becomes Glinda the Good. Bullied for her green skin and used by the fascist Wizard of Oz, Elphaba is driven to revenge, mistreatment that ultimately corrupts her.

The novel quickly became a bestseller, spawning one of the biggest ever Broadway musical hits. Its themes of female empowerment, friendship and otherness resonated with young women in particular, the devotion of whom has led to its behemoth cultural impact.

A Hollywood adaptation of the musical starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda arrives in cinemas 22 November. Its release is a reminder of our enduring fascination with witches - for all the tin men and scarecrows, the Wicked Witch remains the most memorable and influential character from The Wizard of Oz.

Ding! Dong! The witch is not dead... Just misunderstood

Witches were first meant to be feared, not idolised: a bitter crone with a wart on her nose that envies youth and beauty, intent on corrupting and bringing death upon us.

For women, this messaging became an especially pervasive and insidious form of patriarchal control. Not only should we stay young, pretty and well-behaved (for fear of being killed), we should also be weary and judgemental of other women that dare oppose such ideas.

Portrayals of witches have often been centred around the Triple Goddess archetype - three distinct figures representative of the cycles of womanhood: Maiden, Mother and Crone.

The maiden is young, virginal and beautiful; the mother cherished solely for her fertility and domestic roles; the crone elderly, vile and spiteful. While the latter has been most prevalent throughout history, recent decades have sought to focus more on the mother and maiden, re-framing them as vessels for female expression, rebellion and empowerment.

If Wicked encouraged us to understand and empathise with a villainous witch, films like The Craft, Maleficent andThe Love Witch made us realise we are the witch.

She is the ugly self-hatred that bubbles through our thoughts; the suffocating grip of societal expectations; pustulating rage; unrepressed sexual desire; female competitiveness and kinship; the yearning to be free and to be “bad” - or as Robert Egger’sThe Witch put it so succinctly, “to live deliciously”.

The witch is a cauldron of contradictions potioned by the patriarchy, but more than that, she is a spectacular unravelling of ideals; an embodiment of womens’ trauma and truth, and the power to be found in taking back ownership of ourselves.

Before we try defying gravity with Elphaba, here’s a look at some of the most marked iterations of the witch across cinema - divided into two separate but overlapping categories.

The wicked witch

In the 1922 silent film Häxan, one of the first ever films about witches, there is the quote: “The devil’s companion can be young and beautiful, but she is more often old, poor and miserable.”

The image of a warty crone has become synonymous with evil witches, their degraded looks intended to disgust us and incite fear.

Anjelica Huston’s Grand High Witch in the 1990 film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s "The Witches" is one of the most memorable examples of this. When in the company of other witches and plotting to turn children into mice, she reveals her true self to be a grotesque gargoyle of Jim Henson-devised drooping earlobes, sunken and scaled skin, talon-like fingernails and exaggeratedly long hooked nose.

While somewhat dated now, the prosthetics still hold up as terrifying, especially when the witches scratch at their open scalp sores. It’s flesh that is infested with death and decay, an overt monstrousness that alienates evil, as if it could so easily be distinguished.

Other famous cinematic examples include, of course, Margaret Hamilton’s green-skinned Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, Bette Midler's hamster-toothed Sanderson sister in Hocus Pocus, and the Evil Queen from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - a woman so desperate to remain the “fairest of them all”, she attempts to kill young Snow White with a poisoned apple, taking the form of an old hag to do so.

In this sense, the hag guise of the wicked witch has always been reflective of society’s obsession with female youth, women rejected once they reach a certain age and are no longer considered desirable to men.

But the wicked witch is not always old and ugly. The Craft's Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk), for example, is a teenage goth and so-called “scary bitch” that becomes so obsessed with witchcraft and obtaining ultimate power, she is possessed by a dark deity that leads her on a murderous revenge spree.

As audiences have grown more fascinated with the backstories of villainous characters, and historically monstrous archetypes have become universal expressions of messy human emotions, it’s no longer so easy to define a witch as wicked.

Instead, cinema is increasingly recognising all the ways in which the wicked witch has been maligned; an empathetic woman driven to hatred through mistreatment, her actions suddenly viewed from a place of empowerment. Which leads us to…

The empowered witch

Throughout the 90s, witches were cool. It was a time of celestial whimsigoth decor, Mazzy Star, and a whole slew of TV shows about teenage spell casters.

Meanwhile, on the big screen, films like Practical Magic starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters using their inherited powers to navigate life and love gave rise to the relatability of witches, turning a historically dark subject into something lighthearted and goofy.

Within this cultural shift, witches also became more mainstream representations of feminism: strong independent women that banded together and could conjure a life for themselves free from patriarchal expectations (although a lot of 90s witches did busy themselves with boys).

The Craft, one of the decade’s most defining horrors, took a darker approach, about a teenager that befriends three witches at school who cast magic against those they dislike. It spoke to a generation of misfits and outsiders, those that couldn’t see themselves in the Owens sisters’ Midnight Margaritas, but recognised the ravenous rage within Nancy Downs.

It sparked the question: What if we used our powers to destroy and break free from our oppressors?

In Robert Egger’s 2016 film The Witch, one of the past decade’s most lauded horror movies, a young woman named Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is banished to isolation with her Puritan family, finding counsel in a crone and embracing the feminine empowerment of rebelling against oppressive ideologies by becoming a witch.

That same year, Anna Biller’s tantalisingly technicolour The Love Witch portrays a young, beautiful witch named Elaine (Samantha Robinson) casting love spells on random men she picks up and seduces, leading them to become so hopelessly infatuated - and unable to cope with such strong emotions - they end up killing themselves.

Luca Guadagnino's re-make of Dario Argento's Suspiria uses dance to express his witches' volatile, psychosexual-infused feelings of womanhood under a patriarchy, with a finale in which the protagonist Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) becomes head of the coven, Mother Suspiriorum, opening up her chest in a kind of rebirth and reclamation of autonomy.

The empowered witch of modern times takes back control of her narrative, sometimes using her powers for good, other times to avenge the bad that's been done to her.

Through making the witch a symbol of both female frustration and freedom, we're led to question who the real villain is in her stories. The one with magic powers? Or the society that sought to stifle them - and celebrated in her melting?

Wicked is out in cinemas worldwide on 22 November.