Season of the witch: Empowering hocus-pocus the focus of movies, TV shows

SHARE Season of the witch: Empowering hocus-pocus the focus of movies, TV shows
screen_shot_2018_10_23_at_2_17_47_pm.png

Dakota Johnson (center) plays the star of a creepy dance troupe in “Suspiria.” | AMAZON STUDIOS

Double, double, toil and trouble, witchcraft’s back and pop culture bubbles: The season of the witch has descended upon television and film, reflecting an era of renewed female empowerment.

On Nov. 2, the big screen is playing host to director Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria,” a new take on Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic about the coven at the heart of a world-renowned dance company, and the push-and-pull between young star Susie (Dakota Johnson) and the troupe’s enigmatic director Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton).

“Though the influence of women in numbers is undeniable, the capacity and energy of one singular woman, should she choose to ignite it, is equally as powerful,” Johnson says.

CW’s “Charmed” (8 p.m. Sundays, WPWR-Channel 50) is another revival, a modern TV take on the 1998-2006 show about three enchanting witch sisters saving the world from supernatural bad guys, while Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” (premiering Friday) is a horror-tinged coming-of-age tale starring Kiernan Shipka (“Mad Men”) that’s way darker than old episodes of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”

Add in the return of Supreme Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) and her kind in the current “Apocalypse” season of FX’s “American Horror Story,” plus “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris developing a “Bewitched” reboot, and we’re all bound to be under their collective spell soon enough.

“It’s a way to tell a female empowerment story about women who historically have been disempowered and killed for their power,” says Amy Rardin, creator and executive producer on the new “Charmed” alongside writing partner Jessica O’Toole.

Macy (Madeleine Mantock, from left), Maggie (Sarah Jeffery) and Mel (Melonie Diaz) work some magic on “Charmed.” | CW

Macy (Madeleine Mantock, from left), Maggie (Sarah Jeffery) and Mel (Melonie Diaz) work some magic on “Charmed.” | CW

“Witches aren’t villains anymore,” O’Toole adds. “A female superhero seems more what a witch is now. A lot of what you’re seeing of the pop culture witches out there is following that model.”

These tales, from past projects like “Practical Magic” and “Hocus Pocus” all the way to the new crop, still capture our attention, “possibly because of the mysticism and cryptic energy surrounding witches and witchcraft,” says Johnson, the recent star of the “Fifty Shades” franchise. “People are drawn to and return again and again to things they cannot quite define or make perfect sense of: curiosity of the unknown or the undefinable. It’s a subject you can bend and evolve because nothing about it is set in stone.”

“Sabrina” is about a young half-human, half-witch teen, Sabrina Spellman, who wars against the patriarchy — and the patriarch just happens to be Satan himself.

“I love how much it kind of balances those classical horror elements with just having a real story about a real girl and real people. It’s awesome,” says Shipka, who admires her character’s fearless moxie. “If something didn’t feel right to her, she would say it and she would stick up for herself. That really just resonated with me.”

“Mad Men” alum Kiernan Shipka is 16-year-old half-witch Sabrina Spellman in Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” | Netflix

“Mad Men” alum Kiernan Shipka is 16-year-old half-witch Sabrina Spellman in Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” | Netflix

The fact that this rash of magical material coincides with the raising up of women’s voices as part of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements isn’t lost on Hollywood. (Not to mention the fact that “witch” and “witch hunt” are terms used a lot in politics these days, or that a bunch of Brooklyn witches put a hex on newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last weekend.)

“It’s a great unconscious resonance,” Guadagnino says of the timely exploration of women and motherhood in “Suspiria.” “We always felt we wanted to go in that direction [where] you could see empowerment and the relationship of power between women, and that is falling in a place and time in which the debate about the power of women is so important to our present.”

The new “Charmed” was originally conceived as a prequel to the old show that would be set in the 1970s. “We were tying the women’s movement directly to witchcraft,” O’Toole says. But the 2016 presidential election was “a wake-up call that the issues we had thought we’d moved past were still very much alive. And it was during that time when every day there was a new prominent man falling from grace and female anger was becoming more and more of a thing.”

The stories they’re telling with three Latina half-sisters (played by Melonie Diaz, Sarah Jeffery and Madeleine Mantock) “feel like the more compelling and important ones right now,” O’Toole says. (They also employ a real Latinx witch, Marcos Luevanos, in the “Charmed” writers’ room.)

“It’s like ‘Law & Order,’ where you can rip from the headlines, but then we do it with demons and magical things and use them as metaphor.”

The Latest
Enbridge’s Line 5 oil and gas pipeline trespasses through sovereign tribal lands, is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, Ben Jealous writes.
A long primary campaign season reaches its crescendo Tuesday. Here’s a final look at the top races on the ballot.
Four from North Central have combined to capture six national titles since the program’s inception, and six are scheduled to compete next month in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials at Penn State.
The Bulls have 13 games left in the regular season and an opportunity to break even when they visit the Rockets on Thursday.