Witch movies: how the wicked villain became a heroine

A witch film is a story built around a woman, or sometimes a man, believed to hold dangerous power. Witches have been on screen since the silent era, and the figure has changed with the times: first an evil outcast, later a complex and sometimes feminist heroine. The Witch (2015), Robert Eggers's first feature, sits at the end of that long road. It is set in 1630s New England and follows a Puritan family, banished from their settlement, who come to fear a witch in the woods.

The figure comes from history. Film witches drew on the Salem witch trials and the wider witch hunts of Europe and the colonies, which mostly targeted older, poor or nonconforming women. At Salem in 1692 more than 200 people were accused and 19 were hanged. Hollywood then gave the witch a clear moral job. The Wizard of Oz (1939), with Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West, set up a good versus evil split that became the template for screen witches for years.

Some films pushed the other way. Häxan (1922), the Danish director Benjamin Christensen's history of witchcraft, treated accused witches as victims of superstition rather than villains. Critics have argued that witches still resonate because they stand for rebellion, self-acceptance and freedom, and that The Witch used the figure as a symbol of female empowerment. Eggers drew on a childhood fascination with witches, and the film won him the Directing Award in the US Dramatic section at Sundance in 2015, cost about $4 million and took about $40 million worldwide. Relay has the 9 witch films below, from 1914 to 2025, and they show every stage of that change.

What makes a witch film

• A woman with power nobody controls. The witch is feared because her power answers to no church, husband or court.
• An accusation. Many of these stories begin with someone being named a witch, and the naming matters more than magic.
• A curse. A spell or hex that outlives the person who cast it, and drives the story forward.
• Sympathy that shifts. Older films ask you to fear the witch. Newer ones often ask who made her one.

9 witch movies to watch

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914)

Long before The Wizard of Oz (1939), Oz already had a wicked witch on film. L. Frank Baum, the author of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote and produced this silent film for the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, and J. Farrell MacDonald directed. The villain is Old Mombi, played by Mai Wells, whom King Krewl hires to freeze Princess Gloria's heart. She also turns Pon, the boy Gloria loves, into a kangaroo.

Critics of the time rated it well above average, but audiences stayed away, and even a 1915 reissue as The New Wizard of Oz never recovered its costs. Baum reused its story for his 1915 book The Scarecrow of Oz. A restoration from Library of Congress materials premiered in September 2024.

Fantasy

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The Long Hair of Death (1964)

In a 15th-century village, Adele Karnstein is burned at the stake as a witch, and as the flames rise she curses the family responsible with plague and death. The real reason for her execution is that Count Humboldt desired her. Her younger daughter Lisabeth is later forced to marry the count's son, Kurt.

Antonio Margheriti, an Italian horror director, shot it in black and white. Barbara Steele, a British actress who was a favourite of horror fans in Europe, plays two roles: Helen, the older daughter who is killed for learning the truth, and Mary, a mysterious woman who returns to take revenge. The critic Glenn Erickson wrote that among horror fans Steele's pictures can do no wrong, and the Monthly Film Bulletin called it a pleasingly atmospheric Gothic tale. Here the witch is the wronged party, which puts it closer to The Witch than to Oz.

Horror

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The Witchmaker (1969)

A paranormal researcher, Dr. Ralph Hayes, played by Alvy Moore, takes a group of psychics into a Louisiana bayou where young women have disappeared. The coven living in the swamp is draining the women's blood to regain its youth, and it sets out to induct one of the researchers, Anastasia, who has supernatural blood in her past.

William O. Brown wrote and directed it. Moore produced it with the actor L.Q. Jones, the first of three genre films they made together, followed by The Brotherhood of Satan and A Boy and His Dog. Mondo Digital's reviewer notes that it arrived soon after Rosemary's Baby and played drive-ins well into the 1970s.

Horror

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The Touch of Satan (1971)

A young drifter, Jodie Lee Thompson, stops at the Strickland farm and meets Melissa, who tells him she is a witch. Her family hides a darker secret: an old crone, Lucinda, who is really Melissa's sister and has been killing people with a pitchfork. Melissa made a pact with Satan to save Lucinda from being burned as a witch in the 19th century, and the film ends with Jodie making his own pact to give Melissa back her youth.

It was shot in Solvang, California, from June 1971, under the title The Touch of Melissa. Its second life came on Mystery Science Theater 3000, the comedy series in which a man and his robots talk back to bad films. The episode first aired on 11 July 1998, and Vulture lists it among the show's 25 essential episodes. Melissa is less a monster than the victim of her own bargain.

Horror

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Hex Hollow (2015)

This is the one true crime here. In 1928 John Blymire, in York County, Pennsylvania, came to believe that Nelson Rehmeyer had put a hex on him. Rehmeyer practised powwow, a folk magic of central Pennsylvania that mixed Christianity with European folk remedies. A local woman known as Nellie Noll told Blymire that to break the curse he needed Rehmeyer's copy of the powwow book The Long Lost Friend and a lock of his hair.

On 27 November 1928 Blymire, John Curry and Wilbert Hess beat Rehmeyer to death and set fire to the body and the house, which did not burn down. The trial in January 1929 became a media sensation. The documentary revisits the case with J. Ross McGinnis, author of the book Trials of Hex. Long after Salem, an accusation of witchcraft still ended in a killing.

Documentary

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The Witching (2016)

With Halloween hours away, the hosts of a podcast called The Witching Hour gather at the spot where the Woodland Valley Witch was murdered, to tell scary stories. Corey Norman directed that framing story in New Gloucester, in the Maine wilderness. Inside it are six short films by five directors, including George Bessudo, Patrick Rea and April Wright.

Norman has said the idea came when Ruthless Studios let his team help pick the shorts and they realised the films all felt like campfire tales. The witch here is a local legend, the kind of story a small town tells about the woman at the edge of the woods.

Horror

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A Witches' Ball (2017)

Beatrix, a 12-year-old played by Morgan Neundorf, wants to become a witch. When her pending status is put at risk, she has to solve three magical riddles with her pet rat, Muggs, before the Witches' Ball, the night the witching world gathers to welcome its new members.

Justin G. Dyck directed this family fantasy from a script by Keith Cooper, and it was released in the US on 6 May 2017. It is the far end of the road that began with Mombi: here being a witch is a goal, and the riddles are a test of growing up.

Fantasy

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Annabellum: The Curse of Salem (2019)

Salem casts a long shadow. In this horror film directed by Craig Rees and set in Warwick, England, a vengeful witch's curse from 1692 Salem is released, in the form of an old doll, on a family trapped in a historic English mansion.

It reached US video on demand on 24 August 2019. It shows how far the trials travel: a curse from a Massachusetts village now haunts an English country house.

Horror

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A Cursed Man (2025)

The filmmaker Liam Le Guillou asks practitioners of dark magic to curse him, on camera. In Los Angeles the witches Griffin Ced and Carrie Wolf refuse. In New Orleans he meets the voodoo priestess Lilith Dorsey, and a hoodoo practitioner, Sen Elias, agrees to do it. The search also takes him to India and Mexico.

John G. Kruth, executive director of the Rhine Research Center, which studies ESP, helps measure Le Guillou's reactions. Film Threat gave it 8.5 out of 10, while AIPT called it a waste of a great premise because it finds no evidence. After so many films about invented witches, here is one made with real ones, and several of them say no.

Documentary

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Where to go next

• Folk horror movies, including the 1922 witchcraft film Häxan
• Ghost movies and the haunted castle that started horror cinema