Lived It

Fear Month: From Bewitched to Sabrina — A history of witches on screen with special guest Maria Lewis

Episode Summary

Inspired by the Fear Street trilogy, we’re joined by witch expert, critic, and novelist Maria Lewis, who schools us on the history of witches from subversive housewives to rebellious teen occultists (with a bit of Satanic Panic on the way). All in this episode with Alexei Toliopuolos and Gen Fricker.

Episode Notes

Episode Transcription

Alexei Toliopoulos:

You're listening to the Big Film Buffet, snack edition. I am Alexei Toliopoulos, and I am always joined by one of my dearest friends, Gen Fricker.

Gen Fricker:

Oh my goodness. It's so wonderful to gather with you. To be here in this moment. Our powerful energies combining Alexei, you know why?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

The power of three combines us.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. Hoops to you. Tag yourself. On air.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

But we're not alone in our coven today. We are joined by one of my favourite people in the world to talk about all things bitchiness in Fear Street, because Fear Street is the trilogy that we're talking about at the moment on Netflix and at the centre of it all is Ms. Fear herself, the witchy vengeful spirit that is behind all of the spooky and ookiness and perhaps even the dookiness of Fear Street trilogy. So we have called in our sage, wisdom expert of all things, witchy, they are a film critic, a film curator, and the author of the new book, The Rose Daughter, amongst also the Who's Afraid series. And the reason they're a witch expert, because they're an award-winning author of a witchy book themselves, The Witch Who Courted Death. It is Maria Lewis.

Gen Fricker:

Eh, welcome to the pod!

Maria Lewis:

Hail to the watchtowers of the north, guys. It's great to be here, blessed be, blessed be.

Gen Fricker:

Thank you so much for coming and joining us. We have been in the middle of fear month on our podcast and we wanted to get into the history of witches because they really seem like they're having a moment right now. And as we kind of go through this film trilogy, that takes us through the nineties, through the seventies, through the 1660s, we kind of noticed a pattern that the witches seemed to represent certain things. And we thought, we have to talk to an expert. We have to. Maria Lewis, tell us about the first time you saw a witch on screen and what it kind of represented to you.

Maria Lewis:

First time I saw a witch on screen was in The Wizard of Oz, a movie that I hate.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Controversial off the bat!

Maria Lewis:

Coming in straight with the hot take. Don't like it. Wizard of Oz sucks. That's my take. But I really loved Wicked Witch of the West. Loved her aesthetic. Loved a green gal. Loved their shoes, just across the board. Fun shoes for everyone involved. Glenda, the good witch had dope heels as well. She had an amazing aesthetic and I was like, who are these girls? I need to know more.

Maria Lewis:

But I'd always been obsessed with supernatural, broadly, and growing up in the nineties, and I'm sure we'll touch on this in a minute, but the nineties was a real boom moment for witches in pop culture. Obviously, you had The Craft and you had things like Hocus Pocus, which was targeted really at my age group. And then I was a little bit older by the time The Craft came out. And I was like, well, I guess it's time to start practising Wicca. Let's go, baby! Let's get some revenge. And then, things like Charmed and of course Buffy, when Willow had her witchy arc from sort of season three onwards. Charmed and Buffy were sort of coming out concurrently. So it was just like, a wham bam, thank you, ma'am. You've got multiple shows involving witches each week. It was so good.

Maria Lewis:

And in the nineties as well, there were some amazing witchy texts, like the original run of Fear Street, but also T-Witches, which was in a similar target market to Fear Street, tweens and teens. But T-Witches had these two twin girls who were both witches, as you may tell from the title, they were tweens and teens, but also witches, henceforth T-witches. And then the Disney Channel did a T-Witches original movie with Tia and Tamara as the T-Witches. The movie wasn't great. And the airing wasn't great. But T-Witches the book series was a movement and a moment and Fear Street as well.

Maria Lewis:

Especially because in the nineties it was a lot of empowering versions of witches. And you have vague bits of villainy, obviously with Hocus Pocus and the way certain characters evolve in The Craft. But Fear Street was leaning really hard into that. And that fun era of satanic panic. Like, wow, what a time. Practical Magic was coming out of that as well. And I was really obsessed with that book, even though I was way too young for it. I was just like, oh, this is amazing. Like, people read up. And then the film and I was like, wow, midnight margarita time, let's go. This is all I want.

Gen Fricker:

So when you talk about satanic panic, what does that mean? And why does it pop up when it does?

Maria Lewis:

It was this trend in America, around the eighties, shall we say. It was like, oh my God, rock and roll music is Satan. And like, if you play, the Beatles White Album backwards, it says, "All hail Beelzebub or whatever." Essentially, the west Memphis three is the case that often people think about in terms of satanic panic. And it was just like, there were these three kids that were horribly murdered and the three, also children, who were sent to jail for their murder, were these boys who were dressed in black and wore leather and listened to heavy metal music and wore chokers or whatever.

Maria Lewis:

It becomes this thing where it was this systematic idea that there were cults out there hailing Satan left and right. Satan was getting hailed like nobody's business. And that witches were an ever present threat in America. It's not really true. And that's where you get stuff like Charmed and stuff like The Craft and stuff like Fear Street. Shadyside's a fictional town, but the idea of satanic panic is sort of flirted with in this story in a way that I really enjoy. It was exploiting and exploring something that had real world consequences and was talked about in the news all the time into a really fun and engaging and genuinely scary genre story. That was the thing I was always obsessed with about those books.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

The thing that I love so much about horror films, Maria, is that whatever it is, whatever the demon or thing chasing after you, it is always so laden in subtext of what the film actually is really about. With witches though, what do you think they actually represent when they're on screen or in text at all?

Maria Lewis:

Well it depends on what the story is trying to do. And also who is telling that story because the way that men represent witches is very different to the way that women represent witches is in popular culture. And not to say negative positive either way, but witches might often, at times are represented as villainous originally. And then you have this split sort of happening around the thirties and forties where you start to have more cartoon representations and newspaper serials are becoming popular, where you start to see variations on this idea of green skin, warts, the pointy hat, the broomstick, the witch on your cereal box, that of it all, et cetera. I didn't know what the proper academic term is for, but that covers it, right?

Maria Lewis:

But you start to see the split when then you begin to have Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, right, which was an Archie comics character invented by Dan DeCarlo out of the sixties, along with Josie and the Pussycats around that same era. And that became a really popular animated series for Saturday morning cartoons in America. But it started to sort of explore this idea of not all witches had to be villainous and that there could be fun and cuteness and quirkiness, and kookiness involved in that, right? Witches can just be people with power and what they do with that power shifts, depending on what you're trying to say with that character, right?

Maria Lewis:

And traditionally witches and the idea of witchcraft was used as a handy Ikea guide to get rid of a bunch of women. There were witches, it was like, oh, let's get rid of these bitches. That like hex and house and this whole idea of the hammer of witches, which was literally an instruction on like, hey, so you want to round up a bunch of blousy broads and all these women be yap, yap, yapping with their property and their opinions? Here's how you can kill them. And, I don't know if they have a birthmark, string them up. If they talk to other women, I don't know, put them at a stake. That was the idea. It was extremely step A to B to C to D.

Gen Fricker:

Let's fast forward 300 years into the future from the 1660s, from those original witch trials. And that kind of thing to, as you say, these 1960s depictions of witches, and when you were kind of talking about representations of femininity and that kind of thing written by men, one that really popped in my mind is Bewitched. It's such an archetypal version of a magical woman and that kind of thing.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Tied to housewifery, really, as well.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. What do you think was bubbling around in the culture at that point that informed that?

Maria Lewis:

Well, I Dream of Genie comes out around that same era too. And those shows very much in the same dialogue of you have a fantastical premise that is your sort of elevator pitch of the show, and then wacky hi-jinks happen in and around it. But it starts to get fun in the seventies. Like when you get to Suspiria and stuff like that, and you have this idea of covens and it's not just a witch, it's multiple witches. That's when it starts to get really fun. And then you get to the eighties and you have Witches of Eastwick with Cher and stuff. And you're like, this is when it's starting to get good. So it's not about one witch. It's about multiple witches. That's when it gets juicy.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It's interesting seeing how they evolve over these different eras and how they tie into, I guess, the idea of femininity or the idea of feminism of that time.

Maria Lewis:

Yeah. Because you know, the sixties are often referenced as a really big moment for feminism, but also the suffragette movement of the early 1910s, 1920s. And it's not long after that, that you start to see more, witch representations in pop culture that are negative. It's used as versions of propaganda of like, look, at all these suffragettes and they're compared and drawn like witches with the warts on the nose, the whole thing.

Gen Fricker:

To drill down on the evolution between the 1960s pop culture witch and the eighties, what do you think are the key differences between the witches of the sixties and the eighties?

Maria Lewis:

Cocaine! You can even see it with the hair and just the vibe is looser and wilder. You know what I mean? Even the progression, Bewitched, Suspiria, Witches of Eastwick, you can see where it's moving and where it's going. And then by the time, like the late eighties, when you're really getting into the meat of the riot girl movement, and that's burgeoning into grunge and the Lilith Fair of it all, and even the name Lilith Fair, that relates directly back to Wicca and Wiccan practises. The music and the sound and the aesthetic and the unity of women, and how that tied into pop culture, by the time that you do hit that pop culture apex of witches in the nineties, it's really logical. And I think very easy to see how that is transitioned.

Gen Fricker:

Do you think witches and their stories that are kind of popping up across these different decades of pop culture, are they a reflection of what's going on or are they kind of hinting at more subversive stuff that's bubbling up to the top?

Maria Lewis:

Again, kind of depends on who's telling the story and what their intent is because I'm very interested in female witch stories and oftentimes the things that they represent and how they represent them are different from the ones that are male witch stories, you know what I mean? Practical Magic, okay, yes, very much a film made with the male audience in mind for sure. But it's based on a book by a female novelist. The idea of the female matriarchy is so prevalent in that story between the older witches and the younger witches. And of course the daughters by the end of the movie. And I think that's really interesting compared to something like Witches of Eastwick, I guess, is a good example of that. Where it's like, there's three women and then there's Jack Nicholson, I guess? Ba-da-ba-da-bum-bum. Let's just throw him in there and hope for the best.

Maria Lewis:

But also the modern Suspiria, I think was a very interesting examination of what was happening present day in the world at the time, and this sort of re-examination of feminism and intergenerational feminism and even your body as a weapon, like the way that women's bodies can be weaponized against them. It was really fascinating to me, as opposed to, witches sort of being, not a gimmick, but it's a story device earlier on, you know what I mean? You can't say Wizard of Oz is a real examination of femininity. And I feel like we start getting really interesting contextual breakdown. So it is still enjoyable from a film book, movie perspective, but also have something to say until the nineties really.

Maria Lewis:

Fear Street, they had really good deaths. The deaths were kind of always sort of off-camera, off the page. It was alluded to, and it's so hard to write a death scene. I have seven books and every single one I'm like, ah, man, I got to write a death scene coming up, here we go, like how to make it scary and interesting. Hard.

Gen Fricker:

Do you have a favourite death from Goosebumps or Fear Street? Because we talked to R.L. Stein last week on the podcast and he told us about his favourite.

Maria Lewis:

I love that.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah.

Maria Lewis:

Let me just refer to the...

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Oh my lord. Let the record show.

Gen Fricker:

Maria just held up about 10 Goosebumps books that she just had ready to go.

Maria Lewis:

I actually have more on my shelf, but I was like, don't weird them out. Just keep it to 10. Night in Werewolf Woods, which is not a Fear Street book. It's an OG Goosebumps book. And I have a big thing for werewolves, they're probably my favourite monster. But there are a few really good, getting absolutely shredded to pieces scenes in that, which I found so enjoyable at the time, but going back and reading them and I'm like, man, middle grade is like eight to 12, really. That's kind of what the age group is. Trying to write a really good death scene is hard for me as an adult. And most of my books are targeted at, you could say, 18 to 80 year olds, right? How the heck? Like R.L. Stine is a master, baby. Like, Stephen King who?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

What do you think witches will look like in the future?

Maria Lewis:

Black. I think we'll start to see more witches that are representative of the world as we know it. I mean, Rachel True, the actress who plays also a character called Rachel in The Craft, she was truly a really unique pop culture entity because that character was written for her specifically. And she is a practising witch, but she was also for so long, the only representation of black women as witches and involved in witchcraft in popular culture. That character's a real touchstone for many people growing up, not just in the nineties, but you know, you go to a pop culture convention and there's always plenty of Rachels from The Craft floating around and her presence as part of that pop culture property has been really consistent throughout.

Maria Lewis:

But you started to see it with Sabrina at the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, right? They were getting a lot more diversity in there. The witches that were at the school and then the witches that were villains in various regards, but also that people that were at her high school. But you're starting to see it in the page as well. I always feel like comic books and books in general and just literature, are always a few steps ahead of the curve.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Leading the way, if you will.

Maria Lewis:

Right, exactly. Because there's this book called Akata Witch from 2011 by a really incredible African author, that was... It did fine. It did well, it won a bunch of awards, but it's really started to find its level, kind of in the past sort of decade. It's become much more discussed and popular, but also Spell on Wheels by Kate Leth and my book, The Witch Who Courted Death, has an Aboriginal witch is one of the key characters in that story. And I think that's exciting when you're starting to see other people get included in the narrative rather than excluded because that was, not just for witches, for most of pop culture, it was a version of white, straight, Caucasian femininity to explore. And now we're past that and we're starting to see a few shifts on what that could look like, which is really exciting to me because every culture has witches in one form or the other. So what does that look like outside of a Caucasian lens?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Maria Lewis:

Hail to watchtowers in the north, truly. So great to be here. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, you know. That whole bit.

Gen Fricker:

Thanks, Maria!