How do film, theater, and television revisit and imagine witches, witch hunts, and witchy magic? In this seminar, we will discuss the cultural construction of the witch, from Puritan New England to horror and camp from the early 20th century to the present. Through Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692 and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (along with Nicholas Hytner’s 1996 adaptation), we will begin our journey to understand how historical persecution has always also been a narrative about gender, sexuality, religion, race, and power. We will then turn to cinematic witches from Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan through mid‑century Hollywood, 1960s and 1970s views from New American Cinema and Italian Horror / "Giallo" films, as well as late‑20th‑ and 21st‑century feminist and queer reappropriations. Films will include Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polański, 1968), The Witches of Eastwick (George Miller, 1987), The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996), Practical Magic (Griffin Dunne, 1998), The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015), The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016), and Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025). In this course, we will ask what anxieties the witch embodies and makes visible, i.e., how different historical contexts project fears of female agency, sexuality, community, and technological or social change onto the witch’s body. We will also look into the different ways filmmakers both within and against mainstream Hollywood use the witch to subvert, openly criticize, or reinforce those projections. Organized around three key viewpoints, gender identities, social anxieties, and audiovisual representation, the course aims at developing students’ skills in close reading of literary and film texts, their engagement with feminist, queer, and historical scholarship, and, finally, their abilities in writing critically about genre and representation.
- Dozent/in: Marcel Hartwig