25 of the Most Essential Movies About Witches

Witches have been part of cinema for almost as long as there’s been cinema. In 1898—just two years after the first movie screening in America—J. Stuart Blackton’s 1898 short film The Cavalier’s Dream featured a witch character who shuffled on screen and cast a spell by rapping on a table. 

Our depictions of witches have gotten considerably more sophisticated in the century-plus since then. Witches were the central characters of feature films in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until the late ’30s, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz, that our iconic idea of the so-called “movie witch” really came into focus. 

The witch doesn’t belong to any one genre; horror is thick with them, but you’re just as apt to find them across comedies, romances, superhero movies, or family dramas. To trace the evolution of witches on the silver screen—and hex up your Halloween streaming list, regardless of your horror tolerance or complete lack thereof—we’ve curated a list of 25 essential witch movies.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

Häxan, directed by Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen and produced by Sweden’s now-legendary Svensk Filmindustri, isn’t the first movie to depict witches and witchcraft. Still, it’s probably the earliest witch movie widely considered a cinematic landmark. Part documentary slideshow and part grueling dramatization of a medieval witch trial, Häxan will dispel any notion you may have that a century-old silent film can’t be deeply unnerving. 

In an interview with the BBC, Ghostwatch screenwriter Stephen Volk called Häxan “the seminal faux documentary that preceded all others,” implying that it sketched the template for films such as The Blair Witch Project. Volk isn’t the only one to credit Häxan for its influence on Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s 1999 surprise smash hit. When the team behind Blair Witch founded a production company, they named it Haxan Films.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Disney’s first full-length film is a cinematic milestone and an artistic and technical marvel: 750 artists worked for years to produce the nearly 2 million hand-crafted paintings it took to create America’s first animated feature. It’s also a landmark of occult cinema. According to film scholar Heather Greene, Snow White marked two firsts for on-screen witches: the debut of the sexy “vamp witch” archetype, which would later feature in everything from Bell, Book and Candle to The Love Witch, and the first movie to feature a truly frightening witch antagonist.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Even though she only has about 12 minutes of screen time in Victor Fleming’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s classic novel, Margaret Hamilton forever changed the way witches would be portrayed in pop culture. Other elements of the Wicked Witch’s signature look, including her black wardrobe, pointy hat, and long, crooked nose, were associated with witches long before The Wizard of Oz. But before the film, witches were either depicted as white or with skin tinted in various shades of orange, yellow, or even red. MGM did something no one had done before: The studio made its witch antagonist green.

In her introduction to the 1977 book The Making of The Wizard of Oz, Hamilton speculated that the green makeup might have been more of a technical choice than a creative one. Black clothing next to light skin tones sometimes produced a white line that made heads and hands seem disembodied; green makeup eliminated the problem. The actress suffered greatly for her art—the makeup was toxic, leading to painful skin irritation and exacerbating serious burns she received during an on-set accident—but her portrayal gave us a legacy of green-skinned cacklers that lives on in cartoons, costumes, and Halloween décor.

I Married a Witch (1942)

When French auteur René Clair and screwball maestro Preston Sturges set out to turn the 1941 novel The Passionate Witch into a movie, a faithful adaptation was never in the cards. The novel—started by and credited to Topper writer Thorne Smith but completed after Smith’s death by Norman Matson—presented its witch as an overtly seductive woman who used sex and black magic to manipulate the book’s male hero, and included at least one gory animal sacrifice scene. 

In her book Lights, Camera, Witchcraft, film scholar Heather Greene points out that none of that would have flown in Hays Code-era Hollywood, where a set of stringent guidelines made it impossible to film The Passionate Witch as originally written. After all, evil could not be “presented alluringly,” so casting Veronica Lake, who was possibly one of the most alluring humans alive in 1942, as a malevolent sorceress was probably a non-starter. 

So Clair and Sturges shifted the story’s point of view from the witch’s male victim to the witch herself, casting Lake as a resurrected witch who falls in love with a man whose ancestor burned her at the stake for practicing witchcraft in the 17th century. The result is a classic screwball comedy that helped inspire the TV series Bewitched more than 20 years later.

Woman Who Came Back (1945)

Horror movies featuring witches were few and far between in the 1940s, which makes Woman Who Came Back all the more notable. In her audio commentary on Imprint’s 2024 Blu-ray release, film historian Kelly Robinson points out that many of the era’s defining American horror films are either set overseas (The Wolf Man; I Walked with a Zombie) or cast an immigrant character as the supernatural threat (Cat People; Weird Woman). 

Woman Who Came Back is one of the rare WWII-era horror movies that is truly steeped in American history and folklore. The film is set during Halloween and draws from the Salem witch trials, making it a perfect choice for October viewing. It focuses on a woman who is descended from a witch-hunter and believes the spirit of a vengeful witch is possessing her. It’s not particularly scary, but it’s heavy on the eerie atmosphere, and the vintage children’s costumes are the stuff of nightmares.

Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

Bell, Book and Candle features the superhumanly beautiful Kim Novak as Gil Holroyd, a single witch who sets her sights on mortal Shep Henderson, played by James Stewart in what would be his last role as a romantic lead. It features one of the most disappointing tropes in the witch narrative canon—a powerful witch must give up her magic for a man—but helped lay the groundwork for the hidden fantasy-witch worlds that would later feature in intellectual properties such as Bewitched and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. 

Today, Bell, Book and Candle is often viewed as a not-so-subtle allegory for being gay in midcentury America. It’s based on a 1950 play of the same name by John Van Druten, whose work often codified queer culture in a time when LGBTQ+ people were forced to remain closeted.

Black Sunday (1960)

The year 1960 was a momentous one for horror cinema: It saw the release of Eyes Without a Face in France, Jigoku in Japan, and Peeping Tom and Psycho in America. Italy’s most notable contribution that year was Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, which the British Film Institute cites as “the true birth of Italian horror” and is often named one of the best horror movies of all time.

It features a trope that recurs again and again in witchy cinema: a woman, executed as a witch, who curses the descendants of the men who killed her. In this case, it’s a Moldavian witch played by the great British scream queen Barbara Steele, who has a pretty good reason to curse her executioner’s progeny. In the film’s opening scene, she’s subjected to brutal torture and entombed for 200 years.

Black Sunday was filmed in black and white, but its violence was so disturbing that the film still got banned in the UK for several years. Bava went on to direct several influential horror films, including the anthology Black Sabbath and the slasher progenitor Bay of Blood. Still, Black Sunday is widely regarded as his best film, thanks partly to Steele’s go-for-broke dual performances as the vengeful witch and the young woman whose body she intends to take as her own. 

Burn, Witch, Burn (1962)

This effective British chiller deserves to be a Halloween-viewing staple, if for no other reason than its exquisite atmosphere. Released in the UK as Night of the Eagle, it’s the second adaptation of Fritz Lieber’s classic horror novel Conjure Wife, filmed by Universal in 1944 as Weird Woman. (It got a comic makeover in 1980 as Witches’ Brew.) I Am Legend author Richard Matheson scripted it alongside frequent Twilight Zone writer Charles Beaumont; Burn, Witch, Burn is the best of the three versions.

Often considered a sort of spiritual successor to Jacques Tourneur’s outstanding Night of the Demon, it centers on a skeptical sociology professor whose life begins to unravel when it seems that his rapid ascension through the ranks of Hempnell Medical College’s faculty might be connected to the fact that his wife has been dabbling in witchcraft. The film’s American release included a lengthy opening voiceover by Paul Frees, a voice actor who was often sought out for his uncanny ability to mimic Orson Welles. Frees was also the voice of the Ghost Host in Disneyland’s original Haunted Mansion attraction and channeled Peter Lorre as Boo-Berry in the GM monster cereal commercials. 

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

In Roman Polanski’s landmark American debut, a young woman falls prey to a coven of urbanite witches operating out of a chic New York City apartment building. But it was almost a very different kind of film; when B-movie king William Castle (House on Haunted Hill; 13 Ghosts) bought the rights to Ira Levin’s novel ahead of its 1967 publication, he intended to direct it himself.

Rosemary’s Baby was a huge success, but Castle claimed there was a sinister price tag attached. In his 1976 autobiography Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America, Castle writes that he received as many as 50 angry letters per day, some accusing him of “unleash[ing] evil on the world” and calling him a “worshiper at the Shrine of Satan.” He began to think the film was cursed: After its release, he suffered painful kidney stones and uremic poisoning; the film’s composer, Krzysztof Komeda, died after sustaining a brain injury; and Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson Family. 

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

If Bedknobs and Broomsticks has a whiff of Mary Poppins to it, there’s a good reason. Lots of them, in fact: It only entered development after Walt Disney’s attempts to secure the rights to P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books reached an impasse. Once Mary Poppins proved to be a box office hit, this flick was rushed into production.

Julie Andrews was initially considered for the role of Eglantine Price, an apprentice witch who reluctantly takes in three orphans evacuated from World War II-era London during the Blitz. But producers quickly settled on Angela Lansbury instead, with Andrews’s Mary Poppins costar David Tomlinson stepping in as con-man “magician” Emelius Brown.

Mary Poppins screenwriter Don DaGradi took the reins as Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ director. (Both films also feature songs by the Sherman brothers.) It’s easy to see why critics often see Bedknobs and Broomsticks as a Mary Poppins knockoff. Still, it has one thing its more highly regarded predecessor doesn’t: Lansbury as a childless, middle-aged, motorcycle-riding witch who dispatches Nazis while zipping around on a mail-order broomstick. 

Suspiria (1977)

While American horror cinema of the 1970s was mainly moving toward gritty realism, Italian horror master Dario Argento was making Suspiria, a “psychedelic fairy tale” about a young American ballet dancer who enrolls at a German dance school that turns out to be run by witches.

Argento and his co-writer, Daria Nicolodi, drew on classic fairy tales and gothic art for Suspiria. But this iconic giallo owes perhaps its greatest debt to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which inspired Suspiria’s vivid color palette.

“We wanted to recreate the colors of old Technicolor and Disney films,” Argento told Another Man magazine in 2018. “The vivid, strong colors in those films stayed in my memory from childhood.” To that end, cinematographer Luciano Tovoli tracked down a small amount of a vintage Kodak film stock that replicated the vivid hues of Technicolor, forcing the cast and crew to capture every scene in only a couple of takes. 

The Worst Witch (1986)

The first TV adaptation of Jill Murphy’s popular kids’ book series has never been well regarded by critics, and Murphy herself has criticized everything from the script to the special effects and claimed the young stars nearly cried when they saw the costumes they’d be wearing.

But the cast, which includes Tim Curry, Fairuza Balk, and Charlotte Rae, is top-notch. Curry’s performance of the song “Anything Can Happen on Halloween,” accompanied by some genuinely astounding blue-screen FX, is unforgettable by any standard. Thanks to yearly airings on HBO and, later, the Disney Channel, The Worst Witch became a Halloween staple for many American viewers. 

Pumpkinhead (1988)

Pumpkinhead is the first and only horror film directed by special effects legend Stan Winston (The Terminator; Aliens). But the concept is based on a poem by Ed Justin; film scholar Heather Greene even traces its roots all the way back to another notable piece of American witch lore: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 story “Feathertop,” about a sorceress who conjures up a pumpkin-headed scarecrow to court the daughter of a prominent town citizen as revenge for some unspecified wrong.

The witch gets a makeover in Pumpkinhead as Haggis, the “old witch of the woods,” who, at the behest of a grieving father, conjures up a demonic entity to slaughter a group of teen interlopers who accidentally killed a local boy. Haggis is a sinister version of the Appalachian granny witch: The locals fear her but also respect her power and tolerate her as a vital—if not utterly terrifying—pants-wetting episode-inducing member of their rural community. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

Don’t be fooled by Kiki’s breezy tone and gentle spirit—this Studio Ghibli staple, about a bighearted young witch navigating her newfound independence in an idealized, midcentury European city, almost singlehandedly rescued what is now one of the world’s mightiest animation studios. 

According to film journalist and Ghibliotheque podcast co-host Jake Cunningham, Ghibli was reeling from a pair of 1988 box-office bombs—Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro, both rightly considered classics today—and badly needed a hit. They got exactly that with Kiki’s Delivery Service, a project they retooled from a slim, 80-minute confection to a full-length feature under the personal guidance of animation master Hayao Miyazaki and explicitly marketed to girls and young women.

The result was a blockbuster that put Studio Ghibli back on track. In Japan, Kiki’s Delivery Service was the highest-grossing domestically produced film of 1989; only Rain Man and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade beat it at the Japanese box office that year. 

The Witches (1990)

The Witches, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 novel of the same name, was the last film Jim Henson worked on before his death in May 1990, just three months after the film was released. The tale—focused on monstrous witches who intend to poison all the world’s children with a potion that will turn them into mice—had a controversial ending; Henson famously disagreed with Dahl about it.

In Dahl’s book, the young hero is turned into a mouse, but he chooses to stay that way so he can die with his elderly grandmother. Director Nicolas Roeg shot that ending but also filmed a more conventionally happy one that sees the boy restored to human form. Test audiences chose the latter, which made it into the finished movie. Dahl was incensed, viewing his ending as happy enough and far more nuanced. 

The Craft (1996)

Besides being a landmark of ’90s teen horror, The Craft was also one of the first Hollywood films to try to get witchcraft right. To that end, the film’s producers and director Andrew Fleming hired Pat Devin, a Wiccan priestess and practicing witch, as an advisor. Even before Devin got involved, Fleming and screenwriter Peter Filardi were trying to represent modern witchcraft and pagan religious practices accurately in the script. 

“The fact that the first script I read contained discussions of magical ethics and the consequences of misuse of power was exciting,” Devin said in a 1998 interview. “I could see the possibility of a decent movie.”

Devin didn’t win every battle, but several of her suggestions were incorporated into the film, including commuting Nancy Downs’s final punishment from death to confinement in a mental hospital. (In an early draft of the script, Nancy is fatally impaled on a coat hook.) That said, Devin steered the film away from accuracy rather than toward it in at least one instance. She advised the filmmakers to stick with “Manon,” which isn’t a name found in Wiccan lore, as the name of the deity invoked by Nancy and co., lest viewers of The Craft copy the film’s rituals and accidentally summon an actual pagan god.

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

Eve’s Bayou, a Southern gothic melodrama with an entirely Black cast, tells the coming-of-age story of 10-year-old Eve Batiste in 1962 Louisiana. When Eve catches her father with a woman who isn’t her mother, she turns to two local women who might be witches—and possibly summons up a curse with potentially devastating consequences.

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons eschewed stereotypical “witch doctor” caricatures in favor of nuanced depictions of root workers and conjure women. It’s one of the few American films that accurately represents hoodoo, an American spiritual practice with roots in West African religious tradition; it also explores aspects of the Haitian practice of voodoo.

Eve’s Bayou is rightly considered a modern masterpiece, and in 2018, the Library of Congress added Lemmons’s debut to its National Film Registry, recognizing its “cultural, historic and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage.”

Halloweentown (1998)

For a few glorious years in the late 1990s and early aughts, the Disney Channel aired a spooky, kid-friendly original movie every Halloween season.

In October 1998, that honor went to Halloweentown, about a 13-year-old girl who discovers she has latent magical abilities and sneaks off to a land populated by vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and “a few very fine witches.” (For context, Halloweentown premiered the month after a certain boy wizard made his U.S. debut with Scholastic’s publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.)

Halloweentown has more in common with classic portal fantasies than traditional witchcraft stories. Still, its charming, tween-centric narrative has made it such a beloved millennial touchstone that the town of St. Helens, Oregon—where the movie was filmed—holds a month-long Spirit of Halloweentown festival every year.

Initially written for NBC in the early ’90s, Halloweentown was conceived as a darker story aimed at older viewers. Once the project ended up at the Disney Channel, director Duwayne Dunham, a former editor who’d worked with David Lynch on Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Wild at Heart, retooled it for a younger audience. 

Practical Magic (1998)

By the time its 1998 theatrical run was over, Practical Magic had grossed nearly $68 million worldwide—which would have been respectable had the studio not spent $75 million making it. The witchy rom-com was a critical and commercial disappointment initially, but it has since amassed a sizable cult following. A sequel was even announced in June 2024.

There are many reasons why a movie might not perform as hoped, but “it got cursed by a vengeful witch” isn’t typically one of them. Yet according to what director Griffin Dunne told Vulture in 2017, a “witch consultant” he hired grew so incensed when her demands weren’t followed that she vowed to curse the film, Dunne, and the movie’s producer.

She promptly sued the studio and left Dunne a voicemail that was reportedly so frightening that neither the filmmaker nor the Warner Bros. legal department could listen to it in its entirety. The incident even inspired a line of dialogue in the film: “Curses only have power when you believe in them.” Dunne apparently had a hard time not believing, though. He was shaken enough to hire someone to perform an exorcism to “cover [his] bases.” 

The Witch (2015)

Writer-director Robert Eggers subtitled his breakout film “A New-England Folktale.” Still, he admits his story of witchcraft in colonial America has more in common with classic, pre-Disney fairy tales than traditional folklore. “The key to creating this whole thing was understanding that the real world and the fairy tale world were the same thing in the early modern period, except for in the minds of the extreme intelligentsia,” Eggers told Indiewire in 2016. “Everyday life was imbued with the supernatural. Witches were as real as mud, shit, the breeze, and God.”

To pump as much realism as possible into his tale of a family that encounters a witch in the early American wilderness after they’re banished from their Puritan settlement for being a little too puritanical, Eggers lifted much of the film’s dialogue from 17th-century witch trial transcripts and the writings of Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who recorded vivid accounts of the Salem witch trials. 

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

This creepy 2016 thriller was the first American feature by Trollhunter director André Øvredal, and it features a witchy performance unlike any other on this list. The title character is actually a corpse discovered at the site of a massacre and entrusted to a father-son coroner team tasked with figuring out how she died.

Since we’re including the film on a list of essential witch movies, there’s no reason to be coy: Jane Doe is—was?—a witch and her corpse is hiding secrets best left uncovered. Actress Olwen Kenny stars as the titular Jane; the actress and model was selected for the role partly because of her history of modeling work.

Her proficiency with yoga helped her remain still for long takes and control her breathing. The role required Kenny to lie naked and immobile on a cold table for up to 10 hours a day and remain unresponsive to the madness playing out around her. Given some of the things that go down in the morgue once Jane’s body starts getting dissected, it’s a tall order. 

The Love Witch (2016)

With The Love Witch, Anna Biller became the living embodiment of the auteur theory of filmmaking: She’s credited as the film’s writer, producer, director, composer, production designer, art director, set decorator, costume designer, and editor.

In researching her gorgeously stylized film about a glamorous witch who literally loves men to death, Biller nearly became a witch herself. She told that she threw herself into the subject to the point that she “thought of actually becoming an initiate.” Biller’s modern take on witchcraft draws from several contemporary traditions, including the practices of English occultist Alex Sanders, neo-pagan icons Stewart and Janet Farrar, and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. 

Suspiria (2018)

Less of a remake than a companion piece, Luca Guadagnino’s lavishly produced Suspiria is nearly a full hour longer than Dario Argento’s 1977 classic. Guadagnino spins the tale of a dance school run by witches in an entirely different direction, both in style and substance, by switching up one central plot point and digging deeper into the story’s mythology.

Guadagnino also drains the film of its famed primary color scheme in favor of washed-out earth tones. If stunning practical effects are your thing, come for the infamous torture-by-dance scene and stay for the jaw-dropping, gore-drenched finale. Love it or hate it, it’s some of the most striking horror imagery ever committed to film and a wholly unique take on cinematic witchery.  

The Fear Street trilogy (2021)

In 1998, ABC tried adding Ghosts of Fear Street, a half-hour series based on R.L. Stine’s popular YA horror novels, to its TGIF lineup. The pilot bombed with female viewers, and the show never made it past the pilot stage.

Netflix had considerably better luck in 2021 with the Fear Street trilogy, which retains many of the books’ key elements but recontextualizes them for an inventive take on witch narratives and the teen slasher subgenre. Released in rapid succession after its planned theatrical release was tanked by the pandemic, the three films center on a young lesbian couple who accidentally disturb the grave of a teenage girl hanged as a witch in 1666. They were so successful that Netflix hasannounced a fourth installment in the franchise: Fear Street: Prom Queen, based on Stine’s 1992 series entry. 

You Won’t Be Alone (2022)

There’s no real lead actor in this film about a young witch raised in isolation in 19th-century Macedonia, and who struggles to understand what it means to be human. That’s because she’s a shapeshifter who can assume the form of any creature she kills; throughout the film, she slips into the bodies of a new mother, a young man, and a child, all while learning to experience human emotions such as grief, fear, and love.

Writer-director Goran Stolevski rooted his tale in Macedonian folklore about an entity known as the Wolf Eater, but the film’s grisly transformation rituals—to assume another creature’s form, the witch must stuff its entrails into a cavity in her chest—are his own creation. Not everyone will appreciate the film’s tone and pacing, but it’s a treat for those who enjoy a more experimental take on horror. 

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