Witches -- an Age-old Conflict of Age

The concept of the witch is an interesting trope within the horror genre, both because the witch is one of several commonly (exclusively?) female magical entities, and because she can be either good or evil in nature. This nature of witches has been shown throughout literature; some memorable examples include the witches from The Wizard of Oz and the Harry Potter series. The witch in Black Mariah is an example of an evil witch. Recently, the good witch has been becoming more standard than the evil witch in popular media, as seen in installments such as Harry Potter (again), the Maleficent reboot(in which the title character actually possesses traits of both good and evil witches),  and Kiki’s Delivery Service (which we watched in class.) Although the evil witch can serve as a convenient villain, her motivations often seem to come across as two-dimensional at best and misogynistic at worst. It can be hard to pull off a purely evil witch nowadays. Despite these potential setbacks, a witch character can be used to provide commentary on these aspects of the evil witch trope, or commentary on the human characters.

            This week, after a partial viewing in class, I finished watching the movie Suspiria. In this film, the witch characters had some very hard-to-comprehend motivations. Essentially, the evil witch coven in this movie would kill anyone that got in their way, had the potential to get in their way, made them angry, or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The way I interpreted it, they were so evil that normal viewers couldn’t begin to understand their motivations.

            Although the motivation of the head witch of the coven was not to gain/regain youth, there was definitely a conflict of age in the movie. The head witch was centuries old, while her victims were (mostly) young girls. In fact, as I found out later after watching the movie, the script originally called for 12 year old girls rather than 20 year old young women. That idea was scrapped but much of the original dialogue remained, resulting in the young women having very child-like “voices”. In addition, the actors were placed in a larger-than-normal set to give the illusion that they were small and weak. Altogether, this movie fits into the witch trope of old women preying on young girls. And, following another witch trope, the young triumphs over the old, and the evil is vanquished.

            The witch trope of associating old age with evil puts old women in a negative light, which is only reaffirmed by the triumph of the young and beautiful characters over the old witch. This treatment is much more rarely seen in old male characters, as the old wizard character is usually shown to be wise and helpful (ex. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter). The fact that the old woman witch character is shown in such a negative way shows how society values women only for their beauty. Once that beauty is gone, and they have nothing left to offer society, they can only burden and leech from others. Luckily, this trope seems to be dying out, and more good witches are being shown in stories. The good witch is unfortunately usually a young character (because youth attracts audiences—ironically playing into the witch trope again) but that will hopefully change over time.