Thank the filth elders above that Connie Marble somehow survived her attempted execution for assholism and skulked from Baltimore to small-town Pennsylvania to live out her sunset years! That was the first thought that crossed my mind as Aunt Gladys rounded the corner of Pepperidge Farm, crap cereal, and hot dog enthusiast Principal Marcus Miller’s (an exquisitely gay homebody turned bug-eyed menace performance by Benedict Wong) office in Zach Cregger’s Weapons. If Gladys wasn’t Connie in disguise, she sure looked like a close facsimile: that shock of Flavor Aid-dyed hair like she dunked her head in the Jonestown vats then snipped her bangs misandrist short with kitchen scissors; those oversized glasses, trading Connie’s cat-eyes for granny goggles; and the smear of lipstick, scribbled over her cigarette smoker winkles, accentuated by her pale pancake powder makeup. Surely, Cregger purposefully meant to nod to the better half of Pink Flamingoes’ wannabe filthiest couple alive (in addition to a bizarro twist on Bewitched‘s Endora); at the very least, he satisfied John Waters’ decree, “To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.” Hell, Aunt Gladys even has a thing for basements, though she swaps the Marbles’ baby ring for lesbian mothers for…you’ll just have to see the movie.
A significant upgrade from the incest antagonist in Cregger’s former Barbarian, better achieved in the unforgettable X-Files episode “Home” (if you know, you know. How the hell did that make it on the air?), ailing Aunt Gladys picked a hell of a time to arrive in Weapons’ sleepy suburb. She, her withered bonsai tree, and copious bowls of water intend on staying with her (supposed?) niece and nephew-in-law, the parents of Alex Lilly (a heartbreaking Cary Christopher), who is the only student in his class that didn’t Naruto run into the night at 2:17 a.m. From vodka-guzzling teacher Justine Gandy, played with Ozark’s Ruth-like spunk by Julia Garner, to Josh Brolin’s tough, aggrieved papa, whose delivery of “What the fuck?!” alone deserves a brief acknowledgement here, to Austin Abrams’s James, an endearing if rattled homeless man, the film’s narrative is character-driven, made more intimate through the film’s nonlinear perspective shifts.
However, Aunt Gladys steals the show. Like Mink Stole’s sneering turn as Connie Marble, rejecting those assholes who don’t understand the psychosexual charge of bones breaking and death rattles, Aunt Gladys is played with pitch-perfect camp villainy by Amy Madigan, who uncannily switches between old biddy saccharine sweetness with the eccentric affect of Jinkx Monsoon and unbridled demonic evil, like threatening to make Alex’s parents eat each other (Jesus, Gladys, settle down!). At the risk of spoiling more than I already have (vent your rage below), this frail old lady can conjure cannibalism at will because, well, Aunt Gladys is a witch. A particularly spiteful one at that. A captivating combo of aging malice, occult menace, and gleeful monstrosity, Gladys replaces Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle as the cinematic hag heroine of the year. Get those red wigs ready! Gladys will be the Halloween costume of 2025.
Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) STUNS in Zach Creggers’s Weapons (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Yet, there is something strikingly conservative about Weapons: picture-perfect suburban families ripped apart by a witchy drag queen-coded hag outsider. While I won’t spoil the ending, the next generation gets their rip-roaring revenge in a conclusion that rivals The Substance in exaggerated bloodlust. While it doesn’t take away from my enjoyment, this conservative bent becomes especially pronounced when recalling last year’s Satan-worshipping, jolt-faced outsider who is also kind of a hag and demolishes nuclear families with his love of dolls and glam rock, Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) in Oz Perkins’s film of the same name. Both movies notably avoid the kind of subversive, cackling, erotic embrace of spell-casting freedom seen in the previous decade, like Thomasin’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) orgasmic levitation at the conclusion of Robert Eggers’s The Witch. So what, if anything, does that say about our culture? Probably nothing good!
In truth, I wouldn’t have considered this rebirth of Satanic Panic themes, likely remaining content with simplemindedly fawning all over Gladys, if I hadn’t read Payton McCarty-Simas’s criticism tour de force, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film. That Very Witch not only spookily predicts the creeping conservativism in Weapons, but articulates the trend it bucks: the leering, giggling lady monsters in The Witch, Luca Guadagnino’s unnecessary Suspiria remake, and Ari Aster’s Midsommar, a movie I never really thought of as witchy but McCarty-Simas convincingly argues for its rightful genre placement given its usage of Swedish Satanic practices, copious shrooms, and whatever the magic was happening in that communal sex scene. When considered in tandem with the concurrent sociopolitical landscape, it makes sense that feminine frustration might explode into a wicked, nihilistic grin—you try living through the era of pussy-grabbing without cracking (though it’s not lost on me or McCarty-Simas that all these films were made by men, betraying a flop-sweat masculine anxiety about something, like women usurping their power).
As seen in their categorization of these witchy women’s manic, smirking ride into the 2020s, like a nefarious spin on Sally’s blood-soaked, hysterical hitchhike in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, That Very Witch exposes how, since the mid-20th century, witch films have acted as bellwethers for both positive and negative reactions to feminism. This is a compelling thesis, though not a surprising one. Witches have always had something to say about women. Obviously, given that many actual women were executed and their corpses torched for the crime of witchcraft. As podcasters Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi show in their forthcoming How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy, while a handful of men were fingered for witchcraft at the height of witch trial mass psychosis, the overwhelming majority were women, usually marginalized, mouthy women who provided medical help, eschewed gender and sexual norms (not just boinking the Devil as was usually necessary for witch confessionals), or aging and talking in public in the wrong manner.
Gil (Kim Novak) in Bell, Book, and Candle
Though we’ve progressed past searching women’s bodies for blemishes that might be Devil’s marks or employing witch prickers (a real job title…Where do I sign up?!), witches still uniquely embody, as McCarty-Simas observes, “the concerns du jour,” at least in the movie theater. While witches appeared sporadically in movies as early as 1896 in Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable, McCarty-Simas argues that witches slowly begin to take on more symbolic significance in a smattering of movies from the 1940s and 1950s, from Veronica Lake’s domesticated pointy-hatted sorceress in 1942’s I Married a Witch to Kim Novak’s turn as a feline bare-footed Beat Generation enchantress who casts spells on her cutey Jimmy Stewart neighbor and drags him to astrology-themed jazz clubs in 1958’s Bell, Book, and Candle. But, it’s the 1960s that herald a full-blown witch craze both on screen and off, with all those hippie-dippie kooks tripping out to newfound and resurrected occult practices and jetting off to the Bay Area to act bad at black mass with Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. McCarty-Simas shows how the competing phenomenon of woo-woo interests (hallucinogenics, tarot, astrology, Wiccanism, etc.) and straight society’s hair-pulling about the death of God, as per a Time Magazine cover, culminated in what may still be the top witch film of all time: Rosemary’s Baby. Though Polanski’s film and its many countercultural spin-offs may represent the pagan pinnacle, McCarty-Simas deftly pursues the continued progression of witch films through the decades, including the born-again backlash, like The Exorcist’s reassertion of the Church’s necessity in the face of “Your mother sucks cocks in hell” possessed hormonal adolescent excess; Reagan Revolution freak-outs about poisoned Halloween candy and repressed memories of Satan-worshipping homeroom teachers, resulting in, at once, stripping witches of their intimidating authority through parody, swapping witches with crazed single ladies in erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction, and, the best witch media of the decade, trashy Satanic Panic TV specials; and the rebirth of riot grrrl, Bitch Magazine-esque feminism in the 1990s and with it, girl power witch flicks like Practical Magic and The Craft.
Many of the films I’ve namechecked are the biggies. McCarty-Simas’s examination of these well-known movies is pointed, incisive, and sometimes downright delightful, like the much-deserved attention given to the “genuinely feminist witch” of the 1980s, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Yet, what makes That Very Witch really shine is its culling of the cinematic archives for lesser-seen gems. What even is the point of reading a book about cinema if you don’t finish with an extended watch list? That Very Witch certainly answers this call for those of us who aren’t as well-versed in witch-filmography. And embarrassingly, I’m in that category as I never realized until reading McCarty-Simas’s book just how many gaps I have in my knowledge. I mean, how the hell have I never seen Ken Russell’s hedonistic The Devils with Vanessa Redgrave as a horny hunchbacked nun? This must be rectified immediately! But not before I cross off the top of my list, Eiichi Yamamoto’s Japanese watercolor animated psychedelic mindfuck Belladonna of Sadness, which McCarty-Simas describes as “an ecstatic freakout about a Medieval peasant woman who becomes a witch” with “near-constant graphic nudity.” Sold! Even more, I must bear witness to my new mantra: the protagonist Jeanne’s desire to do “anything…so long as it’s bad.” Me too, Jeanne!
Bette Davis as Miranda in Wicked Stepmother
Thankfully, McCarty-Simas doesn’t just spend time on the classics, the underground, and the underappreciated. They also highlight some true cinematic atrocities for us lovers of on-screen bad taste! For instance, I desperately need to atone for my sin of never watching Bette Davis’s short stint in her final film, Wicked Stepmother (and whose red bob Aunt Gladys seems to emulate). Who cares if Davis stomped off the set halfway through its production? Just as long as I get to hear that husky voice snarl, “Call me, mamma!” And if you need more inspiration to seek out this stinker, McCarty-Simas quotes Fandango’s wretched review that called this movie “mind-bogglingly awful.” Count me in!
Though That Very Witch is stuffed to the brim with movies, McCarty-Simas’s historical cultural excavation is just as impressive. The author vividly portrays the march from true countercultural weirdness to the very same Boomers’ money-making about-face as “far out entrepreneurs” (a particularly galling quote that has stuck with me in its perfect encapsulation of the generation’s switcheroo that continues to haunt us: “I’ve yet to figure out what capitalism is, but if it’s what we’re doing, I dig it…”) to mystical quests reborn as browsing Wiccan books in Borders in the 1990s. In particular, they have a knack for exposing the many contradictions in America’s loopy push-pull between radicality, crackdowns, and consumerist cooptation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1960s, which spans everything from the founding of W.I.T.C.H., a radical feminist spinoff from the yippies, standing for Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell, the CIA’s eerie experiments with telepathy, Manson acolytes like Tex Watson declaring before murdering everyone at the 10050 Cielo Drive, “I’m the devil. I’m here to do the devil’s business,” and Cosmo quizzes about “magical gifts” (one question: “Am I fascinated by firelight?”). As if it’s the witches on screen that are the nutjobs…
With this illuminating balance between history and film and cultural criticism, the book reminds me a lot of still possibly the best exhibition I’ve ever seen: 2022’s The Horror Show, curated by filmmakers and artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, at London’s Somerset House. And it’s not just the overlap in films like Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The Horror Show analyzed British culture and politics from the 1970s to today through the lens of horror, which made me think differently about film, art, culture, and politics—and their many intersections. Similarly, That Very Witch not only elucidates how perceptions of feminism from the wider culture impress themselves on film, but also how film may reflect the wider culture better than we can see ourselves. Horror films at that! While horror has been experiencing a particularly hot revival in the past decade, I’m not sure it’s been taken as seriously as it should, still written off as mere blood splatter thrills and slasher catharsis. Yet, we do live in a horror show, so why shouldn’t it be given more serious analysis? Last month, I made the trek over to Ridgewood to watch Lydia Lunch growl at an audience yet again with her band Big Sexy Noise, who performed a sultry, nasty, swamp blues song called “Trust the Witch.” Should we trust the witch? I don’t see why not. And not just because Lydia says so. As That Very Witch reveals, the witch, with her long history of persecution, dark arts, subversive existence, and immortal purview, may just offer the perspective we need.