Posted by Athena Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/24/the-big-idea-payton-mccarty-simas/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56553

It may not be Halloween, but that shouldn’t stop you from learning about the history of depictions of witches throughout the decades in film and media. Author and witch-film-connoisseur Payton McCarty-Simas is here today to take you through a wild ride (on a broomstick) over feminism, horror, and women, in her new book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film.
PAYTON MCCARTY-SIMAS:
More than anything else, my book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, is the product of hundreds of hours spent watching movies. I started the project that eventually became this book in college–– or, more specifically, during COVID, revisiting some of my comfort movies during lockdown. As I worked my way through more recent favorites like The Witch and Color Out of Space and old standbys like Rosemary’s Baby and George Romero’s Season of the Witch, I started noticing visual and thematic patterns. Soon, I was hooked on witch films (though as my list of favorites might suggest I always have been), and I started watching in earnest.
The big idea of That Very Witch is that, by tracing how depictions of witches evolve and change in American horror cinema over time, we can learn about the state of feminism in a given moment, essentially taking the cultural temperature in the process. I trace specific threads through the decades––namely psychedelic imagery, counterculturalism, and feminine rage among others––but each and every smaller idea relied on a huge amount of cinematic data to really put my finger on. I watched over three hundred hours of film for this project, noting different patterns and shifts from decade to decade over hundreds of pages of notes, several Letterboxd lists, and a slightly unhinged-looking conspiracy board.
While all genres move in cycles that capitalize on trends––consider the YA dystopian romance boom that followed The Hunger Games––horror is particularly trenchant given the films’ consistent popularity, relatively low budgets, and quick turnarounds. Simply put, the industry makes a lot of horror movies looking for a quick buck, and, given that profit-motive, producers are always responding to popular demand for a given subject. The terrifying proto-viral success of The Blair Witch Project gives us an explosion of found footage horror, and eventually the runaway blockbuster that was Paranormal Activity, which in turn gives us a rash of suburban hauntings, and so on. As scholars like Robin Wood have long suggested, then, horror can be viewed as an extension of our collective unconscious (in his words our “collective nightmares”), our national fears made manifest at the intersection of broad commercial incentives, personal artistic impulses, and the zeitgeist.
When it comes to witches, I noticed that in moments of high-profile feminist activism, say, the 1960s or the 2010s, witches become more popular––and more frightening––on screen. That’s not to say that witches disappear in other eras, far from it. But the characters of those depictions take on different tones and valences depending on the politics and trends of the moment, and that’s just as indicative of the politics of the age. Witches can be mall goths or hippie chicks, old women in pointy hats or teenage girls in low-rise jeans and lip gloss (or all of the above!) depending on the decade. They can be frightening or funny or fierce. But it takes a lot of hours of films, not to mention countless hours of historical research, to understand what depictions are most common when, and why.
That Very Witch: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop |Kobo|Waterstones
Author’s socials: Website|Instagram|Tumblr|Letterboxd
Read an excerpt.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/24/the-big-idea-payton-mccarty-simas/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56553