The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A witch is a female practitioner of magic and Witchcraft. This is quite different from the male equivalent discussed in Magicians and Sorcerers (not to say there are not female magicians). Where a magician’s power derives from ancient knowledge – scrolls, occult objects and the like – a witch’s power is more earth magic, herbalism and sympathetic magic. (Wizards and sorcerers, for instance, never seem to use cauldrons, which seems an essential item in the witch’s repertoire).
There is a substantial body of films in fantasy and horror where a witch is a force of evil, ranging from assorted Fairytales to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Witches (1990). In these, she is frequently portrayed as something wizened and hideous. There are also a number of horror films about witches burned at the stake exerting supernatural influence in the present.
There is also a reasonable body of films beginning with I Married a Witch (1942) through tv’s Bewitched (1965-72) that shows the witch in a romantic or domestic relationship and the problems this can present. Other works from The Craft (1996) through Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Wendy the Good Witch to tv’s Charmed (1998-2006) see the witch in a more positive light and even her powers as something of an alternate religious practice.
For films dealing with the historic witch trials, which are nothing to do with witches as characters, see Witch Persecutions.
The first film from Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves. A blatant copy of Mario Bava’s i>Black Sunday that is done in by its cheapness, a lack of anything interesting happening and mismatched comedy elements
Classic film and one of Roman Polanski’s finest works, the comically paranoid story of a housewife who increasingly comes to believe that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by The Devil
Spooky Russian film about a haunted plane flight, this recalls something of The Twilight Zone’s famous Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, a slow and weighty meditation upon questions of faith as one man prays to turn back a nuclear holocaust
Back when Dwayne Johnson was a wrestler billing himself as The Rock, this was a forgettable sword and sorcery effort spun off from his appearance in The Mummy Returns. This led to a surprising number of sequels
Medieavel fantasy action film with Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman assigned to escort a witch who may be able to deliver the land from the Black Plague. The wider moral issues of the film are buried under action and CGI
Cannon Films produced remake of The Seven Samurai as an Italian gladiator film starring Lou Ferrigno
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
An object lessons in how not to adapt a Young Adult series – take a book series about an apprentice witch hunter set in an alternate England and turn it a generic Lord of the Rings copy
Jan-Michael Vincent plays a young man who is reluctantly drawn in by his Native American grandfather’s war against a black sorcerer
The fourth of the Shrek films. By this point, the freshness and originality of the first film has been buried under animated film formula, while the plot is a tired rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life
Another work of Russian dark fantasy where a man asks a witch for a spell to help his wife, only to get very different results than intended
The third of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films, this came out the same year as Star Wars and Harryhauden’s stop-motion animated creatures look much more flat in comparison
An incredibly bad Italian-made Sinbad adventure starring Lou Ferrigno that is laughable in its dialogue and acting and incredibly tatty in its budget pinching
The Asylum made Avengers Grimm as a copycat of The Avengers films, featuring a team-up of fairytale heroines, and so for the release of Suicide Squad they made this sequel featuring a team-up of fairytale villains. Both films are utterly incomprehensible and require you to essentially ignore the originals
One of the finest of all Disney animated films, an adaptation of the fairytale made with the full artistic resources that studio could bring to bear
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations made by Cannon Films in the 1980s. A dreary impoverished run through by the numbers with Morgan Fairchild as the Wicked Stepmother and Tahnee Welch in the title role
Catherine Breillat, a director usually known for tackling issues of female sexuality, adapts the classic fairytale in a muddled effort that singularly fails to fly either as fairytale or deconstruction
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
Lightweight British animated adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale made for children
The Hallmark tv mini-series version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale is lushly produced but tends to plod when it should come to life as fantasy
One of the better of Cannon Films cheap fairytale adaptations featuring a grandly over the top Diana Rigg as the Wicked Stepmother
Caroline Thompson, a regular Tim Burton scriptwriter, directs a uniquely revisionist version of the fairytale in which she digs in to explain the origins of many of the familiar aspects of the story
The live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White comes surrounded by controversy on every side and served to make it a critical and box-office flop that left doubt over the future of the Disney remake industry
Beautifully made and very adult version of the fairytale, which seems determined to play up the terror aspect of the title, resulting in a work that seems a long way away from Disney
The second of 2012’s Snow White films after Mirror Mirror, this turns the fairytale into an epic fantasy. Well produced but ultimately a film that lacks anything unique nor pushes far enough into the dark fantasy it promises to be
The first full-length animated film ever made and the beginning of the Disney tradition. A superlative effort, full of an adorable anthropomorphism where Disney instinctively grasps all the elements of the formula
The Three Stooges are transplanted into a retelling of the fairytale, although their slapstick inanity feels drowned out amid the maudlin banality and Cinemascope spectacle
An amazing reinterpretation of the classical fairytale as modern ballet for adults. This does amazing things to reinvent the original and is visually extraordinary
One of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s film, this features a totally demented plot involving a man who develops psychic powers and his encounters with witches and LSD trips
An Oscar nominees for Best Animated Film – a unique and exquisitely drawn dive into Celtic mythology that comes with wit, humour and the emotional tenderness of a Hayao Miyazaki. This deserves to be seen far more widely than it ended up being
A live-action film based on the titular segment from Fantasia. From Jerry Bruckheimer meaning that it is a film of empty-headed special effects that fails to conjure any magic of its own
Jim Wynorski is a B-budget director whose films feature women with massively oversized breasts. Beyond epic-sized mammaries, this softcore tale about housewives engaged in witchcraft that makes no sense on a plot level
Another unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilot, this would have made for a potentially worthwhile series involving Robert Culp and Gig Young as occult investigators
Surprisingly good animated sword and sorcery film, made with a darker edge and definitely not for children
One of the masterpieces of Hayao Miyazaki, a gentle, beautiful work of anime set in an afterlife bathhouse where Miyazaki’s range of extraordinary creatures and quiet tenderness finds something that Western fantasy rarely ever comes near
Matthew Vaughn adapts a Neil Gaiman book in this undeniably appealing fantasy that comes with a story of epical sweep that vies between fantastic imagination and broad humour
Fascinating film set during Puritan witchery as men travel into the woods to confront a witch, this has many similarities to Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New-England Folktale. Made by an historian who makes everything authentic to the era
This team-up of C-list DC super-villains proved a surprise hit. The script is all over the place but Margot Robbie owns the screen as the gleefully insane Kewpie Doll gone wrong Harley Quinn
An early, little known Wes Craven film originally shot for tv in which Linda Blair believes that that cousin who comes to stay might be a witch
The Christopher Reeve Superman films started superbly but became wrecked by the producers’ insistence on the insertion of comedy element. Here they turn their attentions to Superman’s cousin Kara whose screen debut is derailed by a horrendously overacting Faye Dunaway
Fairly negligible film about a family who move into a house to face the vengeance of a witch
The work on which the cult of director Dario Argento was built. The film consists of a series of extravagantly arty deaths at a girls boarding school, although comes without any real plot connecting this
Dario Argento’s original Suspiria was an almost entirely narrative-free work set around a series of extravagantly arty deaths; this remake could not be a more different film. Not to say it is uninteresting in what it does
Forgettable Disney animated film telling the story of King Arthur’s boyhood where the Arthurian legends are sidelined in favour of talking animals and slapstick
Cannon Films make an adaptation of the Mediaeval legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Routine 1980s fantasy cinema with Sean Connery looking embarrassed as the Green Knight
A trio of tales from the world’s oldest fairytale collection – but quite different to anything you expect … While there is all the magic, ogres and princesses, this is a beautifully lush film made for adults and less about simple homilies that about fate and its cruel twists
Film spinoff from the Tales from the Darkside tv series, this is an anthology of three horror tales, the result is a surprisingly slick and well made film
Disney fairytale Lite. The story of Rapunzel gets hiply modernised and is now no more than a cute adventure/romance about a handsome rogue and a girl who has magical hair. Eminently forgettable Disney animation.
Amiably lightweight 80s comedy in which average teenage underdog Robyn Lively gains magical abilities and the complications these create
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
A key work of British exploitation director Norman J. Warren centred a series of supernatural novelty deaths
A horror anthology featuring episodes from seven different directors. As with other anthologies, the episodes vary in quality, ranging between the so-so, the mostly quite good and one standout segment
The Found Footage genre has become fairly much strip-mined of all possibilities and I felt little enthusiasm for yet another. That said, this film about a reality tv crew in a heavily superstitious East European village, proves surprisingly well made and entirely wins you over with a bravura climax
Legendary animated masterpiece from Richard Williams that was butchered in release. Williams’ animation is visually extraordinary
Animated film from Don Bluth, an insipid adaptation of the fairytale that eventually bogs down as a comic picaresque (*)
Nick Willing conducts the first of his SF revampings of popular tales. Here The Wizard of Oz is reworked into a Steampunk fantasy with some startling reinterpetations of the familiar characters
Low-budget Charles Band produced film that has entertainment value for its cheesily absurd creature effects and an amazing cast line-up
From Troma films, this is an anthology made up of twelve Christmas-themed short horror films for what supposed leading indie directors – so acclaimed I’ve only heard of two of them before
Inane Disney Channel film with twin sisters Tia and Tamera Mowry as sisters who didn’t know it who discover they are witches. A film that has zero interest in its fantasy elements and is entirely taken up by airhead teenage airhead natter
Having to sit through the Mowray twins airhead natter again in a sequel to their early Disney Channel film feels the equivalent of nails being scratched on a blackboard
Lavishly made Greek myth adventure, an adaptation of The Odyssey with Kirk Douglas as Ulysses/Odysseus
An early Roger Corman film that stirs a fascinating mix of elements involving hypnotic regression, witchery, time travel and appearances from The Devil
Jaume Balaguero of [Rec] fame returns with an occult horror where a woman on the run is drawn into sinister happenings at an apartment
Japanese Coming of Age tale about two mischief-making twin brothers growing up in the 1940s
1970s British film about two sisters being drawn into the coven of witches. This comes with much in the way of softcore nudity but there is a surprising degree of innocence about all of it
The only horror film ever made in Communist Russia. Adaptation of a classic story about a monk sequestered with the body of a woman for three nights, the film creates an undeniable atmosphere and mounts to a wildly fantastical climax where he must face all the minions of Hell
A supernatural variant on Overlord where G.I.’s during WWII enter the Black Forest and encounter something supernatural
One of the spate of sword and sorcery films that came out during this period, marginally better than most. The plot is a blatant copy of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo where a swordsman (David Carradine) sets two rival gang factions in a town against one another
Captivating and original film from Zach Cregger about a town that is affected by the mysterious disappearance of a class of children. One film where you definitely can’t predict where things are going
The first of several adaptations of Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife about witchcraft being conducted between rivalry faculty wives in academia. The best version of the story is still the second one Night of the Eagle but this has some eerie moments and great performances
The second half of the film adaptation of the musical Wicked. This essentially operates as Wizard of Oz fanfiction and substantially wrenches the characters and backstories from the 1939 film out of shape to write its own story
The first half of a two-part adaptation of the hit Broadway musical that is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, showing The Wicked Witch’s origin story
The worst film from the usually great Larry Cohen, an unfunny comedy in which a household is taken over by a witch. Bette Davis quit soon into shooting and is replaced partway through by Barbara Carrera
Russian dark fantasy and horror has emerged as one of the most exciting genres in recent years. This incredibly spooky little film is a Russian equivalent of The Blair Witch Project
Outside of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, not much else that George Lucas has made has been a success. This Ron Howard-directed epic fantasy proved to be a big flop where Howard’s lightweight touch fails to make a one-dimensional plot fly
A fascinatingly different and original work. A scrupulous effort is made – from the dialogue and clothing – to place us inside a 17th Century setting dominated by insanely legalistic religious superstitions and fears, at contrast to which there lie a series of phantasmagoric visions of witches
Imagine a version of The Craft with a few dashes of The Breakfast Club – all shot as a Found Footage film. This is far more entertaining than one expects it to be
A remake of the 1980s horror Witchboard. The original was just a VHS release and here is given a better budgeted workover, but disappears among a host of ouija-titled films of recent years
Entry in the Anglo-horror cycle with a resurrected witch and an imported Lon Chaney Jr presiding over deviltry in a sleepy English village
Nicolas Roeg and Jim Henson collaborate on an adaptation of a Roald Dahl book. Roeg leaves the grotesquerie and gleeful malice intact making this one of the best Dahl adaptations
Robert Zemeckis’s remake of the Roald Dahl story and Nicolas Roeg film proves a head-scratching effort that misfires on almost every cue
Low budget vampire action about a vampire woman who is recruited into a secret government organisation
Deliriously frothy and enjoyable George Miller film with Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as three witches who conjure forth Devil figure – Jack Nicholson in full barnstorming mode
Sequel/modernisation (it is confusing what) to The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York. This tv mini-series may be the cheapest work ever served up bearing the Oz name and flounders amid the shabbiness of its effects and utter lack of magic its director conjures
Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia makes what is essentially a comedy version of From Dusk Till Dawn albeit with witches instead of vampires. This has one of the funniest openings I’ve seen in some time but thereafter dissipates into broadly farcical and overlong runnings around
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot
Musical modernisation of The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York City with an All-Black cast. Despite a clear budget arrayed, the film lumbers and never much comes to life
The earliest surviving film version of The Wizard of Oz , one of a number made during the silent era. It makes interesting contrast to the 1939 version but at best serves as a series of highlights from the story and drawing heavily on the stage version in its often crude methods of presentation
An indisputable classic fantasy … a gorgeous sparkling fantasy that made full use of Technicolor in an era dominated by black-and-white and is told in such bold and earnestly heartfelt tones that it becomes the nearest we have to a piece of genuine American mythology
The biggest box-office hit six weeks in a row in 2020, albeit during Corona lockdown. This gets some extremely creepy effects in that managed to work on a jaded viewer
An absolutely extraordinary work of Folk Horror about a young witch who learns the ability to inhabit the bodies of others