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.
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
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!
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
A lumbering, stagebound adaptation of Stephen Sondheim musical that lamely dips into the fairytale parody that Shrek and other films tapped far more engagingly over a decade ago
Another in the early 2010s fad for fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasy films – in this case, a version of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty told from the viewpoint of the witch
Modestly creepy adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a boy who realises that his grandmother is a witch who made a deal with a backwoods entity
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
NOT the Hayao Miyazaki film but a live-action version based on the same books, made by Takashi Shimizu of the Jun-on/The Grudge films fame. Replicating Miyazaki in live-action is a futile endeavour
This has an appealing premise – the children of all the Disney villains have grown up and go to school together. This is promptly killed by the awfulness of the film itself, which is essentially High School Musical set in the Disney universe
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
Nicolas Cage has never had a good relationship with the horror genre – remember The Wicker Man and Vampire’s Kiss? This gives all impression it was designed for the 50c bargain bins, in which Nic tries to save his missing son in what amounts to a supernatural version of Taken
Sequel to The Asylum’s spendidly grotesque Hansel & Gretel, this pits the two characters against one another for contrived reasons to justify its title but is just cheaply made
From the director of Hellbound: Hellraiser II, this is an unfunny monster comedy that plays out like it is trying to be a live-action version of the Hotel Transylvania films
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
This seemed to promise something of tv’s late lamented Constantine or the first Warlock. Instead what we end up with has been turned into a ponderous effects vehicle for Vin Diesel
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
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
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
Beguiling work about a modern witch that becomes a heady swim of provocative ideas about gender issues that is never less than captivating and the most gorgeously colour coordinated films you will ever see
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
The story of the relationship between a giant monster and a boy whose mother is dying of cancer, this is perhaps the darkest children’s film ever made. Adapted from an award-winning illustrated book
Sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. Despite low expectations, this emerged better than one thought it would. It has a better director and seems much more at home being an epic fantasy than the first film
Welsh director Caradog James impressed with his previous film The Machine. Here he makes a horror film concerning an urban legend about an old crone haunting those who disturb her, but fails to do anything notable
A modernisation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale cast as a hipster romance where the mermaid becomes a stripper, all shot with the gauzy soft focus of a feminine hygiene products commercial
A massive letdown of the year. A sequel that brings back several of the original cast and gives it to Yuen Wo-Ping to direct but is merely slickly paced, uninspired action that substitutes CGI for the graceful wirework of the original
This had me watched on the basis of the title alone. An Asylum production, this is less a twisted take on the fairytale than one that turns Little Red Riding Hood into a werewolf hunter
The Troll Hunter director Andre Øvredal creates an intense and absorbing mystery about a corpse on a morgue slab and the unsettling spell it exudes on the two coroners examining it
NOT the Guy Ritchie film but an Asylum mockbuster released at the same time. The most WTF take on the Arthurian legends ever with the Knights as gun-wielding US Marines
A passable B-budget film that came out in anticipation of Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. This is actually an Arthurian sequel, featuring Arthur’s son inheriting the sword.
This live-action remake of the Disney animated film is mounted with a lavishness. On the other hand, the romance at the centre never fully warms up, while the human characters have the show stolen from under by the cutlery and furnishings
Adaptation of a book by NZ author Margaret Mahy. Mahy has a sublimely poetic turn of phrase in the writing but the film strips the book down to the point we get no more than a by-the-numbers Young Adult work
Following the success of The Lego Movie, where he was a scene-stealing supporting character, Batman gets a whole Lego film to himself. Less a Batman film than it is a parody of Batman
Sequel to the painfully bad Disney Channel film that copied the success of High School Musical and featured the teenage children of classic Disney animated villains. This is just as empty-headed and unwatchable
The third film from former Studio Ghibli employee Hiromasa Yonebayashi. Yonebayashi is seen as the carrier of Hayao Miyazaki’s mantle, so much do his films look like lost Miyazaki works. This is sweet and amiable, even if it never hits the emotional heights Miyazaki does
Joe Cornish gained much buzz with Attack the Block. His follow-up film concerns a kid who inherits Excalibur. Cornish has fun translating elements of the Arthurian legends to the present-day
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
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
From the same people who made Demonic Christmas Tree, this is a supernatural retribution film that was sold as a Krampus film
Reboot of the Hellboy series promisingly comes from Neil Marshall but is also made by Millennium Films who have a habit of buying up previously successful properties and churning out cheaper spinoffs
Nobody much liked Maleficent but did make a reasonable amount of money, hence a sequel. The surprise is that in the hands of Norwegian director Joachim Rønning, it is far better than one expected
TV mini-series based on the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett novel that spoofs The Omen and Biblical End Times prophecies. The series is very close to the book as though it didn’t want to edit any precious gag
Sequel to the Russian-made horror film Viy, this is an historical fantasy with a big budget that mounts spectacular effects sequence and provides name stars, even if the results are utterly bizarre
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
The Disney live-action remake of Mulan finally arrives mired in controversy but the film itself proves a solid production for the most part, although never quite soars as a work of fantasy
Osgood Perkins emerges as a top director in this dark and extremely adult interpretation of the fairytale. There is nothing about this that can be viewed as a children’s tale any longer
A really bad low-budget film jumping aboard the Folk Horror bandwagon where construction work at a summer camp stirs druidic rituals from the past
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
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
A new Russian-made version of the Baba Yaga folktale where the old witch is rewritten as a seductive nanny stealing children and their parents’ memories of them
A visually extraordinary True Crime film based on the story of a Spanish woman who may or may not have abducted and killed a string of children in the 1910s
Bizarre family film in which Russian princess Anastasia travels through time to the present day and discovers mall culture
Blumhouse revival of/sequel to The Craft, the film about a quartet of teenage witches. This updates the original to the modern era in ways the original never did
Robert Zemeckis’s remake of the Roald Dahl story and Nicolas Roeg film proves a head-scratching effort that misfires on almost every cue
Weird Western where a group of outlaws on the run end up in a town of witches
Charming anime from Hayao Miyazaki’s son Goro about a young girl adopted into a witch’s strange household. The occasion where Studio Ghibli made the switch over to computer animation
A B-budget venture into the Arthurian Legends that never much finds the rich myth of the cycle and emerges as just a routine fantasy adventure
Spooky Russian film about a haunted plane flight, this recalls something of The Twilight Zone’s famous Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode
Work of Russian horror that heads into pleasingly dark places as a woman enacts a love spell to bring her boyfriend back to her where you just know that something horrible is going to happen
Another of the family efforts from The Adams Family – John Adams, Toby Poser and daughters. This is a unique and original film about modern witches living in backwoods New York
A low-budget adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story Dreams in the Witch House about a student who moves into a house with occult geometry and stirs dark forces
A strikingly directed film that conjures something of The Witch: A New-England Folktale in its depiction of the horrors present in a religiously oppressive household
David Lowery has emerged as a director to watch in the last few years. Here he conducts a beautifully sparse and more ambiguous take on the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Paco Plaza, best known for the [Rec] movies, returns with an unsettlingly effective film about a girl forced to tend her grandmother only to find increasingly sinister things going on
Surprisingly good animated sword and sorcery film, made with a darker edge and definitely not for children
The first of the Fear Street films, somewhat more adult than the usual R.L. Stine adaptations. This can be considered the first Woke era slasher film
The second of the R.L. Stine adapted Fear Street films, this one takes the action back to 1978 where it then becomes a vigorous homage to the slasher film
The third of the Fear Street films, this takes the story back to a 17th Century filled with absurdly modern attitudes and offers an explanation that ties everything together
A comic-book adaptation about vampire wars in a modern East European war zone. A slick Underworld-styled vampire action film that has some interesting ideas going on inside it
Doctor Strange was one of the better MCU films. Here Sam Raimi takes over in the director’s chair. This readily delves into multiverse themes but requires a major crash course in a plethora of Marvel tv series to follow
An absolutely extraordinary work of Folk Horror about a young witch who learns the ability to inhabit the bodies of others
Film that develops a Folk Horror vibe as Eva Green hires a nanny with mysterious healing powers. The horror version of Mary Poppins
A supernatural variant on Overlord where G.I.’s during WWII enter the Black Forest and encounter something supernatural
Jaume Balaguero of [Rec] fame returns with an occult horror where a woman on the run is drawn into sinister happenings at an apartment
As part of their attempt to sell everything including the family silver, Disney make a sequel to their witch comedy, bringing back the three original actresses who are now looking a lot longer in the tooth
Mike Flanagan horror mini-series adapted from Christopher Pike’s book, this is set around a group of patients in a hospice who form a group to tell each other horror stories
Folk Horror about the discovery of a witch’s body in a bog, this is a slow burn film that falls together with great subtlety
Robert Eggers, the director who made The Witch and The Lighthouse, makes a violent, primal Viking film steeped in Norse mythology
Disney’s original The Little Mermaid was an enormously fresh film. This is the live-action remake that came out amid much controversy and is inevitably a lesser shadow of the original.
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
A very strange Japanese-made blend of fairytale and detective story that takes place in the realm of fairytale where Little Red Riding Hood turns detective to solve a murder at Cinderella’s ball
A Halloween horror from a director with a reasonable genre association, this establishes its genre bona fides but then shoots itself in the foot
After a disastrous reboot of the Hellboy franchise, Millennium Media get it right, employing the comic’s creator on script, taking the series into wild directions with Hellboy up against Appalachian folk horrors
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
Essentially Christmas the Action Film featuring Dwayne Johnson as Santa’s bodyguard going into action accompanied by Chris Evans as a nerdy hacker when Santa is abducted
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
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
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 Adams Family have become one of the most impressive genre talents in recent years. It has been fascinating watching them explore a dark version of American folk horror – this takes them into the darkest places they have visited yet
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
An unusual, visually fascinating fantasy film where a knight enters into the realm of demons to save a girl, while being granted a talisman that allows him to continually be killed and resurrected
Paul W.S. Anderson adapts a George R.R. Martin fantasy story but somehow still manages to make it into another Resident Evil copy still starring Milla Jovovich
A reboot of Masters of the Universe, this fully embraces the mythology of the animated series and gives them great life. But is also a work that is constantly deflating any chance you are taking it seriously