Beautiful and damned, ruthless and whimsical, witches have long exerted their spell on popular culture. Discover their influence on cinema and its music.

Daughters of freedom, revolutionary healers or worshippers of the devil? Witches have been among us since the dawn of time. Documents from all cultures have borne witness to them, from Greco-Roman to Celtic mythology. And this fascination endures to this day. 

In Bologna, Palazzo Pallavicini is hosting, until 16 June, an entire exhibition dedicated to the iconographic figure of the witch in a journey across Art Nouveau lithographs, bloody executions, scandals and ancient engravings, mostly coming from the Museum Of Witchcraft And Magic in Boscastle, England – one of the world’s leading collections on the subject.

The media, from cinema to literature, always had a fundamental role in consecrating the mystery of these subversives of history, playing upon the attraction generated by an impactful aesthetic: magic and seductive, but also gothic and occult. Witches represent female power, rebellion, danger, the unknown. And often, they embody the mystery of women themselves.

Witches in love

Hence the bonfires, hence the inquisitions and persecutions by the Church, hence the widespread hatred and fear? Perhaps so. This is indeed what takes place in the Italian drama La strega in Amore (1966), a unique detour in Damiano Damiani’s style and production.

The black and white film, inspired by the novel Aura (1962) by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, follows a magical realism in which eroticism and esotericism, the real and the paranormal intertwine to become one. The backdrop is an ancient Roman mansion, decadent and full of books, in whose courtyard the story culminates in a mad and perverse stake with the protagonist, the very sensual Rosanna Schiaffino, evoking the witch-hunting season. 

Of all the spells, the most magnetic is cast by the music, almost a voodoo dance. Argentinian composer Luis Enriquez Bacalov combines exotic Afro-Cuban motifs, percussion and flutes, with the jazz vocals of Nora Orlandi, so that the entire soundtrack seems to set the stage for an ancestral and intoxicating ritual of seduction. 

Witches look like any other women, Roald Dahl would say, but those in this and other films of the genre are well-dressed, charmantes and extremely elegant.

Witches look like any other women, Roald Dahl would say, but those in this and other films of the genre are well-dressed, charmantes and extremely elegant. This is most evident the eloquently-titled Le streghe (The Witches, 1967)  the omnibus film boasting directors of the calibre of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Mauro Bolognini, Franco Rosi and Vittorio De Sica. The charme of the five modern days witches, interpreted on four occasions by an outstanding and histrionic Silvana Mangano, find a striking match the elegance of the costumes and, as well, soundtrack, composed by Ennio Morricone (for the Pasolini’s ‘The Earth Seen from the Moon’) and Piero Piccioni, in one of his most representative works.

This very same essence was tributed and emphasised, half a century later, by Anna Biller, director of The Love Witch (2016). The work celebrates the iconographic potential of 1960s witchcraft and occult cinema, reinterpreting it from a feminist perspective. Biller, as if in a spell, faithfully brings back to life a carousel of rings, go-go dresses, psychedelia and pastel-tinged make-up, to then subvert this dreamy, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls-like scenario with macabre humour.

The myth of the maneater, the archetypal ancestor of Circe, the sorceress who seduces and abandons for the sake of sadism, to punish her victims – greedy, weak or naive men – in a constant search for the perfect love. The very same obsession that will lead the protagonist Elaine (Samantha Robinson) to the brink of madness.

Witchery will be televised

If in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, the figure of the witch took on the contours of a femme fatale of the paranormal. Instead, on the small screen (and especially in the States) the tones of comedy prevailed, in a balance of witchy love stories and Even in cartoon form, as in Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1970), the series that inspired a successful 1990s remake.

Among the most famous television witches is Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), the protagonist of Bewitched, the series produced by ABC and broadcast to great public acclaim between 1964 and 1972. In the placid surroundings of the American suburbia, the plot revolves around a sorceress in disguise and her husband Darrin (Dick York), your quintessential mad man, the ad man of 1960s Fifth Avenue. 

Similar societal dynamics can be also found in I Dream of Jeannie, NBC’s answer to the successful series broadcast by their competitor. It was distributed in Italy under the familiar title of Strega in amore, suggesting a not-so-subtle reference to the film by Damiani. Once again the protagonist is a blonde witch, Jeannie (Barbara Eden), summoned from a bottle found on a Pacific beach by astronaut Tony (Larry Hagman), and in which she had been trapped for two thousand years.

The witch in Italian comedy

With the 1980s, the comic side of the witch and the unpredictable side effects resulting from their magic spells also spread to Italian comedy, as in Mia moglie è una strega (1980). A film directed by Castellano & Pipolo and starring Renato Pozzetto and Eleonora Giorgi.

The first scene opens with a sabbatical, where a group of barefoot women spin in a wild dance around what looks like a walnut tree. Giorgi plays the witch Finnicella, sent to earth three hundred and thirty-three years after her death by the devil Asmodeo to take revenge for being burnt at the stake by a cardinal. The chosen victim is Emilio Altieri (Pozzetto), a distant descendant of the latter, whom the witch is supposedly on a mission to seduce and kill. But witches are witches, until they fall in love… and with Rome as a backdrop, it’s hard not to fall into temptation.

The entertaining soundtrack is by Detto Mariano and the final credits roll to the notes of the “Magic”, sung by Eleonora Giorgi herself. 

Descendants of a matrilineal archetype, hungry for knowledge and revolution, the witches of yesterday sacrificed their bodies in the name of freedom, their creative selves and desire. How will today’s witches deal with the themes of transfeminism, war and struggle? And what about us? Because after all, we are all a little bit of witches under the skin.

Opening image: Frame from The Love Witch, Anna Biller, 2016.