Pop Culture Witches, Hollywood, and Me
When times are tough, a connection to inner power is more important than ever.
For the past year and a half, I’ve been writing, re-writing, and pitching a pilot about two lifelong friends and practicing witches who move to the fictional town of Westbrook to start over after one becomes a widow and the other goes through a divorce. The story was inspired when a close friend and fellow witch reached out to me and requested a pact: if we both outlive our husbands, we will move to Salem together and turn into the Aunts from Practical Magic. Obviously, I agreed.
As I’ve worked on it, the question has lingered in the back of my mind: where have all the Hollywood witches gone? My interest in the supernatural and the feminist ideology of many magickal practices has clearly been a product of the time in which I was raised. The 90s were a pop culture heyday for witchcraft and badass girls and women who regularly battled the forces of darkness and won. We had Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hocus Pocus, The Craft, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and of course Practical Magic, plus Nick-at-Night reruns of I Dream of Jeanie and Bewitched. In the book world, we were graced with Gregory MacGuire’s Wicked, the story of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West, and, obviously, Harry Potter.
Even as a kid, I knew that all of this was a culmination of decades worth of the love TV and movie audiences have felt for our favorite fictional witches. The 80s brought us Teen Witch and The Witches of Eastwick; in the 70s we had Season of the Witch and Susperia, in the 60s Bewitched, and prior to that we had Bell, Book, and Candle and I Married a Witch, just to name a few. I’ve been so in love with this evolution, I even recorded a podcast about it on Banned Media with Ronnie Ursenbach last year. Film history, feminism, and the supernatural? Consider me a proud scholar on the subject.
To my surprise and delight, I wasn’t the only creator out there asking where the witches went; Deadline recently announced the new show Something Wicked, a multi-camera comedy starring June Diane Raphael.
Anyone who works in or simply admires Hollywood knows we’ve been going through some challenging times here in La La Land. Hollywood is notorious for being a place that will suck the life out of you, completely determined to drain its many hopeful creators of their power. Lately, the double whammy of a Hollywood downturn and broader cost-of-living crisis across the whole economy has left many of us feeling, well, somewhat powerless in the struggle to get by.
This is where the magick becomes even more important. Magick isn’t just about manifesting desires and shaping the world around you to fit your will. At its core, it’s about the knowledge that your power will sustain you, no matter what. I can’t think of a better time to remind Hollywood of its love for magick; after all, the process of creating art and sharing it with the world is a form of magick in and of itself. We’re here for creation, inspiration, and miracles, and believe in these things so wholeheartedly, we’ve devoted our entire lives and careers to them.
As Hollywood struggles to find itself during these growing pains, I think we can all use a little magick to keep the faith. And I’ll still be here, writing, researching, weaving my spells into stories, watching the hell out of Something Wicked, and embracing the next generation of Hollywood witches.