Every 90s Witch Movie, Ranked

It's aesthetically spooky season, babies

We owe them so much.

It was October 1998, we were singing a song about witches in first grade music class, and I was ALIVE. As McAnnulty Elementary’s foremost expert on witchcraft and most on-pitch singer, this was my time to shine. The music teacher was asking the class if witches were really real, and before I could launch into my well-thought didactic monologue about the secret virtue of the spooky, a chorus of “NOOOOO” raised up around me. I joined in with my peers, but I fiercely whispered yes to myself, understanding for the first time that maybe my witch thing made me a little different. Indeed, this was something to build an entire personality around, alienating as many of my peers as possible in the process.

The 90s were a prime time to be a witchy child who watched too many movies - it was a decade of so many movies! As we live through the horrors of yet another 31 Nights of Halloween on FreeForm and the horrors of a world in chaos, we deserve the comfort of the controlled horror of a 90s witch movie. And the world deserves my judgement on those movies.

As I see it, a witch movie must feel witchy in a way that makes me want to plant herbs and move to a cottage and wear linen layered under velvet/statement accessories. Men must not be necessary for the world of the movie to function. On some level, the movie must function as an LGBTQ allegory (gay people love Halloween). And most importantly, the movie must feature a black cat. By these standards, I’ve ranked every 90s witch movie from worst to best.

12. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Let’s get this out of the way: this is not a witch movie. Sure is easy to be misled by the title if you’ve never seen it, though! The Blair Witch Project checks none of my witch movie boxes. Two of the three main characters are, in fact, men. The titular Blair Witch is never even seen onscreen, and I googled that to be certain, which has resulted in an unfortunate number of Instagram ads that incorrectly assume I’m the person to target for horror-adjacent ads.

This is the non-allegorical tale of a group of assholes making bad choices; the biggest takeaway I had was “take more than one map on your haunted woods trip.” I will be writing a treatment for a Christopher Guest inspired movie about the cast of weirdo locals interviewed at the top of the film, however, and our protagonist is absolutely the baby.

IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Regrettably, there is not a black cat.

11. Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Witch movies can be horror movies, but not every horror movie with witches is a witch movie. Such is the case with Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, a movie about Johnny Depp looking like he’s moments from death in every frame. There are so many, many men in this world, and each of them is more horny and made stupid by their horniess than the last. The women in this film are demonized for being suspected of witchcraft, yet the narrative revolves around how that impacts the men.

It’s unfortunate that this is not a real witch movie, because the mythology of the craft in this world is genuinely captivating and a lot of it seems to be based in modern dance and anachronistically low-cut bodices. I’d love to live in this world (mostly to have a shot at wearing Christina Ricci’s entirely impractical cloak), but I do not want to be a witch in this world, and a movie with witches that doesn’t make me want to join the coven misses the mark.

IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Once AGAIN, there is not a black cat to be found.

10. The Crucible (1996)

Well certainly, this is an allegory for SOMETHING! This is absolutely a movie about witches in a roundabout way, and we even get to see some conjuring and blood drinking up top that’s only mentioned onstage in additional dialogue that I hope Arthur Miller wrote (I could look this up, but simply shall not). What makes this count as a witch movie is the fervency with which I tried to steer discussion of the play The Crucible toward a meditation on McCarthyism and The House Un-American Activities Committee in 11th grade English class. All it took to get 13 year old me obsessed with this work was the teacher of my Saturday acting class giggling that Arthur Miller was calling the United States Senate a gaggle of shrieking teenage girls, a line that somehow did not move my public high school peers in the way it moved me when I repeated it to them.

This movie has a fine roster of beloved character actors to rival Bombshell (2019) and weather as symbolism to rival The West Wing (1999-2006). It’s not particularly spooky and I would prefer to not be a person accused of witchcraft in Salem, but I will always hold The Crucible dear. Mostly, this is due to a planned but ultimately not produced high school production in which I auditioned for Abigail Willaims and was cast as Elizabeth Proctor, with my best friend auditioning for and cast in the reverse. We both hated the kid cast as John Proctor, so we did come out on top in the end.

IS THERE A BLACK CAT: No.

9. Double, Double, Toil, and Trouble (1993)

If you told me the Olsen Twins wrote this screenplay themselves and then sent it to Cloris Leachman to punch up her lines only, I would believe you without a moment’s hesitation. From top to bottom, this is pure children’s logic. Good witches love being twins! Bad witches hate being twins! There’s an adult character who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the lore of the witches in this universe who is befuddled by the concept of twins! When the Olsens go missing (for HOURS on HALLOWEEN), every parent and cop in the neighborhood tells their parents to calm down and not make a big deal out of it; elsewhere, the twins have run off with two adult men who are far too eager to hang out with twin girls and who live in homes that could only be viewed as whimsical through the eyes of seven year olds (an encampment under a bridge and an unmapped three room playhouse).

The meeting of the evil coven that so terrified me as a child is a gathering of four goths and two character actresses that reads like a weeknight drag show in deep Brooklyn through my now adult eyes. Cloris Leachman should have won 100 Emmys for her part in elevating this otherwise pedestrian made for television movie into high camp by virtue of her commitment to scowling. This movie isn’t an LGBTQ allegory, as the witches are neither winkingly a little bit different nor villanious archetypes of an evangelical’s worst idea of queer people. It does have a touching commitment to the importance of sisterhood, even if one of the illustrative flashbacks to demonstrate this ostensibly takes place in the 1940s but features the Olsens dressed like the ghosts of Victorian aristocrats.

IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Finally!!!

8. A Simple Wish (1997)

Strictly speaking, this is a Fairy Godmother movie, but what is a fairy godmother but a witch in pastels, as posited by the rules of magic in this “children’s-fantasy-comedy film” (per Wikipedia)? This movie makes the list for one reason and one reason only: Kathleen Turner, to whom I owe a great deal for this performance alone. Kathleen showed up on set her first day feeling a bit peckish, thought to herself, “ah, but craft services is so far away,” then had the idea to make a meal of the set by chewing away on the scenery. At one point, she offers no-older-than-nine Mara Wilson brandy. She walks into an apartment and declares, “what a dump!” and I have to believe that was her entire audition for the 2005 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This is not an allegory for anything, but Kathleen Turner does breathily scoff, “and that’s what happens when you send a man to do a woman’s job,” which is an excellent line and delivery, even though it’s a point of view we probably shouldn’t be agreeing with, as it’s said by the movie’s villain and all.

I would join Kathleen Turner’s coven in a heartbeat, even though its only member seems to be Amanda Plummer starring in a sequel to Sylvia that no one asked for. Yes, Kathleen Turner is defeated by being trapped in a mirror like Cloris Leachman in DDTaT before her. Yes, the movie becomes much less interesting without her. However, for sticking it through to the end, we are treated to a Broadway production of a baldly ripped off from Frank WIldhorn musical adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities that breaks every single Equity rule that has ever been written. It’s a far, far better thing that I do now, indeed.

IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Yes!

7. The Witches (1990)

It is deeply troubling to me when a man writes a story about witches and makes them ugly and evil. It’s more deeply troubling when you think of a witch movie as an LGBTQ allegory and consider that Roald Dahl’s witches’ raison d'être seems to be killing children with no other aims at all. These witches are lurking everywhere in plain sight, ready to corrupt and murder the youth without hesitation, and we must FEAR them!! At least half the witches in this movie are played by men in Queen Elizabeth drag. They’re all in drag, really, it turns out, as they’re all bald and scabby, with the Grand High Witch the scabbiest of them all. Despite all that, the Grand High Witch provides us with the most joyful element of this movie: Anjelica Huston. She gnashes through a German accent in a way that makes her frequent utterances of “witches” sound like “bitches,” which has tickled me for 25 odd years. She tosses her hair and rolls her eyes and throws her head back in laughter and writhes (writhes!!) with unabashed delight in her own evil, best exemplified in the moment when she gleefully pushes a baby in a pram down a cliff for seemingly no other reason than that she can, waving and cackling, “bye-bye!” at it as it goes.

Huston is a welcome distraction from our purported protagonist, a child pulled from a stack of headshots of generic cloyingly earnest late 80s child actors. At one point, our boy-mouse hero (oh, right, the witches’ entire evil plan revolves around turning every child into a mouse) hatches a scheme to foil the witches’ evil plot. When his grandmother rightly worries his idea is too dangerous, he whines back, “GRAAAAAMAAAA!!” as if she has just told him no, he cannot have ice cream for dinner. He quickly resigns himself to being a mouse for the rest of his life, which seems a little low stakes, if I’m being honest. All is not lost, though, as after the boy-mouse has defeated most of the witches, a defector who has turned into a good witch comes back to turn him back to a human, at which point the boy-cum-boy-mouse is bafflingly nude (1990, man!). Overall, this movie reminds me of the things about Roald Dahl I often like to forget, chiefly that he hates women and fat people and Jews. Anjelica Huston, though! She should have won 10,000 Academy Awards for this movie.

IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Thank you GOD, yes.

As you may have noticed by my numbered list, there are six more 90s witch movies, but for both marketing and brevity related reasons, I will be bringing those rankings to you in a later newsletter. Also very possible I made midnight margaritas as inspired by a pick you’ll hear about in part two and simply cannot write anymore at this juncture. Whatever, stay tuned for the rest of the rankings in the next few days, and remember to watch your head.

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