Every 90s Witch Movie, Ranked, Part 2
It's aesthetically spooky season again, babies
Hello to you all! Halloween is almost here, and what better time to finish the ranking series that started it all (it being this newsletter, for which you are welcome) than right now a day before it is no longer seasonably appropriate for this list? As we all know, Christmas starts on November 1st now, so get your spooks in while you can. Wouldn’t you like to stick around to see if I get it together to publish this more often? Better subscribe to see if I do.
A little over a year ago, I embarked on a journey to rank all the witch movies from the 1990s, a list I broke into two parts because I wrote the first part and was tired and wanted to go to bed but also wanted the instant gratification of publishing a piece before writing part two. Like most projects, relationships, and Crest White Strip regimens I've undertaken in my life, I didn't bother to follow through to the end. Until now, that is! I'm back with the epic conclusion that a solid seven people have been awaiting with anticipation. Need to get caught up on part one? Click that link on the words "part one," obviously! If you need a refresher on how I ranked these films, they needed to contain elements of or meet the standards of the following:
- a witchy aesthetic
- men are not necessary for the world/magic of the movie to function
- the movie must work as an LGBTQ allegory on some level - as always, the queers love Halloween
and most importantly of all
- the movie must feature a black cat.
6. Matilda (1996)
If you're like, "Caitlin, this is not a witch movie," I guess you didn't read part one, because I started that baby off with Blair Witch Project and slipped in A Simple Wish at number 8. Matilda checks the boxes! Men aren't necessary - it's Matilda and Miss Honey's world, and we just grow up dreaming of living in it. The children need to band together to defeat a greater evil (in this case, a butch woman - I never said this story was unproblematic), and if that doesn't count as an LGBTQ allegory, the collective first queer crush so many millennials had on Embeth Davidtz's Miss Honey must count for SOMETHING. Though the aesthetic is more peak 90s gaudy and floral than witchy, you can't tell me Miss Honey wasn't growing specific herbs and charging crystals in the moonlight in that little cabin.
Becoming a witch or gaining magic powers and being able to make pancakes by myself or whatever Matilda's deal was, specifically through being a voracious reader, was all I ever wanted as a child. I wanted Matilda’s friends to be my friends, I wanted to do cartwheels in the living room, I wanted to summon Moby Dick through the air to me. This might just be my favorite movie, and - look - is its inclusion here a nostalgia exercise? Maybe, but what isn’t these days? And it still ranks higher than the other Dahl entry here, The Witches. Pam Ferris should have won an Oscar for her delivery of the line, "why are all these women MARRIED???"
IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Yes!
5. Casper Meets Wendy (1998)
1998 gave us many things, most of which I'm too lazy to research to include here. No matter what else happened in that year (and please don't tell me any of those events), I think we can all agree that the most culturally relevant thing to happen was the cinematic debuts of two actresses who'd come to dominate the pop culture landscape of the aughts: Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff. While Lohan did double duty in The Parent Trap, Duff played the titular good little witch in Casper Meets Wendy.
As the title implies, Wendy and her witch aunts meet Casper and his ghost uncles at a Dirty Dancing-esque resort the witches are using to hide from a warlock who has it out for Wendy and the ghosts are using for purposes of sowing body horror-based chaos. The adult cast of this film has to have owed a favor to someone. Wendy's aunts, who are horny beyond belief in general but especially for Casper's uncles in human form (I'd explain how the movie gets us there, but that might take an entire other multi-part newsletter to explain; the movie is on youtube for free - just watch it), are played by Cathy Moriarty, Shelley Duvall, and TERI GARR ("do you think Elaine May saw this movie, you know, in solidarity with Teri?" a friend wondered when I told her of this casting). These women may have signed onto this project for a paycheck, but they showed up on set ready to EARN IT each day, and I think we're all supposed to just forget that Cathy Moriarty is the villain in the first Casper movie. Fine. George Hamilton plays the villainous warlock, and also Ben Stein is in this for some reason.
Wendy the Witch is the coolest dressed and most glamorous person to ever exist, at least if you asked me in elementary school. Is this movie particularly spooky or witchy? Outside of the Spirit Halloween witches costumes everyone wears, not really, as most of the action takes place at a resort with a limbo competition on the schedule. The witches in this movie could probably get along fine without men, even though there's at least one warlock who causes trouble in this world. Humans (and ghosts!) are definitely afraid of witches, and everyone must work to overcome biases in a faintly LGBTQ allegory way. The CGI in this film looks like it was done by a second semester CalArts student for course credit. What gets this entry so high on the list, however, is that if you double featured this and Practical Magic, another iconic witch movie from 1998, you'd be like, "wait, did they just make different versions of this movie but for children and adults?" In fact, I want to see a remake where the Casper Meets Wendy aunts and the Practical Magic aunts swap places, if for no other reason than I deserve to see Dianne Wiest as Teri Garr as Cathy Moriarty's sister and Hilary Duff's aunt. And because the prepubescent camp creep who really wants to date Wendy would grow up to be Nicole Kidman's abusive boyfriend, without a doubt.
IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Okay, look, I honestly forgot to take note of if there was or was not a cat in this movie because I was so sucked in by how much I wanted and still want Wendy's little red formal dress for myself, and I do not have the mental strength for another close watch to see if one turns up, so let's just say yes.
4. The Craft (1996)
You know what, I’ll get this out of the way right off the bat: my friends and I were dangerously close to doing The Craft in elementary school. The only thing that stopped us was that none of us were old enough to be allowed to see the movie or go to pagan and/or occultist stores without a parent or guardian. And honestly, what a blessing that was, because this movie is SCARY, everyone!
The scariest element of all is probably Robin Tunney’s wig, which alternates from lace front to hard front and at one point seems to be colorized blonde in post, frame by frame. And a wig has to be bad to be worse than Christine Taylor’s scabbing hair-loss wig, which is her hex punishment for being a racist bully toward Rachel True. When one considers the scene where Neve Campbell’s burn scars are peeled off of her, one must ask: is this movie more about witchcraft or body horror, honestly?
Fairuza Balk gives one of cinema’s most iconic and enduring “is this good acting like an unhinged person or is this just unhinged?” performances. And, like, YEAH, she’s power-hungry and bonkers, but the way she freaks out on the misogynistic jock just before frightening him out of a window was JUSTIFIED and DESERVED. When she walks on water after her little coven invokes the spirit (which had to have inspired Demi Lovato and friends), it’s like, “oh, so that’s what this movie is,” which is metaphors about false prophets and cults and power, if you think about it. Or it’s about fast fashion goth aesthetic, whichever.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of The Craft is how it inspired an entire aesthetic for people who wear pentagrams and black lipstick unironically. I’m not going to to full journalistic research on 90s high school goth culture, because this is a thing I write for free for approximately six people (but you could become a paid subscriber at any time!), but I will confidently say that this movie has a lot to do with their whole deal. It is, needless to say, very witchy, and while men aren’t necessary for the magic of this world to function, the big plot conflicts stem from wanting men at all. Our coven could have been so much happier if they’d have simply leaned into queerness.
IS THERE A BLACK CAT: I don’t…think so? I was so worried about the fate of the beach invocation ceremony animals and then upset about the sharks that I had to stop paying attention to animals in general in this movie.
3. Halloweentown (1998)
There was something SPOOKY in the air in 1998, and it probably stemmed from knowing that millions of American children would soon be learning the word "blowjob" just from watching CSPAN. Incredible year to be six years old, absolutely no notes. If that was the sacrifice we had to make to get to introduce those same children to Debbie Reynolds through her role in the Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) Halloweentown, though, it was well worth it. Like, it's DEBBIE REYNOLDS!! She is in a hard front synthetic wig. She flies on a broomstick, and the fan blowing on her to to make it look like she's flying through the wind blows the synthetic bangs back to reveal the hard front on said wig; this flying sequence is still more convincing than the flying Cathy Moriarty does in Casper Meets Wendy. Debbie's contour is sharp and she gave this movie her ENTIRE all. Maybe another criterion for how I ranked these movies should have been if there was a woman over 50 wearing crushed velvet chewing the scenery. The score of this movie is all synths right from the top, which is how you know it's gonna be a good time.
If you told me the concept for Halloweentown was reverse engineered after someone at Disney came across a warehouse full of Halloween costumes on extreme markdown, I'd be like "sure." Even so, the mythology of Halloweentown the place is taken gorgeously seriously. The magic is practical and yet high fantasy. Halloweentown itself was founded as a refuge for magical creatures. As Debbie says, "humans feared us and tried to destroy us, so we did our best to make them miserable in return, but it made us evil, which we are not, so we decided to create our own world." And that world even has dentists and sweat boxes for ghosts, imagine.
Though warlocks are again a part of this world, the spooky creatures forming a spooky separatist utopia is essentially an example of allegory they give in freshman English class so you can get a really broad sense of the device. Halloweentown has moments that are genuinely dark and scary, but just as the gays on the Britney Boat had to come together to defeat the Demon Twink, so must the Cromwell family come together to defeat the evil in their midst and return their world away from the straight mortals to peace and harmony.
IS THERE A BLACK CAT: I'm not sure if there's, like, a cute little kitty cat black cat, but there's a woman in a full prosthetics cat costume teaching an aerobics class at one point.
2. Hocus Pocus (1993)
A few years ago, I watched Hocus Pocus with a group of friends, including one who was raised evangelical and was not allowed to see Hocus Pocus as a child because of the witchcraft; he informed us that, after seeing it for the first time as an adult, this movie was not good. He was wrong then, he is wrong now, and if you agree with him, go away. Hocus Pocus is a modern masterpiece that introduced so many of us to camp and Bette Midler’s belt at formative ages.
Every element of this movie - production design, mythology, performances, and musical numbers - is iconic and top-notch. It has a running bit about a teenage boy being a virgin, which his eight year old sister mocks him for relentlessly (and to be frank, the person you have a crush on finding out you’re a virgin because you resurrect three witches through a process only a virgin can initiate is humiliating, but not as humiliating as your kid sister shouting you’re a virgin to anyone who will listen). At one point, Bette Midler nearly performs Emily’s monologue from Our Town. Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker understand how to give and take focus in a way that makes it look easy. You could watch this movie one billion times and still find something new in the Sanderson Sisters’ performances; Bette, Kathy, and Sarah Jessica should have won a special group Oscar for this film. Also, Garry and Penny Marshall play a married couple?? Iconic, perfect film, don’t ask questions.
Hocus Pocus is easily why I was so obsessed with witches as a child. Wikipedia gives a lot of credit to 13 Nights of Halloween for reviving it as a cult classic, but I was a fan from probably 1994 on and have the well-worn VHS to prove it. This, coupled with my Catholic upbringing, had me seeking a lot of answers about virgins that my family was unprepared to give to a three year old. It gave me unrealistic expectations for the Halloween costumes I should expect to wear as a teen, thanks to the FULL CORSET Allison wears to her parents’ costume fête. We are gifted not only Bette Midler’s rendition of I’ll Put a Spell on You, but also SJP performing a lullaby to hypnotize and lure children (that is also the most convincing broomstick riding of any 90s witch movie - a standout in a movie that already has very convincing broom/mop/vacuum riding).
The Sandersons do have a zombie ex-boyfriend, but aside from him, they’re content to be three women spending quiet evenings at home sucking the lives out of little children. Though the Sandersons are the movie’s villains (allegedly), they fit so neatly into an LGBTQ allegory, though as homophobes’ worst ideas of queer people (slutty, obsessed with looks, literally want to eat children).
People only pull Hocus Pocus out at Halloween, which is a mistake Disney agrees with, as they originally released it in July. And while some of you may incorrectly argue this movie is “not good,” (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE), the rest of us know it stands the test of time. When the Sandersons are brought back in a scene that frightened me so much as a child, as an adult, I feel nothing but delight as I prepare to greet my batty but hilarious old friends. And THAT, friends, is called both personal growth and the hallmark of a modern classic.
IS THERE A BLACK CAT: YES AND I WOULD DIE FOR THACKERY BINX.
1. Practical Magic (1998)
What is there to say? A lot, to be honest, but if you don’t feel warm in your soul just hearing or reading the title of this movie, we have little compatibility as friends. Practical Magic didn’t come into my life until my mid-20s, but once it did, it felt like a movie I had known my whole life. It starts with Stockard Channing in voice over in a strong mid-Atlantic dialect, and nothing has ever been made more specifically for me than that.
Are witchtok and cottage core real or are they just aesthetics that have been built up around the Practical Magic fandom? Which one of those aunts taught Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman how to drive and why are we not treated to a surely comedic montage around it? Does everyone laugh at young Sally making a trait of her impossible man being marvelously kind, or just me? I don’t need answers to these questions, but they come up every time I rewatch the movie.
Men are so non-essential to Practical Magic’s, well, practical magic that any man who loves our witches will literally die. They do break this curse in the end, but only after yet another zombie ex-boyfriend almost kills Nicole and a whole coven of women comes together to be honorary witches to save her. It’s terribly exciting both that all it takes to be a level one witch is Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest’s blessing and that one could be initiated into Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest’s coven via phone tree (my most on-brand way to join a coven). The LGBTQ allegory here smacks you in the face so hard that when Sandra Bullock eventually announces she’s a witch, it’s described as coming out. I do not think we can actually be sure those aunts are sisters and not “sisters.”
Practical Magic became probably the most sane selection on the roster of my comfort movies in the worst parts of the pandemic (which remains ongoing - please get your boosters if eligible!); while I turned to Margaret and The Hours to anesthetize myself to the everyday horrors of my world through immersion in the horrors of those worlds, Practical Magic was a hug from an old friend. If I could live forever in any single movie scene, it would be the Midnight Margaritas scene: getting drunk, dancing around, and not wearing a bra (I spend some nights by myself this way and I will ASK you to withhold judgement). In the time when we couldn’t be together with the people we loved most, watching the Owens be together in the most perfect of ways ached. But when friends sent me a video of them reenacting the scene in their apartment last Halloween? That ached, too - but in a good way. It was a promise that if we all kept up belief in what we most wished for, the world we wanted could be possible again. And isn’t that what a good witch movie is for? Well, that and beloved character actresses in wigs.
Also, MARGOT MARTINDALE is in this!!!
IS THERE A BLACK CAT: Yes, and it’s possible Nicole Kidman is dating it.
Did I get the list right? Did I get it wrong? Should I have figured out a way to justify including the Addams Family movies on here like I once thought I could or should? Let me know in the comments!
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