New York! Get Your Witch On At This Film Archive Screening Series
The author of THAT VERY WITCH curates a collection of hex-cellent rarities to celebrate her book's launch.
It was such a pleasure working with Anthology Film Archives to bring some of the lesser-seen witch films in my book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, to the big screen! The book explores the relationship between feminist movements in America and the witch horror films that responded to them, drawing a throughline across more than fifty years of cinema to unpack the powerful sway this cinematic boogeywoman holds over our cultural imagination.
With this selection, I hope to draw attention to stranger, more idiosyncratic, or rougher-around-the-edges examples of the subgenre over time, some familiar, some less so. These four films bring you a cavalcade of acid trips, burlesque shows, giant ghost birds, and laser beams, casting feminist spells that have either earned them a rightful place in the cult canon, or deserve to!
You can get your tickets here; the screening series is running from August 27th to August 31st.
The films:
Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn, 1962, Sidney Hayers)
Though Night of the Eagle is technically a British film, this atmospheric chiller is an AIP picture conceived by two American horror stalwarts, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, both novelists and veterans of The Twilight Zone. This film, a sordid psychological thriller about men, women, and the lies they tell each other, is a great entry point into the anxieties at the heart of the witch films that would eventually come to dominate the 1960s horror cycle: When a psychology professor with a focus on superstition learns his wife practices witchcraft, his worldview is tested and his life is brought to the brink. Bridging the gap between classic ‘40s horror films like Cat People and titans like Rosemary’s Baby with crafty plotting and stark cinematography, Night of the Eagle is a haunting look at some of the simmering fears around gender, religion and the social contract that eventually defined the politics of the decade.
This movie creeps up on you. In the beginning it feels almost like a parlor room drama: Hayers’ direction and Reginald Wyer’s frosty, formal shooting style gets you comfortable, presenting the staid protagonist and his ordered life in almost mundane terms. Soon, though, this drama begins to take on an uncanny quality that ratchets up–– that formality begins to warp and stretch, made into a tangible surface people hide behind. In that sense the style really feels like a precursor to . Creepy! I love the scenes on the beach at night too, they remind me of classic ‘40s horror like or . Of all the films on this list, I think feels the most like a peek into someone else’s bad dreams.
