Witchcraft
The old craft is real, someone in the village or the school is practicing it, and power always has a price.
Witchcraft5 to start
- 1The Craft1996
- 2The Witch2015
- 3Suspiria1977
- 4Witchfinder General1968
- 5The Love Witch2016
What defines it
- Era
- 1922 to today
- Mood
- dread, ritual, temptation
Witchcraft horror is about a bargain. Somewhere in the film a person has made one, for power, for youth, for love, for revenge, and the horror is in watching the price come due, or in watching the people who suspect them decide what to do about it. The form runs from the forest to the ballet school to the high school, and it has always been about who is allowed to want things.
The rules come from the folklore and the trials. A witch or a coven, hidden in a community, practicing something that works. A source of the power, usually a devil, usually with terms. Rituals, shown or implied: the circle, the familiar, the sabbath. A victim or an initiate, drawn in. And an accusation, because the form has always run alongside the history of witch hunts, and the best films are as interested in the hunters as in the hunted.
The form on film begins with Häxan (1922), the Swedish silent that staged the sabbath as a documentary and got banned for it. Hollywood mostly kept witches comic until the 1960s, when Britain turned serious: Night of the Eagle (1962), Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) built the folk horror that The Wicker Man (1973) finished. Italy went the other way with Suspiria (1977), Dario Argento's coven in a dance academy, all color and noise. The 1990s made the witch a teenager in The Craft (1996) and a legend in The Blair Witch Project (1999). Then Robert Eggers's The Witch (2015) restarted the form with Puritans, period speech and a goat, and a wave followed: The Love Witch (2016), Hagazussa (2017), Gretel & Hansel (2020), and Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018), which traded Argento's color for 1977 Berlin.
The signature techniques are about ritual and landscape. The circle in the woods, photographed as ethnography rather than spectacle. The familiar, the hare, the goat, the cat, watching from the edge of the frame. The spell that works, shown plainly. And the trial, where the accusation is the real violence.
- dread
- ritual
- temptation
Slow dread with a bargain in it: witchcraft horror scares by making the power real, and then showing you what the witch had to give for it.
- Axis
- Scare Score
- And
- Loved it
How it scares
This is dread with a bargain in it. Witchcraft films rarely jolt; they tighten, because the fear is the slow understanding that the power is real and the price is what you feared. The form lives in the uncanny, a lullaby, a goat, a kind neighbor, made wrong by what you now know they mean, and in the specific unease of temptation: the initiate in The Craft wants what Nancy has, and so, for a scene or two, do you.
The form gets to viewers who scare through ideas, and to anyone who grew up near a church. It gets to people who were ever the outcast at school, through The Craft, and to parents, through The Witch, where a family destroys itself looking for the witch in its own house. It is less effective on viewers who need a visible threat; the witch rarely does much on screen, and some people find the form slow rather than frightening. Those viewers often respond to Suspiria, where the craft is loud and the murders are set pieces.
How to rank it in Gasper
You answer which was scarier a handful of times, and the film finds its place among everything you have ranked. Loved it? Heart it.
- 1
Witchcraft films are a hard case in a head-to-head. You answer "How scary was it?" with Terrifying, Some scares or Barely flinched, and then "Which was scarier?" against films you gave the same answer. The Witch against a slasher is ninety minutes of daylight dread against a jolt; Suspiria against a ghost story is color against stillness. There is no conversion rate. The question is which one is still with you, and your honest answer is what places the film in your rankings.
- 2
Scores here split along the line between dread and style. The Witch lands as Terrifying for people who scare through ideas and as Some scares for people who need motion; Suspiria often runs the other way. Your first answer sets the band and the comparisons settle the order inside it, so a film you admired more than feared is only ever weighed against others that did the same, and its Scare Score, 0 to 10 with one decimal, is honest about it. A sunlit forest above a masked killer is a perfectly normal result on this page.
- 3
The heart often runs ahead of the score, because these are beautiful, deliberate films that many people admire more than they fear. The Craft with a "Loved this?" heart and a modest score is right for a film most people met at a sleepover. If The Witch got to you harder than you would like the feed to know, Stealth mode keeps the rank private and still counts it toward the Taste tab, where Witchcraft turns up as a Top subgenre for viewers who scare through dread rather than spectacle.
- 4
In Discover, the Witchcraft shelf sits beside Occult and Cults, and the Subgenre filter narrows any search to it. The Community Scare, the average of everyone who ranked a film, runs modest on the gentler end of this page and high on The Witch, which is a fair map, and a gap between your score and the crowd's on The Witch tells you a lot about how you scare.
Where to go next
Occult is the nearest neighbor, with Rosemary's Baby as the bridge between a coven and a cult of neighbors. Cults is the community version, from The Wicker Man to Midsommar. Demonic and possession are where the witch's devil goes when it stops waiting in the woods. Supernatural horror is the parent, and found footage gave the form its most famous witch, who never once appears on screen.
For deeper cuts, try Hagazussa (2017), a nearly wordless Alpine film about a goatherd and her mother that feels like a painting slowly rotting. The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) has children in a seventeenth-century English village dig up something and start a cult around it, grubby and strange. And Black Sunday (1960) is Mario Bava's debut, a witch executed with a spiked mask who comes back two centuries later, and the most beautiful black-and-white film in the form.
Questions about witchcraft
- They overlap more than any two forms in the genre. Folk horror is about a landscape and a community with old beliefs; witchcraft horror is about the craft itself and the person practicing it. The Witch is both. The Craft is only one, since there is no village, just a high school.
- Because the form is about power and who is allowed it. From the accusations of the 1600s to The Craft, witchcraft stories are about women who want something and take it, and about what the people around them do in response. The Witch ends with the question answered one way, Witchfinder General with it answered the other.
- No, though it looks like one. Argento took the giallo's style, the color, the set-piece murders, the score, and put it on a supernatural story about a coven running a ballet school. It belongs here, and the 2018 remake by Luca Guadagnino belongs here too.
- The Craft, then The Love Witch. One is a teen film with real menace and the other is a comedy with real craft. The Witch is slow and almost unbearable; Suspiria is loud and very bloody. Save both.
Is witchcraft horror the same as folk horror?
They overlap more than any two forms in the genre. Folk horror is about a landscape and a community with old beliefs; witchcraft horror is about the craft itself and the person practicing it. The Witch is both. The Craft is only one, since there is no village, just a high school.
Subgenres like this one
- SubgenreOccultSomeone opened the door on purpose: rituals, deals, puzzle boxes and the neighbors who have been planning this for years.
- SubgenreCultsThe community is the monster: a welcome, a belief, a ritual everyone has agreed to, and an outsider who understands too late.
- SubgenreDemonicThe demon is not inside anyone yet. It is in the woods, the cellar, the abbey, and it wants in.
Keep reading
- FeatureHead-to-head rankingAnswer which film was scarier a few times and Gasper places it in your rankings. You never type a number.
- FeatureScare scoreA measure out of 10 of how scary a film was for you, read from your own ranked list and shown in skulls.
- GlossaryDreadDread is the sustained, building fear that something terrible is coming, the slow counterpart to the jump scare in horror.
- GlossaryThe uncannyThe uncanny is the unease produced by something familiar that is subtly wrong, such as a doll, a double or a face that does not move right.
- GlossaryStealth modeStealth mode is Gasper's per-rank switch that hides that activity from the feed while the film stays in your rankings with its scare score.
Rank your witchcraft list.
Free on the App Store. Log a film tonight, answer which was scarier, and watch your rankings take shape.
