Life lessons from teen witches
In honor of the month of October, Dani and I have been doing fun classic spooky-scary genres.
Earlier this month was Lingering Spirits (Phantom of the Megaplex, Canterville Ghost, and What Lies Beneath), Creepy Mansions (Haunted Mansion, Ready or Not), and Monster Hunting (Girl VS Monster, Brothers Grimm). Our formula, for maximum enjoyment, has been an intentional blend of Disney Original Movies, completely unknown garbage films, and then closing out with genuinely quality movies. The beauty of this model, from a story-telling perspective, is that you get to see classic genre tropes playing out both successfully and poorly. For example: Haunted Mansion and Ready or Not both delight in the exploration of a large, ancient estate full of secrets, but while Ready or Not has insightful opinions about wealth and dynastic families, Haunted Mansion is a nonstop dumpsterfire of cinematic disappointments. With that all said, Our Teen Witch Night was a solid experience from end to end. We selected Twitches (Disney+), Teen Witch (Hulu HBO add-on), and The Craft (Amazon Prime purchase). Here are some takeaways:
1. If You’re a Witch, Magic Finds You
I’m starting with this theme because it’s one of the few that is actually consistent through all 3 films in this night. Since these are all coming-of-age stories, these young ladies all “come into their powers” much the way we all “I guess come into adulthood but really we all hate this concept and how it’s presented.” Reductively, it boils down to movies equating magic with puberty. Your changing body, am I right? So for these films to nail this principle, all of our protagonists are clueless to their powers until these changes start occurring. The Twitches just turned 21, so when they finally discover each other, they find out they have incredible twin powers. Also, did I mention they’re twins? Twin witches? Twitches?
Sorry, Tia and Tamara. We chose Twitches before we realized you didn’t actually qualify for Teen Witch night. 21-Year-Old Witch Night just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Image property of The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.
For Teen Witch, Louise gets run off the road by her beau while he’s making out in a car and cruising at the same time (oh, the 80s), which drives her and her cute 80s bike right to the door of a fortune-teller. These metaphors write themselves. Boy crush unexpectedly drives girl to seek help from fortune-teller? Done and done. The fortune-teller is our gatekeeper to the other world, so she makes Louise’s journey virtually painless. She doesn’t have to seek power, destiny has brought her to this place. The Craft, on the other hand, is an interesting winding journey. Bonnie sees Sarah pulling off a fancy pencil-stand-on-point spell (that old gem) and figures maybe this girl got power, so the three witchy lasses approach and enfold her into their coven. It’s tough when you’re the new girl in town, sometimes you gotta make friends with witches. We’ve all been there.
Remember that time you were new in school and you casually join a coven? NBD. Image property of Columbia Pictures. All rights reserved.
The sad fact of all of these is that the protagonists lack agency when it comes to their powers. The Twitches are very obviously interfered with, as they are marked for death. Louise just happens to end up at that fortune-teller’s house and for some reason gets a palm reading instead of asking to use a phone. The 80s really were a mystery. Sarah from The Craft has the most agency of the 3, but she’s really recruited rather than seeking these powers or answers. I guess we don’t really seek puberty out, it just happens to us, but honestly as story-tellers, we can and should do better.
2. Magic is a Form of Wish Fulfillment
This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but when witches use magic, it’s typically a form of wish fulfillment. They seek otherworldly power to achieve what they previously felt was unattainable. Twitches is perhaps the exception to this, as magic is their birthright and how they’ll overcome “The Darkness,” which is possibly the laziest name for a villain since Dr. No. But both Teen Witch and The Craft present heroines struggling with boys and high school, and fortuitously coming into their power just when it can aid them in these struggles. In Teen Witch, Louise Miller is woefully uncool with an awful younger brother, a steamy but unattainable crush, a bullying English teacher, and zero recognition in school. Fortunately, magic will empower her to overcome all of these obstacles and more.
Isn’t it every teen girl’s wish to have the popularity of a fictional pop star at any cost? Image property of Trans World Entertainment. All rights reserved.
Similarly, the other witches of The Craft have their own deep desires to be fulfilled by magic- love, revenge, beauty, UNLIMITED POWER. For TV series that play with witches, like Sabrina or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you get similar elements, though usually only an episode at a time. It’s easy to exhaust the trope of Wish Fulfillment, since it essentially has one possible outcome:
3. Be Careful What You Wish For
You wanna be BIG? Well guess what? Adult feelings are hard, and sometimes everything’s cool and you get to work for a toy company and touch a lady’s boobies, but sometimes you just want to go home and be a child. It turns out this lesson covers many plots. Want money? Well Blank Check and Wall Street both have news for you. Want fame? See Josie and the Pussycats or Birdman. Everybody loves a good cautionary tale. So one inevitability is that witches will abuse their powers and suffer for taking the easy way. Twitches mostly fails this formula. It’s really more of an orphan/twin story than a story of magic. Sure, they discover their powers and use them. But they really don’t learn anything about the dangers of using their powers. It’s like neither of them had an Uncle Ben to clutch them and say, “With great power comes great responsibility” before dying over a completely preventable crime. The Craft is the quintessential example of this by telling you whatever you do will come back “three-fold,” and then having the smitten girl nearly raped by her beau, the vengeful girl succeed and see the cruelty she wrought, the disfigured girl turn vain, and the power-hungry girl become murderous and insane. Teen Witch is not as responsive to this lesson. Probably because it was the 80s. I mean, let’s be real: a girl is entitled to popularity, free money, and the ability to make her teacher strip in front of the class as a form of embarrassment. And since it’s the 80s, that teacher is not fired, arrested, or sent on leave. There are some things we needn’t miss about the 80s.
We will never forget you, Mr. Weaver. You scarred us as youths when we saw this movie, and you scarred us again as adults on the re-watch. Image property of Trans World Entertainment. All rights reserved.
She does grow tired of popularity and alienate her best friend. She also gives up her power, realizing she doesn’t need it to get her crush. But this is a pretty feeble lesson at the end of the day. She was able to turn a rock into a stack of cash, you don’t need to give up that kind of juice to get yourself a boy. They’re very easy to get. This brings me to my biggest problem with Teen Witches:
4. Sex is a Problem
Yep, you guessed it. Teen witches are high school girls with love on the brain and the power to get it. As with most teen stories, love and sex are played off each other in a heteronormative arena of “boys want it” and “girls aren’t allowed to want it.” Teen Witch’s bullying English teacher shames her in front of the class for having birth control and also for not taking it yet. Yeah, what the actual fuck, teacher. Fortunately, the movie chooses to empower Louise with a sexy little striptease chase with her boy through a weird abandoned house? (Don’t take your shoes, off, there are definitely rusty nails in there. You’re going to get tetanus, this is a terrible idea). Louise also doesn’t suffer as a result of sleeping with this guy, which is refreshing for a teen affair. Horror typically punishes the horny teenagers, so it’s nice every once in a while to have a story where that’s not the outcome.
The Craft would be the antithesis of this approach. Our innocent snowflake Sarah decides not to sleep with jerk Chris, leading to scandalous of her being a terrible lay. Her vengeance is to make Chris fall in love with her, which is the logical equivalent of having a dog bite you, then covering yourself in raw meat. She nearly gets raped as a result of Chris’ “excessive desire” (yeah, we all feel the red flags), so the desire for love becomes a vicious rebuke through sexual violence. Points lost for being uncool about sex, The Craft. On top of that, Nancy, the Emperor Palpatine of this story, uses a glamour to get with Chris, then magics him out a window when he recoils from her. The real takeaway seems to be that love, sex and desire are all bad news in high school. Well thanks, The Craft. I guess we’ll all just wait until college.
If The Craft taught us anything, it’s that sex with witches gets real complicated, real fast. Image property of Columbia Pictures. All rights reserved.
I suppose I should note that Twitches completely fails in this arena. Tia and Tamara seem to be the only girls without boys on the brain. But then, I also mentioned that they turn 21 in this movie, so it’s entirely unclear why this is aimed at a Disney Channel audience in the first place. Yeah, it hardly deserves recognition in this themed movie night, I’m sorry I keep bringing it up.
What’s the Point, Alex?
Teen witch movies are a wonderful sub-genre. Examples are rare, the source material is ranging and unexpected. It’s certainly an area that is ripe for exploration. It does seem like the wish fulfillment trope makes it far better suited for film than TV. The recent TV series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Motherland: Fort Salem thrive in that arena of teen paranormal romance, which always becomes tiresome in the way that it takes generic teen angst and then overloads it with overwrought world-building. But it’s really a genre to pay attention to for modern film-making, as an access point for telling meaningful and progressive stories about young women owning their power. Don’t watch Twitches period. Watch Teen Witch, but know that it’s just a piece of 80s absurdity and think about how far we’ve come. Definitely watch The Craft, and then remember all the ways in which high school was hard and awful, and appreciate that it’s over.