With Wicked hitting screens this week, it is time to look at the greatest witches to cast a spell on audiences.
Ranked in order, from the very best to the still pretty good (I mean there are hundreds on screens but we can’t squeeze in all the dross).
1. The Wicked Witch of the West
Utterly terrifying, the very epitome of witches and witchiness. The cackle. The menace. The obsessive hatred of good little girls.
Margaret Hamilton is the witch. Appearing on screen in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz with such force of personality and image, the Wicked Witch instantly became not just iconic but mythic, creeping beyond the film into the dreams of millions of children.
Everything about this performance is a masterclass, the voice, the make-up, the way she moves, her exits and appearances through fire and smoke…utterly unnerving.
The new film Wicked will of course be trading upon the power of the original but it will never match it.
“Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness,” laments the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts at the end, as she somehow both concedes to Dorothy’s triumph and sears in some guilt over her demise, pricking that notion of good.
Indeed the Good Witch in the film, Glinda, is cloying and annoying in a way the wicked one with isn’t. As Salman Rushdie points out in his famed essay on the film, “Glinda simpers upon being called beautiful and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters, whereas the Wicked Witch is in a rage because of the death of her sister, demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity… the Wicked Witch of the West can be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here.”
2. The Grand High Witch
The Witches, the 1990 adaptation featured a stand-out, electrically unnerving performance from Anjelica Huston that Anne Hathaway couldn’t quite match in the 2020 remake. It helps that the film is in the hands of director Nicholas Roeg, who brought some of his trademark artful eeriness to his Roald Dahl adaptation. Too much at first: he recut the film after showing an early version to his son, who was absolutely petrified by it.
But Huston has a ball giving some sex appeal to the role, and the revelation of their real faces of the witches when they take their skin off is rendered terrifically body horrific here by the last film work of Muppets creator Jim Henson.
3. Maleficent
Not Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent from the 2014 – though it’s pretty good – but the original Maleficent in 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Voiced by Eleanor Audley (who also played Cinderella’s evil stepmother in the 1950 Disney film), Maleficent the ultimate ‘Mistress of all Evil’ who curses the infant Princess Aurora to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die before she’s 16. Actually, she just has a good long sleep.
Audley acted in live-action recordings for the animators to reference in what was a nine-year production long before green screen. The character was supposed to be a combination of a vain femme fatale and a vampire bat so people got the messages that this was a Bad Woman. However, the scariest scenes for any child comes at the climax of the film when she turns into a vengeful dragon. Still haunts some of us today.
4. The White Witch
We of course need the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in this list, and we’ll go for Swinton’s portrayal of the character as its pinnacle, just beating Barbara Kellerman who played the role in the BBC late Eighties children’s drama.
Swinton makes epic use of her icy charm here, showing a Witch who can shift from sensual charm to frightening intensity and undeniably a force of pure Evil. To this day, many of us will never eat Turkish Delight as a result.
5. Melisandre
Played by Carice van Houten, the Red Woman was the ultimate in sexy witches. As liable to seduce you as burn your child alive, this Priestess of the Lord of the Light was somewhat of a trope in those early seasons of Game of Thrones where everyone was constantly naked.
But Melisandre developed into well-rounded character who went on to play a crucial role in the show, resurrecting Jon Snow from the dead, matchmaking Snow and Daenerys, right up until the end when she spurs Arya on to seek out and kill the Night King.
But perhaps her stand-out moment comes when she takes off her necklace to reveal her true form. That of a frail, ancient woman. Echoes of the famous bath scene in The Shining here.
6. The Blair Witch
Never seen, but strongly felt, this witch still frightens. The Blair Witch Project’s reputation has somewhat nose-dived over the years as a slew of found-footage imitators have generated their own sub-genre (lured in by the film’s initial $35,000 cost and $250 million gross), but I watched the original the other night, and it still really stands up.
Filmed on camcorders by the actors themselves, who had no script to work from as they were terrorised in the woods by directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, it is the ultimate in cinéma vérité horror that is genuinely frightening. The claustrophobia of being in the tent with the actors as strange noises are heard outside is genuinely visceral.
No we don’t see the witch but her presence is strongly felt as the characters run in the dark towards their fate. Amazing that when it was released in 1999 the successful marketing of it as ‘found footage’ convinced a lot of people that it was all real.
7. The Witches of Eastwick
This 1987 adaptation of John Updike’s novel with Jack Nicholson’s Daryl Van Horne in town, the downtrodden womenfolk begin to liven up a bit. Well, three of them anyway: Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon. They have latent powers unleashed as they are transformed into Jack’s little coven of witches, a harem for this unholy priapic master until they begin to realise this “horny little devil” might actually be the devil.
These witches are not scary, and play somewhat second fiddle to Jack’s none-more-Jack performance. Off-screen was a different story though. Sarandon was originally cast as single mother sculptor Alex until, prior to filming, Cher demanded she have that role instead. Sarandon only found out about the change when she arrived on set. Fear the Cher.
8. Miss Price
Angela Lansbury’s lovely witch in Bedknobs and Broomsticks brings warmth where other witches bring chill. In this Disney classic from 1971, three orphans sent away from the Blitz to the countryside, end up in the care of Miss Price, a trainee witch who wants to use spells against the Nazis and takes them off on some adventures using a magical bedknob.
Loved mostly for the mix of live action and animation in their visit to the football-loving island of Naboombu, and for its climax in which a Nazi invasion is thwarted by magic-filled suits of armour, actually its real magic in in the casting, with three of the least annoying kids in the Disney pantheon and their stand-in parents, the ever-lovely David Tomlinson as Mr Browne and Lansbury’s Miss Price. She’s more of a reassuring presence than Oz’s good witch, that’s for sure.
9. The Evil Queen
Although she’s known as the Evil Queen she is 100% a witch, what with the magic mirror that informs her she’s not the fairest anymore, and with her transformation into a hideous old crone who brings her stepdaughter Snow White a poisoned apple.
Lucille Le Verne supplied the voice, which was the first ever to be heard in an animated film. With her fearsome demeanour – based on Joan Crawford – she’s one of the greats.
10. Minnie Castavet
Roman Polanski’s all-time great horror Rosemary’s Baby – adapted from the brilliantly pulpy novel by Ira Levin – has Mia Farrow’s Rosemary ‘luckily’ moving into a sought-after apartment block in New York with her somewhat slippery husband played by John Cassavetes. Seems that all is not actually fine and dandy here as there’s a Satanic cult around these parts who have an exciting idea for helping Rosemary get pregnant.
The witch in this film is their next-door neighbour Minnie, played by Ruth Gordon. It is a masterstroke of performance and character, Minnie being the ultimate meddling nosy-neighbour who turns out not to be such a silly old fool, but only acting the part to ensure Rosemary eats her special chocolate “mouse” as they prepare her womb for the coming of the Beast. Gordon is utterly convincing as this, eccentric, over-bearing, ridiculous pensioner who is always getting what she wants. Still as chilling as ever.
11. Mother Markos
Suspiria, the Dario Argento 1977 classic – remade with Dakota Johnson in 2021 – is one of the horror greats and holds much of its power in the way that, like Blair Witch, it ramps up the tension without ever showing you much at all. You only think you saw something.
Suzy (Jessica Harper) is an American ballet student signed up to a prestigious academy, only to find it’s a front for a coven of witches. Maggots fall from the ceiling, the blind pianist is killed by his own dog, a fellow pupil disappears, and Suzy figures out that the school was established by lead witch Mother Markos. She must find that witch and kill it, in order to destroy the rest of them in a fiery inferno.
Goblin did the music. Thom Yorke’s soundtrack for the remake was also very good. Everyone thinks they see the witch but don’t.
13. The VVitch
Again, this witch is more of a force than an actual witch as such, though she certainly makes her presence felt when she possesses Black Phillip the goat. This slow burning modern great – albeit flawed, to this reviewer in never truly delivering on its slow burn with a hot and horrific climax - by director Dave Eggers, takes witches away from old crones and squawking voices into disturbing period realism.
14. Evil Spirit
Three witches in Shakespeare’s play are transformed into just one in the very greatest of Macbeth film adaptations: Throne of Blood by Akira Kurosawa.
This witch, though, is deeply unnerving, spectral figure in the forest, whispering hellish phrases inside Washizu (/Macbeth, played by Toshiro Mifune)’s head such as, “Men’s lives are as meaningless as insects,” while spinning a ghostly loom.
Played by Chieko Naniwa, she is made up like a ‘mountain witch’ mask from traditional Japanese Noh theatre. This is subtle, spell-binding, an utterly convincing as the witch both predicts and shapes the Washizu’s fate.
15. Grotbags
The green bad woman from Rod Hull and Emu’s shows (Emu’s All Live Pink Windmill show being the classic, anyone? Might just be me), and then her own star vehicle on ITV, Grotbags was equal parts funny and scary for little kids as a panto villain writ large. Carol Lee Scott played Grotbags, a Pontins veteran and working men’s club performer, who met Hull during the summer season in Cleethorpes.
All of this sounds like it happened 40 years ago. Which it did.
