The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/i-married-a-witch)
“The 50’s, for all their historical patina, were an age of post-war innovation: the mixer, the slow cooker, the top load dishwasher,” writes Lauren Parker in her review of this favorite of Witch cinema. “And for more than just these appliances: the invention of the nuclear family and its purity.”
Our last stop on this cinematic journey was 1937 with the release of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Up to that point, the Hollywood witch had already evolved from a turn-of-the-century “clown witch” to a stereotypical cartoon “hags in rags” and finally into an animated femme fatale. Throughout that early period, the witch was contained within the framework of fantasy. Even those few outliers created a wall of separation between reality and the witch. MacBeth (1916) is just a retelling of a Shakespearian drama. In the Witch of Salem (1913), the “witch” is a victim of hysteria. In film studies speak, the witch never threatens to enter into the viewer’s world.