I love witches, especially in October, so I dug up six witch flicks on my streaming apps to carry me through the weeks leading up to Halloween. Let’s see how that worked out for me.
COVEN (2020)
This campy take on The Craft concept isn’t even good enough for SyFy, but it gave the hubby and I some good laughs.
A coven of sexy college witches immediately goes too far during a ritual to conjure a distant witch relative, leading one of the girls to die during a blood sacrifice. There’s also lingerie and boobs, so that tells you the kind of audience they’re going for here. This isn’t your guncle’s The Craft.
Only one of the remaining witches is even vaguely traumatized by the death. Even so, when a new witch shows up on campus, the PTSD doesn’t stop the witch from trying to recruit her to join the coven.
Meanwhile, the evil lesbian leader of the coven has sinister side plans. She wants power. She wants world dominance. She wants revenge on a redneck homophobe she encountered at a bar.
A lot of nothing happens. The “good witches” get some help from an occult shop owner and a college professor, there’s a cute guy as a love interest to the new girl, there are some low budget magical fights, the conjuring effects are funny, the girls show a bit of skin during rituals, etc.
Finally, the evil lesbian leader becomes possessed, and the girls battle it out with finger lightning on a city street. Like I said. It doesn’t even rise to SyFy level bad.
OUIJA WITCH (2023)
This is a simple witch revenge flick that could have been better if it leaned more heavily into its slasher structure. We needed more kills, we needed them to be more violent, and we needed them more often.
The opening scene is a goodie. Three teens are trying to summon a legendary witch that was hanged in their town centuries before. It works. The lights go out, they do some creeping around the dark house, and they encounter the witch.
25 years later we meet another young woman who works as a bartender. Her father has passed, her mother happens to be one of the girls from the beginning of the movie, and her coworker at the bar is a tough lesbian.
Too bad the lesbian isn’t around when the main girl walks home from work at night and gets attacked by some douchey male patrons that follow her from the bar.
It appears that the movie is supposed to take place in Salem (a shot of the Salem Witch Museum gives it away), so she runs right to the local occult shop, which is owned by fricking Sean Young, who whips out a Ouija, summons the infamous witch, and sends our main girl on her way.
While the main girl is at home having nightmares, the witch returns as a beautiful woman to hunt down the guys that attacked the main girl. Naturally, she’s not really beautiful, she just chooses to wear a sensual facade. It’s kind of weird considering she doesn’t use her magical hotness to seduce most of her victims. She actually scares them, which puts into question what kind of men these douchebags really are. And why aren’t there enough of them to up the kill count?
She finally does seduce the leader of the douchey dudes in the final act and transforms into her true hag form while they’re having sex. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, when he gets what he deserves and gets it good, only…it’s a cutaway kill! This witch bitch doesn’t seem to want to satisfy our horror itch. That is until she finally rips out a heart. Awesome.
Mom and daughter join forces to use the Ouija board to stop the witch once and for all, but the ending is hokey and low budget, with no real battle and the simplest solution to taking the witch down.
THE NORTH WITCH (2024)
This is one of the most intense films in this bunch, and it feels like it’s inspired by Yellowjackets, maybe a little Evil Dead, and a good dose of witchery.
Freshly booted from therapy, our main girl calls her friend to ask if she can stay with her. The friend is going hiking in the woods with some other friends to search for a mysteriously, long-lost cabin, but reluctantly invites the main girl to come along.
As soon as they reach the woods, the craziness kicks in. The main girl is the only one who seems to realize they should turn back, but they persist. Before you know it, there’s a wicked storm, they get separated, and the main girl ends up taking shelter in the very cabin they’ve been looking for.
She finds a diary detailing the cabin’s witchy past, and mysterious occurrences in the cabin lead her to start documenting what’s happening on her camera.
When one of the other girls from the group shows up, the shit really hits the fan. She begins acting very odd, and her behavior gets worse—extreme and violent. The actress playing the role is fantastic, and the whole situation is disturbing and unsettling.
The movie definitely grabs a hold of you and keeps you riveted, but I do think that most horror veterans will guess right from the start what’s really going on here. Even so, we get a vicious finally, and there’s a great witch presence as well. This is one I would definitely watch again.
THE WITCH FILES (2018)
To me, this one was like Chronicle meets The Craft, with a heavy dose of catty camp and less budget. I actually had fun with it even if it is horror lite.
As with many “found footage” flicks, you have to put aside the fact that everything that occurs is somehow caught on camera and just go with it.
It opens with a bunch of girls in detention. This film overlooks the ostracized teens concept a bit, because despite them all coming from different backgrounds that would ensure they were never in the same cliques, they immediately bond over detention and the fact that the new goth girl in town is brazenly into magic. They all want in on it.
So, they do what these teen girls do in all these witchcraft movies. They begin with basic, simple spells and incantations to mess with people they don’t like. There are actually some fun flying scenes that are rather impressive for such a low budget film, including one girl dropping in on a broom! Awesome.
Things begin to fracture when the girls express different opinions on what is right and what is wrong. There are some inner group conflicts and magical fights, with one girl even making a quip about shooting lightning from her fingers. It’s this kind of subtle, self-aware humor and the personalities of the girls that made this one kind of charming to me.
A bit of a mystery unfolds, with veteran actor Paget Brewster of Criminal Minds investigating their intensifying mischief, and it all builds up to a battle at the school dance, where the humorous undertones really move to the forefront. This confrontation leads to the forest for the final fight, and we briefly get to see an old hag of a witch at last.
I liked the plot, I liked the girls, I liked the simple special effects. This is the kind of movie I would have watched constantly on cable back when I was a teenager.
WITCHCRAFT (aka: Hanna’s Homecoming) (2018)
Moody and atmospheric with a folk horror vibe to it, this German film is dubbed in English on Amazon Prime. It initially kept my attention as it treaded familiar teen-girl-angst-meshed-with-witchcraft territory, but the energy barely picks up, and the movie begins to run long without much in the way of payoff.
A teen girl comes home from boarding school to live with her father and work at his slaughterhouse. Her mother died in the marshes, as did three other men, which led the town to believe the mother killed them with witchcraft. So very quickly, some of the other young people in town assume she’s a witch, too.
At times, I thought she was as well, but in the end, I don’t think that’s the case. Weird stuff starts to happen around her, she sees a ghostly apparition near the marshes, and she befriends another girl who is somewhat of an outsider.
I expected them to begin practicing witchcraft together, but that doesn’t happen either. However, people do begin disappearing and dying.
She has several run-ins with douchey dudes, which leads to some male nudity, landing this one on the stud stalking page. Yay!
Even so, there’s no satisfying witchcraft revenge here against guys. The Craft this definitely isn’t. And it didn’t have to be. It just needed to be more enthralling than it is. In fact, the conclusion reminded me somewhat of the predictable ending of The North Witch, only a lot less horror slanted.
YORK WITCHES SOCIETY (2022)
What at first seems like the usual cliché plot about teen girls forming a coven and unleashing evil takes a unique turn in this film, and I was really feeling it. It is, however, a slow burn that also feels a little prim and proper in its depiction of the events that unfold. While there’s some dark payoff in the final act, the film restrains itself from delivering visually on the kills.
It opens with a good old-fashioned witch burning in colonial times. Naturally, the witch curses the townsfolk.
In modern times, a young woman comes to a new school. She immediately gets confrontational with a professor in class during a lecture on the history of the witch trials.
Yeah. Our main girl is a witch. She’s also pressured to join a coven by some classmates. The atmosphere is moody and spooky good as they begin doing rituals. There are a few early signs that their rituals are unleashing something evil, but the real fun doesn’t begin until they practice magic in a cabin in the woods about halfway through the movie.
Would you believe their next incantation leads to Evil Dead shaky cam POV through misty woods? Awesome.
I just wish the film had leaned a little harder into the terror of them being trapped in the cabin with more of the demonic presence that eventually shows itself in the last few minutes. There are some good death scenes, but they’re mostly cutaway and sterile, with just some blood and nor grisly gore.
The twist concerning the original witch they were trying to conjure is pretty fresh, and there’s some satisfying suspense once the demonic presence tries to enter the cabin to hunt them down, even if it does kind of resemble the emperor from the Star Wars universe…
