How not to get bored on Halloween: 5 most famous witch movies

The main characters in these movies are witches. According to the law of the horror genre, they personify evil, and meeting them is a difficult test for the characters in the story.

"After all, a witch," writes the Observer, "can put a terrible curse on you or people close to you. And whether you should be afraid of them is up to you."

Here are the 5 best witch movies that will broaden your horizons and introduce you to the most famous witches in the history of cinema.

Hocus Pocus

"Hocus Pocus" (Kenny Ortega, 1993) failed at the box office and caused a loss of $16.5 million to Disney. Fortunately, the movie survived, thanks to television and Blockbuster DVDs.

Nowadays, Hocus Pocus is a classic of the genre, a nostalgic and enjoyable movie that makes viewers laugh as the Sanderson sisters wreak havoc and try to eat children. These witches are too silly to be taken seriously, let alone as absolute evil (even if they are).

Hocus Pocus paved the way for the witch movies that came later in the decade, including paving the way for the dominance of the Harry Potter franchise in the early 2000s.

Halloweentown

This original Disney film (dir. Duane Dunham, 1998) stars Kimberly J. Brown as 13-year-old Marnie Piper, who is forbidden by her overprotective mother Gwen to go trick-or-treating or celebrate Halloween at all. After a visit from her grandmother (Debbie Reynolds), Marnie learns that she is part of an ancient line of witches from Halloweentown, a parallel world filled with goblins, anthropomorphic pumpkins, skeletons, ghouls, and other creatures.

However, the townspeople are disappearing, and Marnie and her younger brother and sister have to stop a mysterious villain before it's too late.

Eve's Bayou

Kassie Lemmons' directorial debut (1997) is a family drama set on the edge of a swamp in Louisiana. Jurnee Smollett, then a very young actress, plays the role of Eva, the daughter of Louis, a handsome doctor played by Samuel L. Jackson, and his elegant wife, Roz.

Eva's innocence, having witnessed her father seeing another woman, is gradually destroyed, leading to a series of events that find her at the door of Ellora, the neighborhood witch.

Steeped in the heavy beauty of the South, Eva in Bayou showcases the spiritual practices of voodoo. Monochromatic visions flicker ominously throughout the film, as Eva's aunt, Moselle, predicts the future, and Jackson skillfully draws the line between the attractive Lothario and the loving father, deepening the film's hazy mystery and showing that the world is not what it seems.

The Love Witch

No list of movies about witches can be considered complete without Anna Biller's cult feminist masterpiece The Love Witch (2016). Samantha Robinson played the main role in the movie.

Her character is Elaine, a sexy witch with dreamy purple-blue eyeshadow and pale pink lip gloss. She seduces men and kills them one by one, driving them crazy and not allowing them to live without her.

"You have to give a man his fantasy," Elaine says. And she's right: her hypnotic representation of femininity, like her witchcraft, is a way to gain power over men.

Although the film is formally set in modern Northern California, the costumes, colors and scenery, as well as the fact that the film was shot on 35mm film, transport the viewer to the atmosphere of the vintage 1960s.

The Witch

This brutal horror film (dir. Robert Eggers, 2015), produced by A24, tells the story of a witch hunt in New England in the 17th century.

A Puritan family builds a farm next to a dark forest, but their vision of the promised land is threatened when their newborn son is taken by a witch.

The A24 film features a series of horrific events that pit the family against each other and the terrifying hedonism of forest pagan rituals.