WATCHcultA Dark Song
2016 · Ireland/UK · 100m
A grieving mother and an occultist doing a months-long ritual properly. The tedium is deliberate.
1922 onward · 21 films
Witchcraft
Rural, female, and usually persecuted by exactly the people the film sides against.
Witchcraft horror splits cleanly in two: films about witches who are real and dangerous, and films about communities that murder women for no reason. The second group is bleaker and generally better.
The documentary that is not one
Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (1922) is a Swedish-Danish essay film about witch trials, with staged reconstructions of sabbaths that were shocking enough to be banned in the United States. Its argument, that the accused were mentally ill or simply poor and inconvenient, was ahead of the scholarship by decades.
The persecution strand
Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (1968) has Vincent Price playing Matthew Hopkins straight, with the camp switched off, and it is the best performance he ever gave. The English countryside is shot in summer sunshine while people are tortured in it. Reeves died at 25, the year after.
The Witch (2015) does the same period with obsessive accuracy, most of the dialogue taken from court records, and then commits fully to the supernatural in the last ten minutes.
The stylists
Argento's Suspiria (1977) is barely about witchcraft and barely has a plot. It was one of the last films printed in three-strip Technicolor, which is why the reds look like nothing shot since.
Note on the folk crossover
Witchcraft and folk horror share most of a border. Filed here: the coven is the threat. Filed as folk horror: the community is.
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The whole shelf
Filter these →WATCHcult
WATCHcultAlucarda
1977 · Mexico · 85m
Mexican nunsploitation with an actual argument, and everybody in it screams for eighty minutes.
WATCHknownBlack Sunday
1960 · Italy · 87m
Bava could not afford colour and made the best-looking gothic ever shot. Barbara Steele's face did the rest.
obscureDon't Go Near the Park
1981 · USA · 80m
Cursed cave dwellers from 12,000 BC eating people in modern Los Angeles. Incoherent throughout.
WATCHobscureHellbender
2021 · USA · 86m
Made by one family during lockdown for almost nothing, and it looks better than films with fifty times the budget.
WATCHcanonHereditary
2018 · USA · 127m
A film about grief that turns out to be a film about a cult. Toni Collette should have won everything.
WATCHknownInferno
1980 · Italy · 107m
The Suspiria sequel. Less coherent, more beautiful, and has the best underwater sequence Argento shot.
WATCHknownNight of the Demon
1957 · UK · 95m
The runic parchment, the smoke on the railway line, and a monster the producer added against the director's wishes.
WATCHcanonSuspiria
2018 · USA/Italy · 152m
Not a remake so much as an argument with the original. Colder, longer, and about postwar German guilt.
WATCHknownThe Blood on Satan's Claw
1971 · UK · 93m
Something is dug up in a field and the village children form a cult. One third of the unholy trinity.
WATCHknownThe Devil Rides Out
1968 · UK · 95m
Christopher Lee as the hero for once, and the best script Hammer ever filmed.
knownThe Devils
1971 · UK · 111m
Ken Russell's best film, cut in every territory it has ever played, and still not properly released.
WATCHknownTwins of Evil
1971 · UK · 87m
Peter Cushing as a witch-hunter who is worse than the vampires, and the Collinson twins were Playboy's first.
WATCHknownViy
1967 · SU · 78m
The only horror film made in the Soviet Union, and the last twenty minutes are extraordinary.
WATCHcanonWeapons
2025 · USA · 128m
Seventeen children leave their houses at 2.17am. Cregger structures it as overlapping chapters and it pays off.
WATCHknownYou Won't Be Alone
2022 · Australia/USA
A Macedonian witch story told as a Malick film, and it is about what it is to be a person.