USA TODAY International Edition
Bewitching season on big screen and small
Double, double, toil and trouble, witchcraft’s back and pop culture bubbles: The season of the witch has descended upon television and film, reflecting an era of renewed female empowerment. The big screen is playing host to director Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, goes nationwide Nov. 2), a new take on Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic about the coven at the heart of a world-renowned dance company, and the push-and-pull between young star Susie (Dakota Johnson) and the troupe’s enigmatic director Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). “Though the influence of women in numbers is undeniable, the capacity and energy of one singular woman, should she choose to ignite it, is equally as powerful,” Johnson says. CW’s “Charmed” (Sundays, 9 ET/PT) is another revival, a modern TV take on the 1998-2006 series about three enchanting witch sisters saving the world from supernatural bad guys, and Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” (premieres Friday) is a horror-tinged coming-of-age tale starring Kiernan Shipka (“Mad Men”) that’s much darker than old episodes of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” Add the return of Supreme Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) and her kind in the current “Apocalypse” season of FX’s “American Horror Story,” plus “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris developing a “Bewitched” reboot, and we’re all bound to be under their collective spell soon enough. “It’s a way to tell a female empowerment story about women who historically have been disempowered and killed for their power,” says Amy Rardin, creator and executive producer on the new “Charmed” alongside writing partner Jessica O’Toole. “Witches aren’t villains anymore,” O’Toole adds. “A female superhero seems more what a witch is now. A lot of what you’re seeing of the pop culture witches out there is following that model.” These tales, from past projects such as “Practical Magic” and “Hocus Pocus” to the new crop, still capture our attention, “possibly because of the mysticism and cryptic energy surrounding witches and witchcraft,” says Johnson, the star of the “Fifty Shades” franchise. “People are drawn to and return again and again to things they cannot quite define or make perfect sense of: curiosity of the unknown or the undefinable. It’s a subject you can bend and evolve because nothing about it is set in stone.” “Sabrina” is about a young half-human, half-witch teen, Sabrina Spellman, who fights the patriarchy – and the patriarch just happens to be Satan himself. “I love how much it kind of balances those classical horror elements with just having a real story about a real girl and real people. It’s awesome,” says Shipka, who admires her character’s fearless moxie. “If something didn’t feel right to her, she would say it and she would stick up for herself. That really just resonated with me.” The fact that this rash of magical material coincides with the raising of women’s voices as part of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements isn’t lost on Hollywood. (Not to mention “witch” and “witch hunt” are terms used a lot in politics these days, or that Brooklyn witches put a hex on newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last weekend.) “It’s a great unconscious resonance,” Guadagnino says of the timely exploration of women and motherhood in “Suspiria.” “We always felt we wanted to go in that direction (where) you could see empowerment and the relationship of power between women, and that is falling in a place and time in which the debate about the power of women is so important to our present.” The new “Charmed” was conceived as a prequel to the old show that would be set in the 1970s. “We were tying the women’s movement directly to witchcraft,” O’Toole says. But the 2016 presidential election was “a wake-up call that the issues we had thought we’d moved past were still very much alive. And it was during that time when every day there was a new prominent man falling from grace and female anger was becoming more and more of a thing.” The stories they’re telling with three Latina half-sisters (played by Melonie Diaz, Sarah Jeffery and Madeleine Mantock) “feel like the more compelling and important ones right now,” O’Toole says. (They also employ a real Latinx witch, Marcos Luevanos, in the “Charmed” writers’ room.) “It’s like ‘Law & Order,’ where you can rip from the headlines, but then we do it with demons and magical things and use them as metaphor.”