2023's Best Witchy & Occult Media! (Part 1)
It was a pretty good year...
Happy New Year, all! Hard to believe we’re in 2024. 2023 was a challenging year for many, to say the least. 23 has always been a magical number for me, though, so I did my best to recognize good things when they showed up.
Did you think I forgot to do my usual year-end list? Nope, just busy and distracted as usual. As the Great Goddess Tori Amos might say, it was a pretty good year for witchy and occult films and TV.
Speaking of Tori, there’s often speculation about female musicians and their affinity for witchcraft (or, if you’re the ridiculously-popular Taylor Swift, there’s accusations made by stupid people that she “promotes” witchcraft or even uses it to, um, make entire football teams lose? Whatever, losers). There will definitely be discussion of popular music and its connections to witchcraft and the occult in my forthcoming book The Witching Hour: How Witches Enchanted the World so stay tuned!
2023’s witchy media offerings got off to a steamy start with AMC’s Mayfair Witches. Not gonna lie, I had high hopes for this one, especially because it starred two fabulous actresses who’ve already done some witchy roles: Alexandra Daddario and Annabeth Gish. Based on Anne Rices’s popular novel series Lives of the Mayfair Witches (which includes the books The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos), it follows the exploits of a family of witches, starting with Roman Fielding (Daddario), a young neurosurgeon who discovers she’s the heir to a powerful witchcraft legacy. Rowan’s personal life is a bit chaotic, and discovering her witchcraft legacy shakes things up even more, obviously, ultimately affecting her professional duties. She rejects her witchcraft heritage at first, but finds herself unable to escape her destiny.
Sigh. I must admit I am tired of these “young woman discovers she is descended from a family of witches whose lineage goes back centuries, OMG who knew?” storylines. But they seem to be popular and there are some well-written novels out there following this theme. Anne Rice is an entertaining writer to be sure (and her Interview with the Vampire has an excellent new series adaptation that debuted on AMC in 2022), but this series, while it has all the right witchy ingredients (a marvelous cast, beautiful cinematography, spooky vibes) doesn’t quite hold together for me.
I loved Kathleen Walsh’s excellent and deliciously snarky summations of the episodes for Vulture. She acknowledges the series’ flaws (its lukewarm feminist ideology, for example) while delighting in the kinds of things (however implausible) that draw fans to witchy shows in the first place: supernatural powers, seeming immortality, endless seduction and sex (even orgies!), and magic’s usefulness for eliminating annoying people in a flash of sparkly smoke. The series is entertaining and very pretty to look at, if not particularly well-written, so if you just need a spooky show to binge with snacks, this more than does the job. Daddario, a world-class actress in my opinion, is amazing as always; also check her out in the fabulous satirical horror-comedy film We Summon the Darkness (2019) and the great adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018).
In the next installments looking at 2023’s best witchy and occult media we will look at some more TV series: Red Rose, The Burning Girls, The Horror of Dolores Roach, The Fall of the House of Usher, and season 2 of Shining Vale.
I’ll also be looking at some witchy, occult-tinged films of 2023 including: The Five Devils, Enys Men, Perpetrator, Starve Acre, Infinity Pool, and a few I still need to see like When Evil Lurks, Hood Witch and Lord of Misrule.