The Witchvox Project

Research and Revival

Greetings, folks. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time (perhaps in its old days on Blogger/Blogspot, to its brief incarnation on the Patheos Pagan platform, to its own URL themediawitch.com, to this new Substack blog you’re reading now.

And perhaps before I became a blogger, you read some of my film and TV reviews and media rants on The Witches’ Voice website, aka Witchvox. That site, which was created 26 years ago in 1996 (then became a legal non-profit in 1997), and which was a hugely popular, influential and culture-changing resource for the worldwide witchcraft community, was retired from active status in 2019.

You may also know I’m currently writing a book (The Witching Hour: How Witches Enchanted the World) about portrayals of witchcraft and the occult in popular media. Part of my research and writing process has involved looking at previous essays and reviews I’ve written and discovering trends and insights and cultural and historical information. A lot of the thinking and writing I’ve done over the years about this topic was collected in the Witchvox archives. Seeing the vast amount of writing on witchy media I produced over the years for Witchvox has made me realize this has been an enormous part of my life (and my career as a film and TV critic, and media studies scholar and teacher).

So I want to share it with you.

Beginning this week, I will be posting regular installments of my Witchvox media articles, beginning with my first media-based articles in 1997. This includes reviews of The Craft (a hugely influential witch movie that recently inspired a reboot, which I wrote about for Time Magazine), a very witchy episode of The X-Files, the documentary Witch City, the film The Crucible, and, of course: Xena, Warrior Princess.

I will be calling this ‘The Witchvox Project’ and will be numbering each installment. Stay tuned for #1 later today! I’m going to try for 2-3 installments per week.

I am hoping this helps me keep my book project on track (as I am referring to and reworking some of this content for my book), and inspires new and interesting discussions about the ongoing cultural obsession with witches that seems to just get more intense every day. I hope you’ll join me and share your thoughts.

And please subscribe! It is free for the moment. I may possibly add a paid subscription option featuring additional content at a later time, but most of this blog’s content will continue to come to your inbox for free. Thank you for your continued support.