The 90s Witch

I'm going to dive into a phenomenon that, if you're into witches and 90s movies or TV shows, has probably caught your attention at some point or at the very least made you curious: the remarkable number of witch-centered productions released throughout the 1990s that eventually became iconic.

Practical Magic (1998), Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003), Hocus Pocus (1993), Charmed (1998–2006), The Craft (1996). Even younger audiences had Halloweentown (1998) and The Witches (1990). And then there was The Witches of Eastwick (1987), which had premiered a few years earlier with the incredible trio of Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Wherever you looked, it seemed like witches were everywhere.

Velvet, moon, stars, and sun-shaped jewelry, candles, long wild curly hair, beautiful old houses, child-eaters, man-eaters, lovers of nature, talking black cats, and the power of sisterhood. Witches became an entire aesthetic and spiritual trend.

But when we talk about witches in general, we have to go back hundreds of years, to religion, paganism, and everything that was considered different; everything for which women began to be branded as witches. It was a label meant to get rid of women whose intellect no longer fit the demands of a changing world; women whose knowledge rivaled that of men; women who didn't need men in order to survive.

I'm only going to explore a few corners of the history of witches and honestly, not in too much depth because, after all, what I really want to talk about is a phenomenon in popular culture. I have the feeling that if I dig any deeper (a very tempting idea, because it's a fascinating topic), this post will end up being much longer than I already intend it to be.

It took a long time for the witch to stop being the monster from children's fairy tales, a public enemy, a "servant of Satan," and become a heroine, a teenager, a mother, a neighbor, a student, and even the very symbol of independence for which, under different names, she had originally been condemned.

So what was happening in the United States during the 1990s that allowed such a historically loaded figure, one who embodies so many different facets of womanhood, to return to popular culture with such force?

Third-Wave Feminism

Let's begin where we naturally have to if we're going to talk about this enigmatic decade: feminism, and the emergence of its third wave at the beginning of the final decade before the new millennium.

The Girl Power and Riot Grrrl movements (closely associated with musical currents like grunge and punk), with their much more youthful spirit, sought to reclaim individuality, celebrate diversity, and redefine what it meant to be a woman.

It was writer and activist Rebecca Walker who first coined the term "third wave" in an article published in Ms. magazine. She wrote it in response to the televised confirmation hearings of Anita Faye Hill, a law professor and attorney who had accused then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

Walker wrote:

"So I write this as a plea to all women, especially women of my generation: Let Thomas' confirmation serve to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman's experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don't prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives. I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the Third Wave."

During those same years, intersectionality began to take center stage within the feminist movement. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a North American lawyer and civil rights activist, had introduced the term to explain that women could experience oppression not only because they were women, but also because of their social class, ethnicity, or cultural background. These different factors overlapped, creating multiple layers of discrimination that added far greater depth and complexity to women's struggles.

As was to be expected with any feminist movement, the third wave was met with plenty of criticism. It was accused of being "anti-men," of not truly seeking equality between the sexes, and of fostering hostility toward masculinity, treating it almost as a pathology that needed to be corrected and holding it responsible for most of society's problems... because, well... it was, right?

Going back for a moment, as I mentioned earlier, this third wave seemed much more focused on youth, sexuality, greater attention to issues of race and discrimination against women, the contradictions of identity, and the possibility of combining femininity with power.

All of these developments helped make the witch's new prominence during the 1990s possible.

Think about it this way: an ordinary teenage girl or an apparently ordinary woman discovers that she possesses a power that has always existed within her. A power that wasn't granted by a man, an institution, or some external technology, but inherited from other women through her family, her friends, or in many cases, through her own body.

The Mythic Figure of the Witch

It's not as though every witch of the 1990s was Sally Owens from Practical Magic or Sabrina Spellman from Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It didn't all begin with the power of sisterhood or the right spell to find the perfect outfit.

In 1990, The Witches, an adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel, was released with Anjelica Huston playing the Grand High Witch, an elegant woman who concealed a monstrous form and was determined to rid England of its children. Three years later, Disney released Hocus Pocus, a film that would eventually become everyone's favorite October tradition, starring Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker as three sisters who prey on children, stealing their youth in order to restore their own.

None of this sounds particularly new. We've known the child-eating witch since childhood through Hansel and Gretel (among many other fairy tales). Yet the famous German story, popularized by the Grimm Brothers is not really the original source of this archetype that worked so hard to frighten us as children.

Fairy tales from different periods, like every other form of entertainment, do not emerge out of nowhere or from the isolated imagination of a single person, detached from political ideas, cultural context, or historical circumstances. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that myths, fairy tales, and legends, rather than being simple fantastical stories created to escape reality, function as mechanisms through which societies process the fundamental contradictions of human existence such as nature and culture, life and death, order and chaos, among many others. The stories we tell reveal far more about people's real concerns than they do about imaginary worlds.

Fairy tale and folklore scholar Jack Zipes develops a closely related argument. Traditional fairy tales, he suggests, reflect the material and historical conditions of the societies that produce them. They are stories that evolve alongside the anxieties and concerns of each era.

Take Hansel and Gretel, for example. Child abandonment, widespread famine, and even cannibalism were not simply fictional inventions, they were tragedies that occurred throughout parts of Northern Europe. During the Great Famine of 1315–1317, years of relentless rain devastated harvests, triggering a food crisis so severe that historical records describe cases of abandoned children and even episodes of cannibalism born out of desperation. The fairy tale transformed those everyday realities, those very real fears, into a narrative capable of giving them meaning.

So what do witches have to do with all of this?

Well, the mythic figure of the witch wasn't far behind. While these crises unfolded, miscarriages, sudden infant deaths, and unexplained illnesses were tragically common. In a world where witch hunts were already a deeply rooted part of society (a convenient way of explaining what people could not understand) many of these deaths were blamed on demonic female figures. Witches were believed to steal a person's vitality, devour babies in the night, and kidnap unbaptized infants so they could boil down their fat to make magical ointments.

To this we can add another important piece of the puzzle. For the agricultural and forest communities of the fourteenth century, nature itself was dangerous. Dense forests, wild animals, getting lost, or freezing to death were all very real threats. The image of a devouring creature, one already recognized as an enemy of society, the witch, became a psychological boundary, discouraging children from disobeying their parents and wandering alone into the woods.

If we go back even further, Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch (2004), explores at length the historical role of women and why they eventually came to occupy the place of the solitary, villainous, dangerous woman capable of the very worst things society could imagine. Federici offers a different interpretation, arguing that the witch hunts were closely tied to the rise of capitalism, with Christianity serving as one of its principal instruments.

In Caliban and the Witch, Federici argues that during the peasant revolts that accompanied the transition from feudalism to capitalism, many women were labeled "heretics" because they sought ways of living more freely, outside rigid class hierarchies, without the obligation to marry, and within communities that existed beyond male authority. They wanted to build cooperative communities and work independently of patriarchal control. That vision, of course, posed a problem for a new socioeconomic system that depended on a growing labor force and on women willing to raise and care for future workers while the current generation remained productive. Female autonomy over one's own body, the ability to provide for oneself, medical knowledge, economic independence, or the freedom to enjoy one's sexuality had little place in a system where all of those things were expected to serve the needs of production. And what better mechanism of control than religion, backed by punishment and morality?

According to Federici, the witch hunts emerged as a way of stripping peasant women of that autonomy. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of women were tortured and accused of witchcraft. Many were simply healers, widows, or unmarried peasant women with knowledge of herbal medicine, childbirth, and methods of inducing abortions. To persecute a witch was, in many ways, to persecute precisely the kind of female autonomy that threatened the new social order, destroying women's control over their own bodies and reproductive lives.

The demonization promoted by both religious and civil authorities, combined with the way witches were portrayed in the literature and theater of the time, gradually created the familiar image we still recognize today, the lonely old woman living deep in the forest. A woman considered "ugly" by European beauty standards, with a long nose, a pointed hat, and a steaming cauldron where she no longer brewed healing herbs and remedies but children instead.

This is precisely the image we find in Hocus Pocus, for example. Winnie and her sisters return from the dead in the present day to lure children, steal their youth, and ultimately kill them in the process.

Empowerment and Mysticism

But as we've already seen, that changes and this evil image doesn't last.

Perhaps that's because our perspective changes as well. When we watch films like Practical Magic and The Craft, or television series like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed, we begin to see the world through the witches themselves, who are no longer the villains but the protagonists.

The Craft and Sabrina the Teenage Witch introduced adolescence into this particular blend of witchcraft and aesthetics. The Craft presents magic as a way of escaping isolation, grief, bullying, racism, and discrimination. Magic and the identity of being a "witch" become a tool for transformation, something that allows these girls to transcend the circumstances they were born into. Sabrina takes this idea even further by making it feel completely ordinary. We follow the everyday life of a teenage girl who just happens to be a witch, the antics of her delightfully eccentric witch aunts, and the countless ways magic shapes her daily routine. When Sabrina turns sixteen, she fully comes into her powers. Becoming a witch is also a rite of passage, a step toward maturity and, eventually, adulthood.

Practical Magic (a personal favorite of mine) introduces the idea of a legacy passed down through generations of witches, women who possess gifts others do not, women who are judged, feared, and demonized because of them. Just as Sally and Gillian must live in a town that gossips about them, mocks them, and turns them into the object of everyone's prejudices, Sally's daughters, Antonia and Kylie, eventually experience the very same thing. The town discriminates them and fears them, but isn't it curious that the moment desperation sets in, those same people come knocking on their door, especially when love is involved?

A brief detour.

This is something that fascinates me for reasons that go a little beyond witchcraft, the image of women, or discrimination. So I'm going to wander off for a moment and pour some of those thoughts into this discussion of witchcraft, superstition, and magic.

The Owens women are accused of being witches, which isn't untrue, but the prejudice they face is a curious mixture of fear, distrust, jealousy, and perhaps what interests me most, belief. For the people in town, magic becomes an option they turn to whenever they lose control of a situation.

In Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (1925), Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski argues that magic doesn't emerge where people have complete mastery over their environment. Instead, it appears wherever uncertainty takes over. While studying the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski observed that fishermen only performed magical rituals when venturing out into the open ocean, a place where danger and uncertainty were far greater than, say, fishing in the safety of a lagoon.

So what does all of this have to do with Practical Magic? Maybe nothing. Or maybe quite a lot. It's simply an observation about how something very similar seems to happen in the town. In everyday life, the Owens women are the target of gossip, prejudice, and ridicule. But the moment desperation arrives, rational explanations suddenly seem to go out the window, and those very same people who point fingers at them end up knocking on the door of that dreamy old house, asking for help.

Before getting back to witches, I want to make two more observations about this little bubble of belief I've created.

Desperation pushes people to search for any possible way to regain a sense of control. It's something remarkably similar to what Malinowski observed among the Trobriand fishermen, who relied on magical rituals only when they found themselves out at sea, where experience and practical knowledge alone were no longer enough. Magical thinking became a kind of backup system, a companion to rational thought rather than its opposite. These rituals, these little superstitions, don't arise because people are ignorant of what might happen. They emerge from an emotional need to manage the anxiety that comes from facing something beyond our control.

When we experience intense emotions (fear, grief, desire, or desperation) we stop evaluating situations with the same emotional distance we usually have. Urgency becomes driven by emotion, creating a need that cares very little whether the solution is logical or verifiable. What matters is easing the intensity of the feeling. The woman we meet at the beginning of Practical Magic, desperately knocking on the Owens aunts' door because she's heartbroken over the man she loves, isn't thinking much about what she does or doesn't believe. She simply wants the pain to stop.

I find this especially interesting because it's something we still see all the time today. Here in Argentina (and I imagine in plenty of other countries as well) we do it constantly with football superstitions. Since we're in the middle of another World Cup cycle (a dangerously controversial topic for an Argentine apparently), it's the perfect example. The anxiety of watching a match may not be life-or-death, although it certainly feels that way to us. For ninety minutes, we, the spectators, have absolutely no control over what happens. It's a kind of helplessness.

But what we can do, in our desperation, is wear the same jersey we wore during the last victory, sit in exactly the same seat, light incense or candles, repeat affirmations, or touch a saint's medal. These little rituals transform an entirely passive position into an active one. Rationally, we know they don't change the outcome of the match. I changed where I watched Argentina play in almost every game of the last World Cup. But these tiny rituals help contain an intensely emotional and subjective experience, rescuing us, if only for a moment, from the frustration of not being able to do anything at all.

This doesn't have much to do with witches, I just thought it was worth bringing up.

(Back to earth.)

Let's continue.

In Practical Magic, the fear and criticism the town directs at these witches isn't really the film's central concern. Adapted from Alice Hoffman's novel, the heart of the story is female connection, first between sisters, then between nieces and their aunts, and finally between neighbors, as an entire community of women comes together to help Gillian confront the spirit of her very-much-not-normal ex-boyfriend.

In the end, witchcraft becomes a metaphor for care passed from one woman to another, from sisters, relatives, friends, and neighbors. It's a vision worlds apart from the moralistic and religious image of the isolated, dangerous, villainous woman that dominated so much of Western history.

I have to admit that I haven't seen much of Charmed yet, although it's very high on my watchlist. But from what I do know, the three sisters inherit their powers through a female lineage, and their strength depends on staying united—a theme captured by the show's famous motto, The Power of Three, and symbolized by the triquetra.

In the 1990s, the figure of the witch seems to carry with it all the stories that had shaped this mythical character over the centuries.

Little Things About a New Millennium

Now we arrive at the heart of '90s witchcraft. The films themselves reveal an interesting pattern, but to understand it a little better, we need to look at the historical context surrounding them. Much like the widespread belief that the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world in 2012, the 1990s were marked by a powerful current of anxiety and anticipation surrounding the turn of the millennium and what it might bring, whether the end of the world or a complete transformation of the future.

Spirituality is a subject one could spend a lifetime talking about, so I don't want to go too deeply into it here. Instead, I want to use it as a way of understanding where society stood during the 1990s. Because when a society is gripped by collective anxiety, carrying millions of hopes, fears, and uncertainties as it prepares to cross the threshold into a new millennium, what we call spiritual almost inevitably takes on a central role. In other words, when faced with uncertainty, we tend to reach for anything that offers us even the slightest sense of order.

In A Generation of Seekers (1993), American sociologist Wade Clark Roof describes the generations born after the two World Wars as increasingly moving away from traditional churches in search of a more personal form of spirituality, one they could shape for themselves.

With this new, more individualistic approach to spirituality, practices like Wicca (considered basically modern witchcraft by many) began to seem especially appealing. There were rules, but no central authority. There were no rigid dogmas, nor any obligation to belong to a religious community. Of course, this hadn't always been the case. Most spiritual traditions begin as collective practices. But with the publication of books such as Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988), Wicca not only became more accessible, it also became far more flexible. Unsurprisingly, this wasn't well received by many traditional Wiccans, who saw this growing popularity as a dilution of the religion, reducing its rituals to something easier to package and consume.

At its core, however, Cunningham's message was simple: anyone could practice Wicca on their own.

One of the bestselling books of the era was Silver RavenWolf's Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation (1998), published at the height of television series like Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Its rituals were simplified, written in an approachable, youthful voice, and designed so that readers could gather everything they needed with a quick trip to the grocery store. Teen Witch eventually became one of the most criticized and frequently challenged books among more traditional Wiccan practitioners. Yet it also accomplished exactly what it set out to do: it expanded Wicca's reach and brought it into the mainstream.

In 1989, Laurie Cabot, officially recognized as a witch by the Governor of Massachusetts during the 1970s, published Power of the Witch, a book that blended witchcraft with parapsychology and theories about the power of the human mind.

By the 1990s, alternative spirituality had become one of the defining cultural currents of the decade. And, like everything else we've discussed, it emerged within a broader historical context that helps explain why. It wasn't simply a reaction to fears surrounding the approaching millennium or to technology advancing at an increasingly rapid pace. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Western society experienced a gradual erosion of the institutions that had long provided individuals with direction, certainty and purpose.

Sociologists and philosophers had been noticing these changes for years. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition, arguing that by the end of the twentieth century, after two world wars and the rapid expansion of capitalism, people could no longer understand themselves through the great unifying narratives that had structured social life for centuries. Narratives such as the Judeo-Christian religions, the Enlightenment's faith in reason, or Marxism's promise of a future revolution capable of bringing justice. In their place emerged what Lyotard called "little narratives", smaller, more personal ways of creating meaning and understanding the world.

German sociologist Thomas Luckmann, in The Invisible Religion (1967), argued that religion had gradually lost its role as society's primary source of social integration. As religion became increasingly privatized and no longer revolved around a single shared doctrine, the search for spirituality and belief fell more and more into the hands of the individual. This created space for forms of spirituality associated with the New Age movement, as well as religions like Wicca, which became increasingly accessible and increasingly commercialized.

After all, spirituality functions as a response to questions such as: Who am I? How should I live? What principles should guide my life? And if the major religious institutions no longer provide those answers, people are compelled to take a more active role in constructing them for themselves, to build the narrative of their own lives.

Spirituality therefore becomes part of a person's identity within an increasingly individualistic culture, a word that might as well be the unofficial motto of today as well. In searching for something to connect with, people also search for the practice that best expresses who they are.

Tarot, crystals, meditation, astrology, and Wiccan practices all promise the same thing in different ways: a path toward better understanding oneself. They offer a spirituality tailored to the individual.

Now let's add third-wave feminism to the equation. For many women, Wicca offered a radically different way of experiencing spirituality from the one proposed by the Judeo-Christian religions, which had historically been more patriarchal and centered on ideas of sin and punishment. Within Wicca, feminine energy is sacred. The worship of goddesses allows for a worldview that places women at its center, nature occupies a fundamental role, and the female body as part of that natural world is no longer treated as something inherently sinful.

Witches Arrive in Hollywood

And so we arrive at the 1990s, when witches took over both the big screen and the small screen. It's not as though they had never been there before. Audiences had already watched witches living perfectly ordinary lives in California in the beloved sitcom Bewitched (1964), as well as in films such as I Married a Witch (1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958).

But by the 1990s, witches were making their way back onto film and television sets. And if there's one thing Hollywood has always been good at, even today, it's spotting a trend and turning it into a movie. The industry may change, but that part never really does.

The growing publishing market devoted to Wicca, Neopaganism, and alternative spiritualities certainly didn't go unnoticed by the major studios when it came time to dust off the broomsticks. Llewellyn Publications, which had been publishing books on occultism, astrology, and Wiccan practices for decades, even described the years leading up to the new millennium as a period of tremendous growth for that particular market.

Hollywood is certainly capable of producing original ideas (although... these days that's becoming high key debatable), but it's always worth remembering what I mentioned earlier: the things we consume, music, books, films, and television, reflect what is happening in society at that particular moment.

American sociologist Helen A. Berger argued that solitary Wiccan practice expanded dramatically throughout the 1990s and that, naturally, gave producers, screenwriters, and authors plenty of material to work with.

Whenever a cultural phenomenon becomes popular or successful, it's only natural that others will try to replicate the formula. But the success of series such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (yes, she hunts vampires, but we're including her because she's badass and because there are witches involved), Charmed, and films like The Craft and Practical Magic can't be explained as merely a commercial calculation. All of these stories were in conversation with a historical moment shaped by third-wave feminism, Neopaganism, and new forms of spirituality that were steadily gaining ground in North American culture.

In the end, the witches we saw on screen simply gave a beautiful cinematic face to a cultural movement that had already been taking shape for years.