We step behind Broadway’s emerald curtain to explore Wicked with two leading scholars. The University of Kansas’ Paul Laird, professor emeritus of musicology, received unprecedented access as Stephen Schwartz composed his blockbuster musical and wrote the definitive book on its making, Wicked: a Musical Biography. His colleague Jane Barnette is a professor of theater & dance and the author of Witch Fulfillment: Adaptation Dramaturgy and Casting the Witch for Stage and Screen. She reveals how the evolving story of Oz has redefined witchcraft in modern theater. In this engaging discussion, we prepare for the film while learning more about the book and musical that changed how we see good, evil, and female power and friendship.
Wicked Movie: The Making of a Witch explores the nuanced and powerful portrayal of witches in the highly anticipated Wicked movie. Witch Hunt podcast hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack delve into their immediate reactions and the deeper social themes conveyed through the film
Wicked Movie: The Making of a Witch explores the nuanced and powerful portrayal of witches in the highly anticipated Wicked movie. Witch Hunt podcast hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack delve into their immediate reactions and the deeper social themes conveyed through the film. From the breath-catching spectacle of Galinda’s grand entrance to the heartbreaking social justice undertones surrounding Elphaba’s journey, this podcast dissects the movie’s profound commentary on othering, power dynamics, and societal hypocrisies. Alongside enthusiastic discussions of standout scenes involving musical numbers, stunts, and emotional turns, Josh and Sarah provide a thorough examination of how the Wicked movie redefines classic witch stereotypes and resonates with contemporary issues. The podcast is an unmissable treat for fans of Wicked, Oz, and beyond, offering a thoughtful and passionate examination of one of the year’s most magical films.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] There's pandemonium. People are running in the streets in panic because, oh, the Wicked Witch is coming. Like suddenly there's a Wicked Witch. There hasn't been a Wicked Witch before, as far as we know. And now there is one and she's the great enemy. And oh, by the way, she's green. Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast reviewing the portrayal of witches in literature, theater, and film. I'm Josh Hutchinson. Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today we investigate the treatment of witches in the Wicked movie. Josh Hutchinson: And we're reviewing the Wicked movie because it's something that we obviously enjoy, and it's something a lot of people out there enjoy, and we want to be able to enjoy it together while also critically evaluating the role of the witches in the film. Josh Hutchinson: So, we saw the Wicked movie today, and Sarah, I'm really curious, how did you feel when you [00:01:00] walked out of the theater? Sarah Jack: I didn't want to leave. I wanted to walk right back in and watch the next showing. Josh Hutchinson: That's the same way that I felt, actually, though, even while the movie was going on, I was like, I can't wait to watch this again and catch more of the details and everything because I kind of had to live in the front of screen mostly to focus on what they were saying and singing, but I wouldn't be able to just sit back and enjoy everything. Sarah Jack: We've spent several weeks preparing for this event, reading, watching. So there's been all this time looking forward to being in Oz in the theater and so being there was fantastic and I wasn't ready to leave Oz. And Josh Hutchinson: It was a really, it was really just a great [00:02:00] creation of the world of Oz. I thought their rendition of Oz was quite excellent. Sarah Jack: Maybe we want to talk about Galinda's entrance into the film a little bit. Josh Hutchinson: Boy, do I. Galinda's entrance is so spectacular. And if you love the Good Witch in the 1939 MGM film, this is very evocative of her coming in, in her bubble. It's. I love the way they show, they pan up to the sky and you just see this like light twinkling in the sky moving. You think, Oh, it looks like the sun, but cause it's so bright and spectacular, but it keeps coming down. And then it's a bubble with Galinda in it. It's amazing. Sarah Jack: Yeah, and she, Cynthia and Ariana have now created these characters [00:03:00] that I, I don't, I, they will never be matched, in their, the combination together, their partnership, their friendship. And we'll be talking about that more, I'm sure. But I, I fell in love with Glinda immediately and, I'm sure, you know, my love for Glinda the Good Witch from MGM, you know, that sets the stage and, but Galinda was just marvelous right from the get go. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, she's spectacular. They really cast the movie very well. I thought all of the actors just fit perfectly the character. You know, I don't know if they, they cast it and then they did some rewrites to, to make it perfect for them, butall of the songs just came straight from the musical and they were able [00:04:00] to sing them perfectly. And, you know, you look at people like Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel and the vocal talents that they have, then you see Ariana and Cynthia able to pick that ball up and run with it. And they just nailed every note. It was literally pitch perfect and beautiful. thought, you know, the whole, the story between the two characters was just beautiful. They don't start out liking each other, but they come that way. Sarah Jack: I'm just gonna state that I have not been to the musical, but I've read and I've read and read and, you know, seen lots of Oz, and talked to experts, but the first look into Oz today in that theater was [00:05:00] not sparkly. Right out of the gate is the darkness. Josh Hutchinson: There was a really problematic moment for me, one that I struggled with a little in the first scene. Well, spoiler alert here if you're not familiar with the musical, the first scene of the movie is basically similar to the beginning of Oz, once Dorothy lands in Oz and The Wicked Witch of the East is dead and the Munchkins are celebrating, ding dong and all that. And, so the beginning of Wicked is similar in that they're actually celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. Which then the whole movie goes back explaining like the story from the beginning of the, before she was the Wicked Witch of the West when she was Elphaba, you know, [00:06:00] and goes through her life and adventures and misadventures, but in the first scene, while they're celebrating the death, they burn a giant, wooden effigy of the witch, which really evoked the terrors of the European witch trials and also modern-day persecutions of people accused of witchcraft. Sarah Jack: Absolutely. I almost cried. Sarah Jack: So, you know, my experience as a child watching the 1939 film, you know, for sure that the witch was evil. You just, it's not just assumed, but you know, you knew then. And it's this huge relief. This monster's gone. You just hear that a witch is dead. You see her feet there, and the celebration makes sense. It's [00:07:00] comfortable. It is a celebration of conquering evil. Sarah Jack: But if you've read Wicked, if you are familiar with the characters at all, and I think also when you have an awareness of what's happening in our world to innocent women and children and men, I've learned to not, so I automatically think it's not a witch.I don't see celebration in killing a witch because of the reality. And I'm fully aware, fully aware that this is a fairy tale. It's a fairy tale I love, but it was hard to start right there, celebrating and watching the burning of this effigy, especially when there's been things in the news this week of deaths of innocent people, but also of effigy burnings. [00:08:00] And so I couldn't, I was like for a minute there, I wasn't in the fairy, fairy tale. It was hard to see it. It's huge. I mean, it's not, it's huge. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Sarah Jack: they, I mean, Josh Hutchinson: It's a Burning Man size, effigy, basically. Sarah Jack: truly, obviously it goes into the story and you begin to fall in love with Elphaba. It's horrific to realize that that was her, that that is, yeah. I mean, Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Sarah Jack: I want to say it's not just about the things that I said. It does, as a descendant of women that were hanged for witchcraft, it was very upsetting. I'm not saying it was the wrong choice. I don't have an answer. I don't know what I think of that. I think that it is a portrayal of mob mentality against accused and alleged witches.
Josh Hutchinson: That's, uh, the flip side of, you know, what I was saying my [00:09:00] initial shock at it happening. Part of me did feel like this shows what happens. This is like a visual for people that you instantly connect to the historic witch trials most, but, you know, once you know about the modern witch trials, this really just evoked images that we've seen of people being burned alive for this. So it was difficult to see, but I also see it as, Hey, this is a, moment where we can talk about this and maybe shed some light on what's happening now. Like you said, the mob mentality in the manner that they were rejoicing. Everybody's getting caught up in what everybody else is, everybody else's celebration and you know, they just light this thing, but [00:10:00] the image was just so, it's so visceral. And it really just kind of knocks you out for a moment while if, you know. Sarah Jack: Yeah, I'm really curious if, if they did screen test. If they, what kind of responses they were getting and if they just ignored them, , you know, I think people would've been ho I think, I mean, it's very horrifying to watch and part of the, when you're looking at it from the fairytale perspective, you associate water or a, you know, a falling house with witch death, but it's just a different feeling to watch a giant witch burn. Josh Hutchinson: Now that said, if I wasn't aware of what's going on today, I might be It might be, my reaction to it might've been measured a little bit more, but still the thought of all the innocents, the tens of thousands of innocent people who were [00:11:00] actually burned or at least their bodies were burned at the stake because of witchcraft accusations in Europe, still knowing, just knowing about that makes me feel some kind of horror at seeing it. Sarah Jack: Yeah. It was horror. It was horrifying. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. But like you were saying earlier, then you go, it's kind of a dramatic switch. You go from this burning effigy, to then Josh Hutchinson: Glinda starts telling the story of Elphaba and she begins with, well, Elphaba's mother having a relationship that then leads to Elphaba's birth. So you see this little, like, I find it a little adorable green baby, coming out. Everybody who's present for the birth is like shocked and repulsed by it. Sarah Jack: So [00:12:00] that had another tie to me from that had another tie for me in reality. I read an article this week about a little girl that was born with albinism. And in the interview, the mom responds how disappointing it was, how hurtful it was that when her family came to meet their child, they only stayed five minutes. And that's like a real experience that just happened just a little bit ago. I do think that birth is a celebration. It's supposed to be a celebration and it wasn't. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Sarah Jack: for Elphaba's family. Josh Hutchinson: Right. Yeah, the green skin color is obviously a device to mark Elphaba as being different than all the other characters in the movie. It's really just a [00:13:00] signal of her otherness, but like you said, real people go through very similar experiences where a baby's not born the expected skin color. And people don't know how to react to that. There's a lot of superstition. We just did an episode about that earlier this week, and there's so many myths about persons with albinism, especially, but also, you know, people who are born with anything that marks them out as being different than other people. If you have a disability, you're marked out as different right away. If people can see it, then they start thinking about you as being kind of different and maybe less than other people. Sarah Jack: You made a good point when you said they don't [00:14:00] know how to respond. And I do think that there is that. The shock causes people to not respond. Josh Hutchinson: The, that scene is so beautiful with her birth. One of the things that we just had a really wonderful conversation with Paul Laird and Jane Barnette earlier this week. And one of the things that I believe Jane brought up and they spoke about looking forward to how. Is this going to look off the stage on camera? And I loved the dimension that that room, the birthing room had. It had the, the family and the characters and the animals just like all around and the baby goes up. It was really a fascinating scene because, even though there was this, [00:15:00] the father's in the background, not responding well, she's still being elevated. Josh Hutchinson: That's a good point. There's, there's something to that where it begins with her being elevated and then later on in the movie, she's also elevated, like physically lifted above the ground. So you kind of can see her at two stages of life having a similar experience. And we know that flight is so important in portrayals of witches. Of course, the original Wizard of Oz book and film had the Wicked Witch of the West flying around the country on her broom. So you've got that back again and that's wonderful, but you wait for it. It builds up a lot of anticipation for that first actual flight [00:16:00] moment. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: So, Sarah Jack: Yeah. Flight is such a key element in even in Frank Baum's I mean, Dorothy, the wizard, how do they get to Oz? It's through the air. Josh Hutchinson: And how did the wizard get to Oz? Through the air in his balloon. And, you know, so it's common, like the Oz stories tend to begin and end with, you know, whether it's at the end of the MGM film, the wizard taking off in the balloon to go back and leaving without Dorothy or, you know, you know, the way this one ends with the song, the performance, of Defying Gravity. just leave that as a hint for now. it's very effective. I really loved the way that they closed this movie, but we'll come back to that after we talk about the middle a little more. Sarah Jack: I really want to talk about Elphaba's. [00:17:00] magic that they do show like right out, right out of the womb. That is flight. Like the magic that they show is the flight. Josh Hutchinson: But I also love the props, all the props, like all the details. Every little prop was so fun. And it looked like, you know, you just wanted to go play with Galinda's shoes and the poppies and the, the spectacles and glasses. And I wanted to try Elphaba's hat on, like the props were really marvelous. Sarah Jack: I loved the way that they used the poppies in the scene when Professor Dillamond is removed from the classroom, and another professor comes in with a lion in a cage, and Elphaba gets furious about the way they're treating this lion. She's used to animals walking around freely and being able to converse, and this cage is supposed to suppress the [00:18:00] lion's ability to learn to speak, and she gets really upset about that and begins her like social justice quest for the animals, but she puts everyone to sleep using poppies, which, of course, if you know the 1939 film or the original L. Frank Baum book, the poppies put Dorothy to sleep while she's walking the yellow brick road. And so I thought here they are using those poppies again. They found a way to, to tie those things and, you know, have that element included. Sarah Jack: This movie wanted to send some social justice messages and, you know, the animal culture that was under attack and being persecuted is something that is very, there's so many examples [00:19:00] in our history and in our modern world that that speaks to. So that is another one. Like with the burning effigy, that's not going to maybe affect everybody the same way, but I feel like what you see happening with the professor and the animals is not as subtle. Not that a burning effigy is subtle, but it was a clear statement. Josh Hutchinson: It's something that everybody's going to recognize something that's going on today that is reminiscent of the treatment of the animals, the persecution and suppression the animals, because, the animals, they're, you know. In Wicked, the animals begin, they're basically like humans in animal form. They speak, they're intelligent, they can have friendships with humans, and so [00:20:00] forth. They're suppressed and animals start disappearing. I really loved that they included the scene with Dr. Dillamond talking to his animal friends the, in his room, and they're having a little secret hush hush meeting because they can't be caught meeting together anymore, because that would look seditious to the wizard and, and his side of things, which Elphaba doesn't realize that the wizards behind it at first either. What's going on with the animals and them being banned from teaching, they're being banned from preaching. They're being banned from basically any involvement with humans other than as what we think in the real world, the role that animals play as pets and workers and so forth. So they're, they're really suppressed and treated as subhuman. [00:21:00] They're totally dehumanized, and, you know, like with that cage, they don't want the animals to speak anymore. They want them to be quiet, and the board, when Dr. Dillimond flips it over in an earlier scene, says animals should be seen and not heard, which is very upsetting. Sarah Jack: It's very upsetting. These animals are contributing to society. They're intelligent. They have, you know, they're not, they're being devalued, but they're actually are very valuable to society. Sarah Jack: Yes. Yeah. And. I said, through, through your own personal lens, you'll see things going on now and you'll know things that have happened in the past that really remind you of what's going on with the animals. There are so many for me. I hope people [00:22:00] think about Sarah Jack: it's just not a stretch of the imagination whatsoever. Josh Hutchinson: There's so many different ways that you could apply that to today's world and to the world history because, you know, this cycle of persecution has been going on and we've talked about this a little before, the label "witch," as just meaning, you know, an othered, bad person who's dangerous to us, could be a witch, whoever the witch in that sense of the word is changes from time to time. so, You know, the witch has been Jewish people, the witch has been black people, the witch has been feminists, the witch has been the LGBTQ, um, there's been so many witches over time, it might [00:23:00] be the people in the country next to you, um, who are the witches and, I mean, this is anywhere in the world, these kinds of things have been applied to so many where we just label someone as being this bad guy. And they said something about it in the film. There's a part where they talk about how, Sarah Jack: the Wizard talks about how to unite people, you create an enemy. And so he created the animals as being the enemy, because he tired of the discord in Oz. Sarah Jack: Yeah, but then in the next breath, they, they trade that in for Elphaba. She's there, not the enemy, boom, Madame Morrible trades it in. Well, the animal that their usefulness was done, and, it was pretty much squashed. I mean, they, appears that they gotten that handled. [00:24:00] And so then the new enemy is Elphaba. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. There's like announcements. You hear Morrible's voice all over Oz and they show it at Shiz. They show it in the Emerald City. People, there's pandemonium. People are running in the streets in panic because, oh, the Wicked Witch is coming. Like suddenly there's a Wicked Witch. There hasn't been a Wicked Witch before, as far as we know. And now there is one and she's the great enemy. And oh, by the way, she's green, so she's easy to spot. So. Easy to hunt her down and treat her as being different and different than human because she doesn't even look like us. Sarah Jack: Would you like to talk about the friendship and love? Josh Hutchinson: Yes. Sarah Jack: in Wicked? Josh Hutchinson: I definitely do want to talk about. Sarah Jack: It was amazing. Josh Hutchinson: it. It's such a good story, because Galinda [00:25:00] and Elphaba start out like their first big song that's the two of them together is Loathing. And, they just talk about how they loathe each other and well, they sing about how they loathe other, but they're always, even before that song starts, you know, they're at odds with each other at every moment and then they get stuck rooming together and they hate it and they hate each other and or loathe each other. So they're not off to a great start. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: But then Glinda, or Galinda, as she's known at the time, Galinda, well, there's this dance, you see, and Galinda gets a boy to ask Elphaba's sister, Nessarose, who we haven't talked about yet,to ask her out to [00:26:00] the dance, because she's just sitting there by herself, while everybody else is running off to the dance club, and she, in the film and in the musical she's a wheelchair user and Galinda thinks that oh this will look like I'm doing a nice thing by getting the boy to do a favor for, you know, this girl, but really she's just trying to get the boy out of her own hair. But Nessarose is so happy. She beams at Elphaba and just is so like glittery faced. I would, I don't know, that's not a thing but maybe it is a thing. She's just so happy that Elphaba does something nice for Galinda, and then Galinda does something nice for Elphaba, and then they become really good friends. And scene where they had that, that's one when I was about [00:27:00] crying. I was starting to well up a little because it just tugs at the heartstrings the way, you know, Elphaba's isolated on the dance floor and everybody's laughing at her because she's wearing a funny hat. And Galinda goes and dances with her. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: The goofiest Elphaba dance, kind of reminded me of the Elaine from Seinfeld, but it's just Sarah Jack: Oh, yeah. Josh Hutchinson: you know, arms flailing kind of dance. Yeah. Little shoulder moves and little, like whatever this thing was and. Sarah Jack: Yeah. yeah, I just was, I mean, I was there. I felt like I was right there in the, the, the film just really pulls you in. And Sarah Jack: there's another brand out there that we know as magical, but this one had the magic. Sarah Jack: This, I, I mean, [00:28:00] I have been to the magic place recently and in my seat in my theater, I felt Elphaba and Galinda's magic and Oz's magic. They really pulled that off. And that scene really does it. I mean, it is, you feel her isolation and this is something that really was a nod to the thread of courage from the original versions of Oz. They don't ever necessarily say courage in Wicked, but Elphaba was demonstrating that there in that scene, I think. So, and you're just like that turning point where Galinda decides that she's gonna go have fun with Elphaba with the silly dance. It's such a key moment. It is, you know, Elphaba was purposely, you know, [00:29:00] vulnerable right then and Galinda took the opportunity to become her friend right there in front of everybody. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it was so powerful. And this movie, the movie, and I know the musical also, they bring that friendship, female friendship so powerful in both of them. That's a big reason why Wicked's been a running on Broadway for over 20 years and has a touring show and shows in other locations. And, it's so massively successful largely because of that friendship story that you don't really expect from a story involving the so-called Wicked Witch of the West that, Oh, she once was young and she had friends. It's really amazing. Sarah Jack: Yeah. So we just talked about all of that. Josh Hutchinson: We danced around Fiyero. [00:30:00] We got to talk about all of that without bringing him up, but how fantastic was he? Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Dancing Through Life, his grand, big entrance into the scene and the song Dancing Through Life, it's been stuck in my head since I got out of the theater,along with maybe a dozen other songs, but that one keeps coming through because it's so fun. But they do a lot in the scene also of dancing through life. So it's important. And Fiyero, the character of Fiyero in first Wicked movie, he's very interesting. He's a deeper, guy than kind of, he comes off across at the beginning, he seems just shallow and self-absorbed and, he's, they make him the ultimate [00:31:00] goof off character. He doesn't want to take anything seriously. He wants to dance through life. Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think it's interesting. So he's one of the main male figures.Wizard is one of the main male figures, and neither one is quite what they say they are. I don't know what that means. Josh Hutchinson: No. And one has power because he pretends to be powerful, the wizard. Where Prince Fiyero, he's a prince from the Winkie country, which they don't really get into what that is in the movie, but it's very heavily featured in the, this book, the original Wicked. And so he actually is born with real power over people, or at least his parents have authority over people. Yeah, he has authority where [00:32:00] the wizard usurps authority by being able to read a handful of words out of the Grimmerie, which is the ancient magical text in a language no one can read in Oz. Sarah Jack: Okay, I want to talk about Jeff Goldblum here. Fantastic. It was so great, Sarah Jack: Yeah. But I, I loved, I loved her trip to Oz. I loved her invitation to Oz. I loved her trip to Oz. You know, the, Wizomania, the, that was all fantastic. And I had seen an interview with the director and Jeff and Cynthia and Ariana and that huge Oz head was right there on the stage for the interview. I thought it was going to play a bigger part in the film. And it is amazing and remarkable, but they just got right to [00:33:00] Jeff, they got right to the Wizard himself. He couldn't wait to meet Elphaba. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I was surprised when he walks out from behind the head on his own, because we're so used to what happens in the 1939 film when Dorothy goes there and they, like, Toto runs around and finds the man behind the curtain that you're not like, don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain. And he's in there on his microphone telling people don't pay attention. Like where here, yeah, Goldbloom Wizard walks out voluntarily, because he's eager to meet Elphaba, because, as is revealed several minutes later, he has a plan for her. He has something that he needs her to do for him. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Okay. So then actually I want to say another thing about my experience watching this. We get to this [00:34:00] point in the film, and I remember thinking, how come I haven't been scared yet? There hasn't really been anything scary. I, I was thinking it was probably more like childhood fear that I was hoping would be evoked a little bit more. Sarah Jack: And it wasn't there, but that changed too. Once Elphaba has the Grimmerie, the next few scenes are just brutal. And I just, man, that was, that was something. I'm talking about the flying monkeys. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Sarah Jack: That was scary and it was scary what was happening to them. but they were scary. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What happens to them when they're transformed to sprout wings all of a sudden from their back, these gigantic wings just breaking the flesh and clothing and coming out? The [00:35:00] poor, Chistery, the head of the Emerald Guard is writhing on the floor and like, you really feel his pain and what he's going through the animations on those monkeys were just really powerful. You first see it with one and then they go into another room and all the guards that were lining the hallway are all on the floor and jumping on walls. They're trying to, like, not feel this pain anymore. Sarah Jack: And you know what I felt like when Elphaba meets him before she walks up to the Grimmerie and is able to read it, it's like they were kind of, unless I was imagining it, cause I was just so pulled into the story, I wondered if he had been able to talk before and couldn't talk. Like, I felt like he wanted to say something to her. [00:36:00] Cause I feel like they just like paused on his face and his eyes, you know, were looking at her and they showed her eyes. And I just was like, you know why he can't talk. He lost it. Sarah Jack: Yeah. I really want to see what they do with him in the, in part two. yeah. Because he has a pretty significant role in Gregory Maguire's novel, Chistery, and he, does involve speech in his role there. So, be interesting to see what happens. But yeah, when the, the once the flying monkeys go after Elphaba, because Morrible goes out there and tells them that Elphaba's responsible, it wasn't the wizard's idea, it was Elphaba who did it, and they need to go after her, and they're all in a lot of pain, and they fly off in a [00:37:00] rage, and suddenly they're flinging themselves at windows as Elphaba and Glinda make their way down this, you know, one of those long hallways that they only make for movies like this.That exact hall Josh Hutchinson: With a lot of windows and it's high above the city, the Emerald city, they're up real high and these monkeys are flying and full force, like throwing their bodies at these windows. And the first time it happened, like everyone in the theater jumped a little bit, so this comes as a surprise at the beginning, I believe, but they are, they're fearsome, you know, adversaries. Sarah Jack: That Grimmerie was amazing. The way it opened, the way the spells came up off the page, and the language that she read the [00:38:00] spells in, I was so thrilled. Josh Hutchinson: Yes, I loved that she did this spell and she's pronouncing these mysterious spell words, like, which is what you think that a spell is like. It's some mystery language, you know, repetitive, repeating of syllables and things kind of magic. Sarah Jack: Maybe I missed this, you know, when they're, there's a couple times that Elphaba's in the forest. She's, it's not scary really. And I know with Oz there's, the, the MGM Oz, there's the scary trees and I don't feel like there are any Easter eggs or nods to talking trees. I would have liked to have seen at least a face on a tree, but maybe I missed it. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Maybe they're saving that for the second part. Sarah Jack: Could be, but I did the, one of the other Easter eggs that was in it was when they're rescuing the cub [00:39:00] and they bicycle out of there and put the cub in the basket, like Toto went in the basket. That was fabulous. Josh Hutchinson: see that because it like seeing Elphaba on the bike, you reminded me of MGM watching, the Wicked Witch and the mean lady in Kansas riding the bicycle and Dorothy sees her like riding in the air around the house while it's flying in the cyclone, just I had that image Josh Hutchinson: I guess I can't do the music from that sequence, but you guys I'm talking about from Sarah Jack: and then you just. Sarah Jack: You mentioned the cyclone and I feel like the, the, just a little nod. There was a little nod to when, when, Glinda's like, I like the air and she puts her hair out the window. Like that was a little one. And then obviously there's a storm later, but, yeah, I just, Josh Hutchinson: [00:40:00] Yeah, that storm's spectacular, too. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I love the green flashes in the sky. Very awesome. the end in the Defying Gravity sequence. Sarah Jack: I Hope You're Happy. Sarah Jack: I really look forward to being able to see the stage musical because I want to see the songs in that kind of environment and presented like that. Sarah Jack: Sarah Jack: Yeah. I know there's, there's a lot of power in going to see a live performance, and you can really feel very close to a story by being in the same room as the people acting it out and singing and playing instruments and all that stuff. You get to see this whole world coming to life in front of you and it feels very immediate. I'm ready to go see the [00:41:00] Nutcracker. Josh Hutchinson: I was thinking about a Christmas Carol, but like the film also brought a lot of immediacy, I thought, with the ability to do closeups, you know, you can pan back and see the whole world, or you can get really close and intimate with somebody's face and you really get pulled in that way by being able to see the nuances, the little, micro expressions and so forth in people's faces. Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Jack: So Josh, do we consider Madame Morrible a witch? Josh Hutchinson: She is a witch. She is a sorceress. You can call it by different names. She's a professor of magic. She's a spellcaster. She's a lot of things. She's not labeled [00:42:00] witch by anybody in the movie. That's important to note. Where Elphaba gets labeled the wicked witch at the very end, none of the other characters are actually, even Glinda's not called a good witch in this first film, so. Sarah Jack: But her little friends keep saying how good she is. That was so funny. Josh Hutchinson: was Sarah Jack: so good. Josh Hutchinson: Her and her friends and the, her friends,just every time she does something that's outwardly seems like she's doing a nice thing for somebody, they're just like, oh, she's so good. She is such a good one. She's so good. Like all through the movie, they're just saying that, reinforcing that she has this, she's able to build a reputation as being almost saintly or, you know, whatever she's. She's the good witch [00:43:00] without the label witch yet. Josh Hutchinson: Even though she did, because Elphaba got her into the sorcery seminar, and they call it sorcery not witchcraft, which is also something to note. But it's interesting because we also know just going back to the original Oz, and people are familiar enough with this story, this isn't giving much away for what happens. When know that there, in the original Oz, there's a Wicked Witch of the East and a Wicked Witch of the West, and then you have a Good Witch of the South and a Good Witch of the North, so there's like the four corner cardinal directions all are represented by some kind of witch, two good ones and two evil ones or wicked ones, I should say. So we know that we're going to see Glinda become the good [00:44:00] witch, but we don't know yet, who's going to be this Wicked Witch of the East who's Elphaba's counterpart, so I don't want to reveal who that is yet, if you're not familiar with the novel or the musical and you haven't seen the film yet um, because that's not going to happen yet, be revealed for another year when part two comes out, so anyways, we have you know, one wicked witch, a sorceress, a phony baloney wizard, a learning Glinda student of sorcery. So you can see there's kind of, basically you could just say there's four witches if you wanted to, even though one's a male. Sarah Jack: When you were, just reminding us that, you know, It can be anyone who's an accused witch today. That made me think [00:45:00] about childhood Elphaba being used to illustrate like her, her childhood character's there. Elphaba as a child is in this film more than once, but they don't show many of the characters that young. So I was just thinking about, you know, obviously, unfortunately there are children that are branded as witches today, too. Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and watching Elphaba grow up you can see that people are suspicious of her at an early age and like you said, coming out of the womb, she's already doing magic. She does this involuntary magic whenever she's upset, um, so it's just this emotional driven magic. And she in, right when she comes out of the room, out of the womb, into the room, [00:46:00] she, levitates all these objects in the room up to the ceiling. And it's quite remarkable. And then there's a scene where children are picking on her and she gets angry and something happens to those children. And then she gets yelled at by her father, "what have you done now, Elphaba?" Sarah Jack: And do you think that there was purpose, whether, I mean, it's really illustrated in the film, but, Elphaba's character seems to be the one that feels the most. And I don't mean those, those necessarily just those moments where her magic flares up, but she's the one that is thinking and looking outside, you know, what is popular and really evaluating what's happening, and then she's also the one that has power in the form of magic. Josh Hutchinson: She has, now see she's an interesting portrayal of a [00:47:00] witch, because she has this innate power but she's also othered, and therefore, she's people try to render her powerless. She fights back. And, so, but she also, you know, how stereotypically, a witch is like a poor, old crone who lives alone in a, like on the edge of a swamp or deep in the woods somewhere. And Elphaba doesn't have that upbringing. She's the daughter of the governor of Munchkinland. And so she's born into privilege just like Glinda is, or Galinda, born into privilege. They both, their families have servants, and [00:48:00] Elphaba is raised by a nanny, and so her family has resources. Josh Hutchinson: So what I'm thinking is that, you know, people have this image of the, of, always went after the poorest people. And certainly the, you know, that happened a lot. You look at a case like Sarah Good in Salem. You know, she's out asking people for gifts because she can't support herself and her husband can't support the family. But you also have people caught up in witch trials who were middle class or even who were wealthy, like Philip and Mary English in Salem witch trials were the wealthiest people in Salem and got caught up in it. So when I look at Wicked, I'm seeing all these different kinds of [00:49:00] Witches in it, because they all have different backgrounds and characteristics and their lives really shape what kind of witch they become. Sarah Jack: And I think it's something to reflect on that Wicked the film, the most evil thing is the mob mentality or the groupthink. It is the character, you know, on either side of each other, the neighbor, the friend together, you know, those that are, you know, extinguishing the animals, those that decide that Elphaba is the Wicked Witch. I don't know in the future what wicked she may do, but from what we've seen of the story, there wasn't an evil source of power, but there was an evil source of [00:50:00] hurt happening to citizens in Oz. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, hmm, she's not sworn an allegiance to any kind of devil figure or anything like that. Her power, she came by her power naturally, which is interesting. Josh Hutchinson: But, I think, do you think, you know, L. Frank Baum kind of put, flipped witch stereotypes on their head by introducing the idea that there could be a good witch, and then Wicked the novel took that further, by introducing the concept of, you know, a gray area kind of between wicked and good, where, which is the reality that everybody actually lives in, is the space between wicked and good. No, nobody's entirely either one. And, I love exploring that area. Then in [00:51:00] Wicked and in the movie, you really see all of those shades that come between this black-and-white world of good and evil. You see everything that's in between and another way that they change the portrayal of witches is again and I guess L. Frank Baum really started it, because the Wizard, the male figure, patriarch of Oz is a a phony. He can't do any of that real magic. He does the other kind of magic, which is sleight of hand and illusions and things like that so he has a big, giant head that talks and it's supposed to be him. He also takes other forms in the books, so, um, you know, he's effectively powerless. And he has all the power, [00:52:00] but it doesn't come from himself, it comes from these lies that he builds around himself. Whereas the women actually like have, Madame Morrible is a powerful sorceress. Elphaba is a powerful witch. Glinda, we know, is coming into her power. So you've got really, it's a patriarchally run world, but suddenly you've got these three powerful women in it. And what's that going to do? How's that going to shape the next movie? Josh Hutchinson: I've been intrigued by how it's the wonderful wizard, but it's also the terrible wizard. And they did say terrible. He did say terrible in Wicked today. And I was kind of, I was like glad to hear it. I think we always, you know, think the powerful and wonderful and terrible. Josh Hutchinson: You know, that other movie that came out [00:53:00] last decade, Oz the Great and Powerful. He's both great, which can mean a lot of different things, and powerful. Where we know that really he's not so powerful, but he has everybody believing that he is. Sarah Jack: So was there anything else that you loved or that really surprised you? Josh Hutchinson: I was like really happy to see the ruby slippers slipped in there. They had both, they had the silver and the ruby. Josh Hutchinson: yes. Yeah. Those slippers, they've. It was interesting that in, in this one, the slippers, they mentioned because,Elphaba and Nessarose's father gives slippers Nessa Rose. And that's a significant moment where he's got a gift for her, but he's got nothing [00:54:00] but grumpiness and anger for Elphaba. So, that's another moment that actually means, like, isolating Elphaba. Sarah Jack: Yeah, and she feels like she deserves that because she blames herself for Nessa's disabilities. Josh Hutchinson: When Elphaba and Nessarose's father gives Nessa those shoes, he says, these were your mother's. Josh Hutchinson: They're not at this moment in time in part one, the shoes are not special yet. Sarah Jack: She doesn't even put them on then. She's seen in a scene right after that with not those shoes on. Josh Hutchinson: shoes. Yeah. She must put them, tuck them away because they're so special being from her mother, who she never in Wicked the movie. And I also in the musical, Nessa never knows, never knows her mother because her mother [00:55:00] dies, giving childbirth to Nessarose. So, which is a little different than what happens in the novel. Josh Hutchinson: What's your favorite scene from a staging standpoint? There are like, I really love one of the dances when they're in the spinning contraption and Sarah Jack: yeah, Josh Hutchinson: around on the ladders. I thought that really took a lot of coordination to line up that scene, the choreography and the moving, literal moving parts of the set. Sarah Jack: Yeah. I got very excited. I pretty sure I almost clapped. I didn't, but I was like, when I like saw what that room looked like, and them putting the books. I was like, oh my goodness, they're going to be dancing there. It's going to spin around. It's going to be awesome. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, now, you know, if you were to ask me my favorite scene of the film, [00:56:00] that's the Defying Gravity sequence. The part when Elphaba takes flight for the first time. I found that to be very powerful and also very just entertaining and cool. You know, it's very action-packed and dramatic and bold and, just watching, you know, the stunt work in the film is incredible. I've watched a lot of behind the scenes stuff in the lead up to this, and just the number of times they had actors on wires, flinging them through the air at like top speed, and, and they would be singing. You can watch their, their mouth moving the whole time that they're, I'm like, how do you even concentrate while you're being flung through the air like that? So there's a lot of really cool scenes. There's a lot of great action in it. We've talked about a lot of the [00:57:00] emotions and the themes and the undertones and, and that kind of stuff, but there's, it's an action film too. Sarah Jack: It is an action film. Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, so, if you don't like musicals, but you like magic and awesome special effects and stunts, it's really a great film. Sarah Jack: Oh. And you know, the other part that was really great too is just the, the script, like what they're saying and the very special new words that sound like words you know, that are words you know, but don't sound like themselves. That was amazing. Josh Hutchinson: I love the Ozian language with words like horrendable. They're quite fun. They just take, take a word and throw a twist on it. So as the you still understand what they're saying, but it's kind of Seussian or something. It's [00:58:00] a fun way of Ozifying a word. Josh Hutchinson: Cause There's almost nothing that I could criticize about this film. I loved it. Josh Hutchinson: A lot of the stuff, it was like this, you're like looking and seeing so much at once, but then at other times you really are only seeing like a little bit, you know, a more defined, smaller space. Josh Hutchinson: I liked that variety because one of the good things that I really like about that you can do with musicals is make the scenes really come like there's a lot, so much movement at once. In other words, all the dancers, the choreography, people are moving in different directions, coming at each other, away from each other. You know, you see all these different kinds of people moving around on the screen in different ways at the same time. Sarah Jack: Yeah. And they really, in this, in the film, the props and the, the [00:59:00] large, the little props and the big, the furnace, like so much is used in the choreography. It's great. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's another thing I love about musicals, and they did that especially well in this movie, using the entire, like, the sets were practical pieces, because every piece of it is used in some somewhere in the choreography. You've got Galinda gliding, hanging on a ceiling fan at one point going in a circle. You know, people are jumping off walls. There's ladders. There's all kinds of moving parts. Sarah Jack: Which, I really want to point out that I felt like that was a real statement. You had Galinda singing in her room that she, you know, it was To use a word that Jane Barnette used this week in her interview with her that I loved, frothy. It was a frothy room and Galinda's frothy and she does this frothy little flying around in this room, [01:00:00] but the sky is not the limit there. When Elphaba actually flies, the sky is the limit. And I really, I saw, you know, that comparison as significant. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. That reminds me of something else I wanted to say about witch representation. You have the pinkness, another word that Professor Barnette used earlier this week. The pinkness of Glinda and her, Galinda's room is just so stuffed with pink, primarily there's a few other colors in there. It's overwhelmingly pink and so, you know, pink of course being a color traditionally associated with females. While Elphaba there in contrast is in all black, which, you know, a color certainly associated with females, but it's. Like, so different than pink. Pink is like, [01:01:00] we associate it with cheerfulness and happiness and fun and bubbly, cutesy things and gentleness. And black is like a strong, like harsher color. It's a more powerful color. It is associated with evil but Elphaba just Sarah Jack: Independence, Josh Hutchinson: like she belongs in it. And she's not wicked. She's, she's nice. Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us on Witch Hunt. Tune in Monday for a special interview with experts on Wicked and the representation of witches on stage and screen. Until then, have a great today and a wicked tomorrow.
Meet Lori Prescott Hansen and Matthew C. S. Julander writer and co-director of the upcoming film I Be a Witch. The film tells the story of Lori’s ancestor, Salem witch trial victim Ann Foster of Andover Massachusetts. Ann’s story is told through visions and memories that Ann is experiencing during her last days in the Salem jail. Lori and Matthew reflect together on the making of the movie and the impactful lessons the history offers.
[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, the show that asks why we hunt witches and how we can stop hunting witches. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:19] Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack, and today we speak with Lori Prescott Hansen and Matthew C. S. Julander about their film, I Be a Witch.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: The film tells the stories of Lori's ancestor, Salem Witch Trial victim Ann Foster of Andover. Based on actual events, Ann's story is told through visions and memories Ann is experiencing during her last days in the Salem jail.
[00:00:43] Sarah Jack: Welcome Lori Prescott Hansen, Salem Witch Trial descendant, writer, and actress, and I Be a Witch film director, Matthew C. S. Julander.
[00:00:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: I'm Lori Prescott Hanson. I always throw in the Prescott, because I live in a small town, and there's five Lori Hansons just here. My husband and I have been theater artists for a long time. We actually met in a production of King Lear. And we began to do professional storytelling quite a while ago. And we've been doing that ever since. He taught theater at the university here for 20 years, and I did a lot of directing of shows here and here in small town, Idaho as far as being a storyteller goes, there's not a lot of venues unless you create them yourself. And so that's what led me along the path of doing one person shows. And this one about Ann is the second one I've done. And so that's my background. Matthew, take it away.
[00:01:47] Matthew C. S. Julander: So I'm in Utah. I went to film school at Brigham Young University and then zapped off to Los Angeles for close to 20 years of unsuccessful attempts to make my way into the film industry in earnest. So I worked on a few shows and made some corporate videos and just bounced around.
And then eventually decided to move back to Utah. And at which point I met Sherry Julander, who I then married and she is the lady who co directed our movie. And also adapted the screenplay from Lori's one-woman show. And so the story goes that I don't know, two years ago Sherry comes to me and says, 'Hey, I have some friends who are putting on a one woman show up in Idaho,' so we drove for six hours and like about hour one of the drive, she said, Oh, by the way, it's a middle aged woman doing a one woman show. And she was worried that I was going to hate the whole thing and want to turn
[00:02:43] Lori Prescott Hansen: it under wraps.
[00:02:44] Matthew C. S. Julander: But so she waited until we got far enough along that I was stuck. So we went up and watched it, and the story is really compelling. I was just struck. And so I, as soon as the lights came up, I turned to Sherry and said, we, do you want to try and make a short film out of this? And thus was hatched our little plot here. What started as something that was going to be a 25 to 30 minute movie has ballooned up to a short feature length movie. And now we're on your podcast.
[00:03:16] Lori Prescott Hansen: Sherry was actually a former student of my husband's. And so we had worked together. I've done plays with her in the past. And we had talked years ago about wanting to do something around Salem just because we've both always been intrigued by the subject. Then I found out later my ancestor was actually one of the accused women, and Sherry said that name sounds so familiar and she went back and checked her personal history and lo and behold we are both descendants of Ann Foster. We felt a real a real bond and a real kinship doing that. And something that we meandered around years ago finally became a reality.
[00:03:58] Josh Hutchinson: Wow. What's it like to find out that your friend is also your cousin?
[00:04:03] Lori Prescott Hansen: It couldn't have happened to a nicer person. I love her. I love her to death. And she is an amazing actor as well as screenwriter, and she and Matthew are a force together to be reckoned with, as far as film production. We're really excited that they joined on.
[00:04:23] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Sarah and I also have a common Salem ancestor. We started doing this show, and then found out that we're cousins.
[00:04:31] Lori Prescott Hansen: Really?
[00:04:33] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we're both from Mary Esty.
[00:04:36] Lori Prescott Hansen: Oh, wow.
[00:04:38] Josh Hutchinson: yes.
[00:04:39] Lori Prescott Hansen: Yeah. You hear all these names and there's so many stories. So many stories. Yeah.
[00:04:48] Sarah Jack: Do you wanna tell us about Ann Foster's story?
[00:04:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: My son called me one day. He's known as a storyteller. I've always been drawn to crone figures, to wise women, to that sort of thing. And jokingly have always said I'm part witch. But he called me one day and said, "did you know that you are related to an accused witch of Salem?" And it just floored me. And I, cause I had no idea. So I went back and he showed me the timeline, the link from grandmother to grandmother. And she's my 11th great grandmother. And so I began to just read into her life, and the more I read, the more compelled I was and because her story is so unique and uniquely tragic, because of the elements in her life that it just it just pulled me in, and I wanted to do something about and for this woman that I felt a real kinship to. So that's the kernel of the beginning of it for me and my appeal to Ann, because like I say, even if she weren't a relation, her story is so compelling, because it's very unique in its own right. Go for it, Matthew.
What was it about Ann that sucked you in as a non relation?
[00:06:14] Matthew C. S. Julander: Something that I found striking about this whole process is how much of just the dialogue in our movie is pulled straight from like court reports. This is apparently what, at least whoever was writing it down, got, is the exact things that people were saying. And so that makes it very it does make it very personal.
And you're saying, 'oh my gosh, this isn't just a story, this isn't the Avengers, this is like a real person that all this stuff happened to.' So as we set about to make a movie of it, in large part we just followed what we saw Lori when she put on the one woman show, but we, we treated it with a certain degree of gravity or reverence or care, because we wanted to keep it a true story. We wanted to keep it true to what, as far as we can tell, Ann Foster might've really felt. I have a feeling that Lori might be, I don't know, a feistier person than Ann was? Because I'm told that at the time of, yeah, maybe Ann was feistier in her younger years, but at the time of her incarceration, she'd gotten on in years and she was quite feeble.
[00:07:20] Lori Prescott Hansen: No one will ever accuse me of being feeble.
[00:07:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: But on the other hand, just from the life that she led and some of the things that she did that were contrary to what would have been culturally accepted, especially since being culturally accepted was, I think it was a much bigger deal for the Puritans in New England. I think she probably was a feisty lady. She probably was a little bit of a rebellious lady. And maybe she was forced to be that way just because she married a guy who was way too old for her and defied some expectations.
So in any case, it was really interesting being able to look into the life of this very real person and have some of the words that she came up with when she was in the trial, when she was giving her confession and just trying to not just see through that window, but try and open that window up to other people so they could see into it as well.
[00:08:14] Josh Hutchinson: And so this began as a solo project, a one person play, and then evolved from there. What can you tell us about the one woman play?
[00:08:27] Lori Prescott Hansen: When I began writing this whole thing, I began it through a storytelling approach. I was going to tell her story third person. And I actually wrote it out, and I began reading it to my husband, and I realized it was so boring, and it sounded like a book report. And so I played around with combinations of narration and then character, and that became really singsongy back and forth and he finally said one day, you just need to write it as a play. And so I did. I take on other voices throughout the script but not a lot. It's mostly her own voice, her own words. My creation, but it's through her voice. And yeah, it was really well received where I've done it. I've only really done it a handful of times.
But the thing that really turned the corner for me on writing it was my husband again, who is also a playwright, said to me one day, 'you're writing it like you're writing about a woman who knows she's going to die. And he said, that's not interesting. You should be writing about a woman who is fighting to live.' And that was like a huge light bulb moment for me, and I realized he was exactly right, and that's when the writing really began to flow.
And like I say, it was really well received. I was really very proud of it. When Sherry and Matthew came up and saw it and they talked to us about it directly after the show, honestly, I feel such a, not ownership, but such a, this is my thing. And I was really afraid to turn what I had envisioned and done over to someone else. And if it hadn't been that it was Matthew and Sherry, I may never have said, 'okay, you can take this and do it you want with it.' But I did. And I couldn't have been more happy.
They were true to Ann. They were true to her story. They were true to how I envisioned the show, and they only heightened it with a full cast and fleshed out dialogue and lots of scenes in the jail. And anyway, so that was the metamorphosis of it for me.
[00:10:57] Sarah Jack: Is there anything about her history, the story, that you want to share today?
[00:11:03] Matthew C. S. Julander: I can give you like a slight overview of what what the story is about. So Ann Foster was in Andover. She was not among the first people that were accused or tried for witchcraft. Her story started because there was a man in her town. So Joseph Ballard's wife was ill and he thought maybe it was witchcraft. He had heard about all these people getting accused and convicted of witchcraft in Salem, so he went down to Salem and grabbed some of the teenagers who had been accusing people and brought them back up to Andover.
And they spotted Ann Foster and accused her of being a witch. And so then she was dragged in and eventually tried, convicted, and set up in the the Salem jail. We basically tell that story and something that's interesting. This is maybe not so much about Ann's story, but it's more about how this, the way that we tell the story is like structured.
When Lori wrote this script, she wasn't following like the formulaic stuff that they use for say, like writing screenplays. Whereas the story that we told it's almost as if the inciting moment happens before the story starts. And it happens like in a flashback because the whole story is told from Ann Foster's perspective in the Salem jail. And the question that we're trying to put into the minds of the audience right out of the gate is, 'okay how did she get here? What happened? How did this madness ensue?'
And then she just tells the whole story. She goes back to the whole Salem witch like craziness, to her earlier life. She talks about how she was married to a man who was quite a bit older than she was. She talked about her children. She talks about something that happens, one of the terrible events that happens to one of her children, which maybe I don't want to reveal yet, because you have to watch the movie. All these things could have had an influence on why the people of the time thought, 'oh, yeah, that makes sense that Ann Foster would be a witch.'
[00:13:00] Lori Prescott Hansen: Because when you're already the other, you're a sitting duck.
[00:13:03] Matthew C. S. Julander: She was already like an easy target for the accusations. I think that everybody who does a Salem witch trial story or tries to tell the story, the central question is, 'how did this happen?' It's always, 'how did this happen? How did these people get to the point where they're actually executed people for a thing that nowadays we see is just like being a fiction, just completely made up?
And so we tried to get in there, too. And because we have Ann's personal story. And some of the things that she said, we have some of her words, we can say, okay, this is at least the perspective of one person, how she was able to, how she sees it ,why she was dragged into it.
One of the striking things for me is that Ann Foster herself, in our dialogue, she says, 'Oh, I believe there's witches. I'd just be not one of them.' That's not the exact quote, but it's close. So it's oh yeah, everybody believed that it was real. But everyone also knew about I'm not one, though.
We even got into the idea that some people maybe started toying with the idea that, 'am I a witch? Maybe I've had bad thoughts about this person or that person. Maybe I projected some evil onto that person. Maybe that's some witchcraft. Maybe I'm somehow involved.' And that's the sort of thing that allowed it to roll.
[00:14:21] Lori Prescott Hansen: That's one Ann's lines in it is, 'can one be a witch and not know it?' Which is an interesting question. The most poignant question to me that we raise in the script is a line of Ann's. She's in jail. She's been there quite a long time. And she says, 'so what do you do with a broken, old witch?' No one's paying for her to get out, whether they could or chose not to, we really don't know. She's there for the duration until she dies
[00:14:52] Matthew C. S. Julander: Spoiler alert.
[00:14:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: So what do you do with people like this that are the throwaways? Even though your sentence has been stayed, you're still a convicted witch. That's probably the most poignant question to me in the film is 'what do you do with a broken, old witch?'
[00:15:12] Matthew C. S. Julander: And it's maybe not a question that we answer in great detail. It's something that the audience is left to think about for themselves. Because since we stay in Ann's, in her perspective, in her mind the whole time, it's yeah, we don't know why her son Andrew never showed up to pay the jailer's fees.
[00:15:30] Lori Prescott Hansen: Abraham is the one that paid to take her body. They paid to retrieve her body. They did not pay to have, you had to pay for everything. You had to pay for your straw. You had to pay for your chains. You had to pay for your food or water, anything. And we don't know if they didn't have the money to pay her way out or whether they chose not to. We know they did not sign the petition that the town raised when everyone had decided enough was enough. Whether they didn't want to bring more attention to her story or there's just so many questions that we don't have answers to.
[00:16:07] Matthew C. S. Julander: So we asked the questions.
[00:16:09] Lori Prescott Hansen: We asked the questions, and we did take a bit of a slant on things, because we realized if we're going to do this project, we have to make choices. We can't just have the whole thing be ambivalent. We have to make some choices. I hope they were the right ones, but we'll see.
[00:16:28] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think the creative piece of telling the story is an essential part. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys have put together.
[00:16:38] Matthew C. S. Julander: So are we!
[00:16:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: Me too.
We actually just did our first submission of it.
[00:16:45] Matthew C. S. Julander: That's a rough cut.
[00:16:47] Lori Prescott Hansen: It's this close to being done, but we were able to slip it in on a deadline that was important to us. Yeah, it's very close. We actually, the four of us traveled three weeks ago? Four weeks ago? We actually flew out to Andover and Salem and met with some people out there and particularly in Andover we met with a woman that works at the North Church, which is the congregation Ann would have been part of. We met with the caretaker of the cemetery on the South side of Andover.
We met with Jill Christiansen from the Salem Witch Museum, and she was very, very helpful and very kind. And in fact, all of them were, and it just, we really hope to be able to do a screening in, I would really prefer Andover to Salem, because that's where it began, and that's where it would be full circle. So anyway, we've talked to a few people and nothing's set in stone, but we're excited, excited.
[00:17:58] Josh Hutchinson: A lot of people don't realize the involvement of Andover, even though Andover had more accused than Salem did.
[00:18:10] Lori Prescott Hansen: And Martha Carrier was from Andover. It's almost treated as an afterthought in some ways to Salem, and I guess that's probably because of the hype.
And I think there are many people in Andover that feel those strong, still connections to their history.
[00:18:30] Matthew C. S. Julander: It's striking as we went to the graveyard at the South church in Andover and then the other, the cemetery it's up closer to the North Church. When we went to those places and we looked at gravestones, I was struck that very often the people who were buried in, the official graveyard, the official cemetery, are what I would now consider the villains of this story, lots of the judges, but none of the people who were accused of witchcraft and then who would not cop to it.
The ones who would never give up and say yes, I'm a witch. The ones who actually maintain their integrity, those are the ones that don't get to be buried there. And, it's not even sure where many of them any of them, are buried. Because even the ones that were officially hanged, it's they have a, there's a Walgreens. Up the street from, that's where the which memorial is it?
[00:19:23] Josh Hutchinson: That's the Proctor's Ledge,
[00:19:25] Matthew C. S. Julander: the proctor's ledge. So they have a sense of, we think they must be buried here or here, but it's not really known.
[00:19:33] Sarah Jack: It's the exact situation in Connecticut with their victims and the, the founders that ran the witch trials and those kind of things. Their statues are there honoring the history, the impact of their history. And we worked on an exoneration project for the Connecticut victims last year, and the state did pass a bill apologizing to the 34 indicted, 11 hanged.
Now we're working on. State memorial for the victims and one of the things that we're up against is making room for these accused because there's already, all the space is taken by those who have already been buried and honored and,
[00:20:22] Josh Hutchinson: in a lot of cases are the accusers.
[00:20:24] Sarah Jack: They are the accusers. When you started talking about that, I'm like, oh my goodness, there's some other ancient burial grounds in New England, it's the same situation.
[00:20:32] Lori Prescott Hansen: And just following your Facebook posts and that, I realized that the Connecticut thing has been a passion project for you a labor of love, and,
[00:20:43] Sarah Jack: Yeah. It was interesting because there were local Connecticut residents and advocates and descendants who, for many years, have tried to get an acknowledgment. And then last year when North Andover was working on Elizabeth Johnson Jr. 's exoneration. It was happening during the 375th anniversary of the hanging of Alice Young who was the first hanged in Connecticut and it just seemed so unfair that nobody knows her name. She has not been apologized to, and it really just fired a bunch of us up and everything, it was just the right timing. The politicians there were ready to make an attempt, and so this project, which we've talked quite a bit about in several episodes, it was a passion, and we all came together and found a route to that apology.
[00:21:37] Lori Prescott Hansen: Wow.
[00:21:39] Sarah Jack: But now they need a memorial. There's a few individual bricks in some of the local towns honoring some specific victims, but there's nothing. Nothing, there's no monument for the history, so that's what's next. We'll see how that unfolds.
[00:21:59] Lori Prescott Hansen: Yeah. Because people don't even really think of Connecticut. It's that Salem story, no, it was all over. Yeah. Connecticut was earlier than Salem and Massachusetts, wasn't it?
[00:22:13] Josh Hutchinson: It, yes, it began much earlier, started in 1647, so 45 years before. But Andover also, there's not, a specific site to go to in Andover to remember the victims from there. And there were, what was it? 45 or 48 people accused from Andover? Very high number. And there's nothing there, there's no plaque, there's no statue, there's no wall or benches or
[00:22:52] Matthew C. S. Julander: Something that when we set out to make this movie, making movies can be a pretty A large undertaking. Although this movie was quite small by comparison to some. We shot the entire thing in a 20 by 30 garage. So even though it is a period piece, we built a couple of sets.
So we have a prison set that is meant to look very realistic, and we had a Foster home set that ended up looking very realistic over the course of the shoot. The first scenes that we did in that, we only had two walls of that set, but later on, we built out the whole thing. In any Case it takes over your life for a while, because you end up realizing, oh, it's I'm building a house. There's something where you have to decide that you want to go through all the trouble, right? You have to tell yourself this is worth it. And so as we've been talking about the people who are past and the people who went through this incredibly unjust situation, and some of them lost their lives I, I was thinking, eh, whether you believe in an afterlife or not, I would think that those people, maybe it doesn't matter what we think of them now, right?
If you don't believe in an afterlife, then clearly they don't care. If you do believe in an afterlife, they might be busy with something else. And so it's maybe not so much for them that we do these memorials and that we try to try to set things right. It might be more for us. And so that's the thought that I had when we were making this film is, 'I want this film to be something that shows how that happened back then.'
In that sense, that those who don't learn from history will repeat it. If you do learn from history, hopefully you grow. And yeah. As we were making the film, I was always trying to think, okay, how is this going to affect people? How can we show people something that hopefully makes them into better people?
And the crazy thing about the whole witchcraft trial fervor that ran across Europe and then America in many cases, it wasn't as if there was some ulterior motive. But a lot of times it was just, I don't know, the arrogance of the judges. The arrogance of the people in their religion thinking that they were infallible. It was just, things got out of hand, and people's emotions were driven to a certain direction and there was no one to say, 'whoa, let's calm down. Let's think about this.' And so it seems like that is an informative lesson for us right now. And maybe always, everybody always likes to say, 'Oh, in our time, things are so tough.' And it's so similar to now. And you could say that about now, you could say that about probably any epic in the Earth's history as well.
In any case, it seems like it's a useful story for us to look at and say, 'Hey, do I have any prejudices? Do I have any arrogance? Do I have any beliefs that are untested that I'm so sure about that I would do something that might turn out to be reprehensible?' And I hopefully the movie and these stories, and even when we talk about the monuments and trying to call attention to it, so like Alice Young that nobody's ever heard of. If we can call attention to these people and say, 'look, these stories all happened,' hopefully that'll affect us now and say, 'okay I don't want to create another story for somebody 375 years from now to look back at and go,'
[00:26:06] Josh Hutchinson: And Ann Foster's story is so compelling because of so many reasons. You alluded to earlier something that happens to one of her daughters before the trials. And then there are things that happen to her family during the trials.
[00:26:27] Lori Prescott Hansen: Ann, humble, meek, fragile, old Ann was very well known, because of her family and what had happened in it. Everyone knew Ann Foster's history. She was very ripe for the picking. Yeah.
[00:26:45] Matthew C. S. Julander: I think that's actually an interesting thing about the story. So maybe most people's entrance into their understanding of the Salem Witch Trials is the Crucible. That seems to be the most famous story that's been told. But the Crucible sets it portrays John Proctor and is it Elizabeth Proctor? They're portrayed as having John had an affair, right? He's portrayed as having this sin that he committed.
Ann is interesting in that there's really no sin for her, but there is this circle of bad things that have happened, things that, okay, your son in law is a really bad guy though and maybe there's a little impropriety with this and maybe like your granddaughter is a bit of a mess. She's not being very Puritan. There was things that made it look like she could be looked at as being bad somehow.
I think that's a really important thing to look at in the story. If I were to tell another story from the witch trials, I maybe would want to do one about Rebecca Nurse, because she's theoretically like the perfect Puritan, just angelic in every way.
But the idea that I'm going at is some of these people who got roped up in this, they really were unimpeachable. I guess you can't say they were above reproach. They would probably, had their, personal interactions where they might get mad at somebody or do something that people would remember and think of them as having been sinful or wicked or something.
They really were just good people, just fairly honest, fairly good. People like hopefully you and me.
[00:28:10] Lori Prescott Hansen: And John Proctor himself, the same thing that, historically there was not an affair or anything like that. That was Arthur Miller's slant on it that pulled us all in. John Proctor was unique in that he didn't buy it, and he decided he was going to beat the witchcraft out of, was there, was it Mary Warren? And because he didn't go along with it, he was pegged.
The other thing that was interesting about Ann, too, with Joseph Ballard is that was the first time anyone had gone to Salem and literally recruited these girls and brought them back to Andover. And then they singled out Ann, who they already were aware of who she was, everyone was, but that was interesting to me, the lengths that he went to to find a witch, to literally go recruit the girls and bring them up to Andover from Salem.
[00:29:08] Josh Hutchinson: That was a major turning point in the course of the witch hunt, bringing them to Andover, starting that whole, it just snowballed after that, Andover, you had Martha Carrier accused previously to that, but it was limited to her.
And then that just opened the floodgates, and they had the mass touch test where they brought everybody in and had the afflicted people touch them to see if that cured them.
The touch test, basically the belief was that when a witch used their magic against their victim they're transferring this effluvia, this kind of substance from the witch to the victim, and then on contact, the substance would go back from the victim into the witch.
[00:30:09] Lori Prescott Hansen: A literal substance.
[00:30:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, a literal substance that they could...
Yeah, so they could beam at you through the evil eye
or they could get you with it, an image of you, there was, there were poppets and image magic and spells and curses. So they had a few ways to strike at you. But there were ways to cure. You just had to get really close to the person you thought had bewitched you.
[00:30:40] Matthew C. S. Julander: So what the part about it that was backwards is they would, they would blindfold or somehow make it so that the witch was unaware of who was touching them, but they would let the person, the afflicted, still be able to see. So when they did these touch tests, the afflicted person would come in, they'd know exactly who they were touching, so if they like, oh, it's Ann Foster is the one we're accusing. When I touch Ann Foster, I'm suddenly going to not be afflicted anymore, right? So they could clearly fake it. Whereas, Ann Foster didn't know who was touching her, right? So the idea was, 'we don't trust the witches, so we have to blindfold them. But clearly our accusers are perfectly honest, good people, so we don't have to blindfold them.'
And that's just you guys are very bad at interrogation. It never occurred to you that maybe the accusers are not being honest. If we're doing the test, either they're being honest or they're, it's one of the possibilities that we should be testing for. And we can, we just blindfold everybody.
[00:31:30] Josh Hutchinson: Or even if they truly believed that the person was bewitching them, they would behave differently around the person. They buy into this stuff, they first, they see that person, they fall into one of their fits, then they touch the person believing that's going to cure them, and the fit suddenly stops.
[00:31:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: We have tried with the film to be as accurate as we know and as we can be. We all felt, I think, a real sense of obligation to do that. We want it to be true to her story. It's sensational enough on its own. We didn't need to hype it up even more than her story already is. To me, it may be the most compelling of that era, her story, because of so much, but I'm also biased.
[00:32:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: We've talked about how in Andover, it was like a much bigger problem. It was, it's really where it got it blew up more. I said something that maybe for the listeners, it'd be nice to clarify. I said maybe it was because of Ann. So Ann Foster apparently is the first one to have ever said that there were 300 some odd. 307, oddly specific, but maybe she knew that would, made the story sound more authentic. She said there were some 307 witches in our county and nobody had ever put a big number on it like that. And so maybe when she said that, everybody was like, and so then the authorities are like, 'okay buckle on your swords, boys. We got to go pick up some more people,' or something like that.
[00:33:06] Josh Hutchinson: That's also something that makes her confession really interesting, and it is a big turning point, again, in the witch hunt, because, early on, Tituba says there's nine witches, so they're looking for nine people, but then the number just keeps growing, and then it leaps with Ann Foster to this 300 some people, and yeah, they really were looking under every stone, trying to find a witch in Andover.
[00:33:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: Was she the first one, I can't remember, was she the first one in her confession that talked about flying on a stick, or had someone done that before her?
[00:33:49] Josh Hutchinson: Tituba had talked about it.
[00:33:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: and even that she had cheese in her pocket, which I thought was not funny, but like that's really specific. And you do get the idea, too, the question is raised, she was old, she was feeble, she was frail. Did she start to believe these things? Was her mind beginning to wander? Was she confessing to save herself and members of her family, to take it on herself? We don't know all those things, but they're all really compelling questions.
[00:34:27] Josh Hutchinson: And we do know that people, as you mentioned earlier, were thinking, 'could I be a witch and not know it?' Was a theme that was going through the Andover Confessions,
[00:34:41] Lori Prescott Hansen: Right.
[00:34:42] Josh Hutchinson: People questioning themselves, could I have committed some sin that turned me over to the devil?
And could I unwittingly be causing these people harm?
Yeah, people were truly confused about it.
[00:34:59] Lori Prescott Hansen: It's interesting too, to me, that Ann called out Martha Carrier. She wasn't guiltless in accusing others. In her mind, Martha Carrier is already in prison, so I'm not doing any additional harm. You could spend years delving into all of this and never get to complete answers.
[00:35:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: I feel like one of the things when we're trying to figure out how it all happened is this idea of like they had competing virtues. Like one of the virtues was you had to have faith and believe. And another virtue was you had to have integrity and be honest. And those were competing virtues in the sense that say with John Proctor, who thought that all the witch stuff was a bunch of hubbub. And Lori said he tried to beat it out of his servant. He's, ' I'll show you, say that you've sensed witches, whack whack, do you still sense witches? Nope!' For that, for Proctor to do that, it's like he's saying, 'okay, so witches, that's a bunch of nonsense,' but witches are in the Bible and witches are something that we all believe is part of, it's tied to the religion.
And so is John Proctor like showing a lack of faith and a lack of belief? That means John Proctor is not virtuous. But on the other hand, John Proctor went to his execution and wouldn't say that he was a witch. He would, he never I don't want to say admitted because that suggests that he actually was. He never copped to it, right?
And so in that sense, he had the other virtue of the integrity. So these people who were trying to say, 'maybe I am a witch. Can I be a witch and not know it?' That's their attempt to make those two competing virtues work together. I'm still going to believe, but I don't want to lie. It's a form of like cognitive dissonance for them, but like that's an interesting and I guess kind of awful way that they had to try to do the mental gymnastics to make it so they could keep all their virtues.
[00:36:52] Josh Hutchinson: That's a really good analysis. And there was so much going on in Andover contributing to the confessions. Really most of the people in Andover did ultimately confess, and they were being pressured by their own families to do so, because there was a rumor going around that if you confessed, you'd be spared.
[00:37:17] Lori Prescott Hansen: be forgiven. You were capable of being forgiven or of repenting.
[00:37:22] Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, they did end up convicting a number of people who confessed, but fortunately for them it was late enough in the game that they were never actually executed. But that rumor was going around. And then there was the whole, 'could I be one and not know it? Everybody's telling me I am a witch. If the magistrate is telling you you're a witch, and he's a reliable guy and trusted and looked up to, and maybe you start believing him instead of yourself.
[00:37:58] Lori Prescott Hansen: And if you look at that in terms of Ann, she had so much tragedy in her life that maybe this has happened because I am this and she's old and she's feeble and she's worn down and she's seen so much in her family that's just remarkable. I'm sure she was just, in some ways, just done.
[00:38:21] Matthew C. S. Julander: I do wonder how she came up with all the details that she came up with. Like the bird that came black and left white, or the dog, the stick, the cheese in the pockets. There were so many like interesting little tidbits. It's is it because she was in that kind of feeble place and her mind was just making things up now and she was in fever dream mode? Or was she like knowingly trying to protect her family and she's, this is the best way to do it. I've seen enough lying. I if she had, but I'm going to do details with the lies so they seem more.
[00:38:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: And the details of life that are given extra magical or whatever stories to explain them. Ann had a bad leg or a bad hip. She says it's because she fell off the stick. So anyway, just so many things that make it. It's interesting and sad and educational that, if we can learn the lessons that we ought to learn, we'd be better off for our own futures.
[00:39:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: Somebody was talking about how dense those forests are and imagine them without electric lighting, like how there'd be so little that you could see and how everything would be so close. There was the dangers of getting diseases. There was plenty to be afraid of that you couldn't see and wouldn't know was coming, right? And that seems like that also made it rife for people to work up in stories of things and to believe in things that maybe weren't there. It's a really strange place.
[00:39:53] Lori Prescott Hansen: New England is, it's to me a magical place. It's beautiful. It's picturesque. The houses are amazing. I love the styles and all that. I love the toll roads, but it's interesting that such a tragic thing could take place in such a beautiful place. And that's, that happens everywhere, it can happen anywhere. And it was the frontier, particularly Andover. It was the frontier.
[00:40:22] Josh Hutchinson: I've camped in the forest near Andover. There's a Harold Parker State Forest right there. And I spent about 10 days, I believe, in the woods right there. And even today, the woods are so thick that if you're out on one of those hiking trails, it doesn't take long to not have roads and sounds from roads and so just imagining back then, and coming from England where it's a little more crowded and there'd be some more lights to this very wilderness. It's so hauntingly frightening. You actually have wolves and bears and things that they don't have in England anymore. Yeah, it's just a spooky environment, but so beautiful.
[00:41:16] Lori Prescott Hansen: beautiful.
[00:41:18] Sarah Jack: At this stage with your project, what is it that you need from listeners, from supporters?
[00:41:25] Lori Prescott Hansen: We need viewers. Yeah. And exposure. Exposure. That's why we appreciate this podcast so much because it's huge. It's a huge benefit to us. So we need energy.
[00:41:39] Matthew C. S. Julander: We are going to try to put it into festivals, and as we do, we'll post about it on our Facebook page and on our website so that anybody who's interested in seeing the film can go see it. So one thing would be great for us is if you go search for I Be a Witch on Facebook and follow us there. Or you can go to ibeawitch. com, bookmark that, and go back to it. You can also go to ibeawitch. com and find your way to the Facebook group from there.
And that way, anybody who's interested in the film can keep track of, like, where it ends up, so where they can see it. And that, then, as we start, rolling it out and showing it in different places, the exposure would be great. If you, if... If you want to help us with the film, you can, "Hey, they just said they're going to be in this film festival in North Carolina. Everybody who wants to go see it in North Carolina." And that, that, that'd be helpful for us. Eventually, we hope to get it onto a streaming platform. And when we do that, of course, we'll tell everybody where that is. And then it's just a matter of, yeah, tell your friends, go watch the movie.
[00:42:38] Sarah Jack: And right now they can watch the preview,
[00:42:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: They can. You can watch the trailer.
[00:42:42] Matthew C. S. Julander: The trailer's on ibeawitch. com.
[00:42:44] Lori Prescott Hansen: The trailer, I have to say. I'm tickled with it.
[00:42:48] Josh Hutchinson: We'll have a link to that in the show description to both the Facebook and the website. And as you start to have showings, we'll definitely share that on our social media to help get the word out. It's something that our listeners are going to be interested in. We'll definitely be helping promote that as we can.
[00:43:12] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[00:43:14] Mary Louise Bingham: Alice Markham Cantor, a freelance writer and a fact checker for the New York Magazine. She is creating a database regarding worldwide witch hunts. Alice uses her writing skills by weaving the common threads of witch hunts from the 1300s to the current day. Alice introduced me to the story of Iquo Edet Iyo, a prosperous woman looked on with suspicion for years who was accused of using black magic to cause a motorcycle accident at Cross River State, Nigeria. As a result, Iquo was brutally murdered in October of 2022. Alice reminded me that there are over 1,000 innocent people killed due to ongoing deadly witch hunts every year. I encourage the listeners to read Alice's story titled, "Social Turmoil Has Increased Witch Hunts Historically" on Portside.Org. Check out her profile on theinternationalnetwork.org. Thank you, Alice Markham Cantor, you are one powerful advocate.
[00:44:17] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:44:22] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:44:25] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts urges collective action to end witch hunting practices worldwide. At End Witch Hunts, our commitment is unwavering to actively engage in educating and advocating for the cessation of witch hunting practice. We can do this through the power of collective action. Thank you for already supporting our projects by listening to and sharing our podcast episodes. If you'd like to further contribute, please consider a financial contribution. Your financial support empowers us to continue our education and advocacy efforts. As the holiday season approaches, we invite you to keep End Witch Hunts in mind when considering your charitable gifts. We have donate buttons on our websites.
Our latest historical justice initiative, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, is dedicated to securing formal exoneration for those wrongfully convicted as witches in Boston. We are also seeking a formal apology for all documented victims of the Massachusetts Colony Witch Trials. Each of these individuals has a story of innocence, Injustice and life altering consequences due to false accusations. You can make a difference immediately by signing and sharing the petition. Do so now at change.org/witchtrials.
If you live in Massachusetts, you can share this project with your legislative representatives and ask them to propose the amendment. If you are a voting member of the Massachusetts General Court, we need you to lead or collaborate on this amendment effort now. Please consider reaching out to the project so that we can support you as you propose or support such an amendment. Please take action, and let's work together to help close a chapter of American history that calls out to us all for answers.
Commemorating Goody Glover Day, November 16th.
On this day of witch trial memorialization in Boston, we want to highlight the significance of November 16th, proclaimed as Goody Glover Day by the Boston City Council in 1988.
Goody Glover, an Irish Catholic widow, was falsely accused, convicted, and hanged for witchcraft on this date in 1688. We invite you to commemorate Goody Glover Day by visiting her memorial plaque at the parish of Our Lady of Victories. The memorial plaque recounts the tragic tale of Ann Glover, emphasizing her unwavering commitment to the Catholic faith.
You may not be able to visit the memorial plaque, but you are able to pay tribute through various means, including social media discussions, coffee shop conversations, educational programs, and moments of reflection. Your support is instrumental in driving positive change and bringing an end to the dark history of witch hunting practices.
For more information and to contribute, visit endwitchhunts. org.
[00:46:58] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:47:01] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:47:02] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:47:07] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:47:09] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:13] Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:47:16] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[00:47:19] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:47:24] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Welcome back cultural historian Maya Rook. October is a great opportunity to discuss the portrayals of witches in pop culture, witchcraft and magic. Enjoy this fun and reflective episode as we consider the witch in pop culture over time, how she is rooted in Greek Mythology, and her stereotypes and tropes. How are her powers centered within the domestic sphere? Where did we get our image of the good witch? Of the bad witch? What does the future hold for the pop culture witch? Why are men wizards and women witches?
[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Hello, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:16] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, we're excited to share a conversation we had with historian and friend of the show, Maya Rook, about portrayals of the witch in popular culture.
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: We had a great time talking with Maya about how the witch has been depicted over the generations.
[00:00:32] Sarah Jack: From classical Greeks to modern Americans, people have both loved and reviled witch characters.
[00:00:38] Josh Hutchinson: Witches can be good or bad, or increasingly a little of both.
[00:00:43] Sarah Jack: What lessons can be learned from Sabrina the Teenage Witch and her fellow pop culture witches?
[00:00:49] Josh Hutchinson: And what does the future hold for popular representations of the witch?
[00:00:54] Sarah Jack: Welcome back, Maya Rook, cultural historian, educator, and host of Illusory Time and Salem Oracle. Maya is vibrant, creative, playful, humorous, delightful, informative, and you will appreciate the perspectives she brings to this topic today.
Let's start talking a little bit about our favorite pop culture witches. Maya, do you have a favorite pop culture witch?
[00:01:16] Maya Rook: I do have a favorite, and it is Sabrina the Teenage Witch, specifically the show with Melissa Joan Hart that started airing in 1996. So she always just comes up for me. I love so many pop culture witches, but I was at like the prime age when that was released, and I just was fascinated by the show. I loved it. I watched it until I grew out of it. But I've returned to it as an adult, and I think that it really keeps up, holds up, and I really love that one.
[00:01:45] Josh Hutchinson: I like that one a lot, too. Yeah, Sabrina and I like Hermione. It's a pop culture witch. There's some others we're thinking about, like Mary Poppins isn't always considered a witch, but she's very magical. And Bedknobs and Broomsticks, that witch is really good. Those are a few that I like.
[00:02:09] Sarah Jack: I love Morgana from the TV series Merlin. I love her transformation over the series. Unfortunately, it's from good to bad, but I don't know if that is unfortunate. It's a real, real important thread through the story, but I have enjoyed that character.
[00:02:27] Josh Hutchinson: Who else do you think of when you think pop culture witch? Who are the most iconic?
[00:02:34] Maya Rook: That is such a challenging question, because there are so many pop culture witches, and I think, and depending on who you ask, they're going to have that one person or group of people come into their minds, but I think of even just like the Weird Sisters from Macbeth. You have the three witches around the bubbling cauldron that is such an iconic image that continues to impact us to this day, and then we see different iterations even from that. We have the Sanderson sisters and Hocus Pocus, which I think a lot of people would say, iconic witches right there in pop culture.
We also have The Wizard of Oz, and I think that within that, the creation of Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West are both incredibly iconic. Samantha Stevens in Bewitched, for so many people that's their witch that they think of. Of course for me, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and then you have other teen witches as well, so thinking about The Craft, we get into kind of a little more dark witchcraft there. We have the sisters that show up in Practical Magic, and there's Charmed, the television show. You already mentioned Hermione from Harry Potter, right? The Witches of Eastwick is another big one.
I don't know, I feel like I could just name witches forever, but those were the top, I think, ten that showed up for me when I thought iconic pop culture witch.
[00:03:55] Josh Hutchinson: We talk about Hermione being an iconic witch. Why don't we talk about Harry Potter as being an iconic witch? Is it because the label is wizard for him?
[00:04:08] Maya Rook: Yeah, I think so, right? Because he's a he, because he's a male and is referred to as a wizard so much, I think that he doesn't really pop up into people's minds when we think iconic witch. Although we have witches in pop culture or, in the past, where men would be considered witches, for the most part it's associated with women. So I think that's really where our minds are still going to go to this day is we're going to look for the female character that's associated with magic. And in that case, we have Hermione, who is amazing.
[00:04:40] Josh Hutchinson: So there's still like a strong demarcation between here's a wizard and here's a witch and they're not the same thing.
[00:04:49] Maya Rook: Yeah, I think so. I was thinking about that, and we have different representations of wizards, but a lot of the times when I think when we hear the word wizard, what comes to mind often is like an older, white, male wizard with a long beard and the like pointy hat, maybe it has stars on it. A lot of times they're associated more with good magic, and I think when we have witches, we tend to imagine women. And now we have a lot more representations of good witches and bad witches, but I think the sort of stereotype that's left over really from the European witch trials and the witch hunting texts is that it's more negative. They're associated with harmful magic, darker magic. And I think that we're still impacted by that to this day.
[00:05:39] Sarah Jack: Do you think the portrayal of witches in pop culture instill fear, or do you think it takes away fear?
[00:05:49] Maya Rook: Both. And I think it really depends on what era we're looking at. So if we trace the trajectory of pop culture witches, we see this shift happening. I mentioned the European witch trials, the witch hunting texts, the images of witches that are created during that time. We're talking hundreds of years where this is really taking ahold of people's imaginations. And it's, it is very negative. And that, at that point in time is very much going to instill fear. And as the two of you and many of your listeners know very well, it instills fear to the point of persecution and execution, right? So the popular image of the witch ends up having this huge impact on people's everyday lives, on society as a whole, that is very fearful and negative.
You go through time, obviously, to get away from the witch trials within Europe and America. We have fairy tales and folk tales of witches, also often very negative. Hansel and Gretel, don't wander off into the woods, because the witch might get you and try to lure you in with their magic and eat you and all that good stuff.
But I really think that this shift happens that splits with The Wizard of Oz. When we get that good witch, Glinda the Good Witch, which, she's not instilling fear for most people, I would hope, right? She is this benevolent witch who's there to help Dorothy. And then you have the Wicked Witch of the West, who is really, in a lot of ways, left over from those negative stereotypes, and that's the one that you fear. So depending on sort of which of those two witches you trace, you can either get that fear, or you can get something that actually could help release fear.
As we get into the 20th century, we have people like Samantha Stevens from Bewitched, we have good teen witches like Sabrina, other fun kind of pop culture witches, as well, and all of those might be seen actually as a form of empowerment or play or this ability to have a good time with magic and be able to manipulate and control your world from a place of goodness rather than from a place that's pulling from a darker magic.
[00:07:58] Josh Hutchinson: How do you think the portrayal of witches in pop culture affects our understanding of practicing witches?
[00:08:06] Maya Rook: Yes, I think that there's a couple layers there, because the portrayal of witches in pop culture can be for a lot of people your entryway, what sparks your interest. And especially, I think the younger you are, because. And I think that's, you see this, you're fascinated by it. It's oh, this witch can wiggle their finger and then make everything change around them, or they can manipulate their environment. They can have a little more control over their relationships, even their own well being. So it's very enticing. So I think that it could actually draw people to want to explore what is witchcraft and what is magic and what is my own magic. But then I think that the other aspect of it is because that portrayal, it almost is so fantastical and it's external. You see when Sabrina the Teenage Witch, she waves her finger and then sparks will fly out of it and something will happen. But that's not going to happen in our real day to day lives. Real witchcraft, real magic, in a lot of ways, is very ordinary, and it doesn't have such a big, flashy show, and it can take a lot of work to tap into and trust in yourself.
So I think that it doesn't always show us the reality that if you want to practice magic, there's going to have to be a lot of inner exploration, and that some things might just actually be ordinary and boring, but you are tapping into your own power.
[00:09:32] Sarah Jack: I was thinking how some of the challenges or a lot of the challenges that they show Sabrina facing are actual challenges that other girls, boys are facing at that age. And so as you referred to looking into yourself and for your solutions. Hopefully, that those kind of examples can push people to see that in the ordinary there is solutions, that you do have power and strength from your own gifts, as well as your witchcraft interests.
[00:10:06] Maya Rook: Sabrina makes so many mistakes as she's navigating, learning her magic, and I think that's really great, because any teenager, any person coming of age, any human being is gonna make mistakes, they're gonna screw up, but they're able to do it in a way that's very comical. It's set up in that format for a sitcom. Or there's always a lesson that's learned from it, and I think you get this glimpse also that it doesn't actually matter how much magical powers you might have, that there's still going to be opportunities to learn, to grow, and that sometimes the magic is not what's going to be what will save you. It has to be your ability to like talk and communicate with people or share what's going on or ask for help or whatever it is. So all of that is intertwined into those episodes as she's navigating her world.
[00:10:56] Josh Hutchinson: What are some other lessons that we can learn from Sabrina and other witches?
[00:11:03] Maya Rook: I think that one of the biggest lessons we can pull from observing witches and the portrayal of witchcraft in pop culture is that there's more than meets the eye in our day to day lives. I think that it's a reminder that there is something that's like powerful and magical that can be beneath the surface, that you can have that idea of peeling back of the veil and there's another layer, there's another experience to the world around us or to people's abilities.
So a lot of times in pop culture, we have the witches who are very clearly witches, and they have the pointy black hat and they're supposed to look like haggard and just very obvious. They're around the cauldron. They're witches.
But then we have the witches that look really ordinary. They look like everyday people. And I think that a lesson there is this reminder that when we encounter people, we meet somebody, we don't actually know what's beneath it. We don't know who they are. And there could be, and a lot of times there is, this like immense insight, wisdom, power that's beneath them. And it could be something that they're hiding from the world. Because a lot of times these witches that we've mentioned, they're out and about in their day to day life, and they're not revealing to anybody the powers that they have. So yeah, I think that's what stands out to me the most as a larger lesson of like, there's more than meets the eye.
[00:12:24] Sarah Jack: The powers that we find in pop culture, where do they come from or where do they get their power?
[00:12:31] Maya Rook: Yeah, so I think that the power of flight is one that we definitely see, again, rooted back in the witch hunting texts that are coming out during the European witch trials. So we're talking about things that are starting really in the 1400s, and we start to hear messages about that witches can fly in the night. We see images coming out of like woodcuts and paintings, where we see witches on broomsticks, or they're flying through the air in some way. So I think that when we see that today or throughout the 20th and 21st century, the image of the witch on the broom flying through the air, all of it can really be, I believe, rooted back to that moment in time.
And I don't know. I think that it's probably a very enticing power to think about. If you could have the power to do anything, the idea that you could levitate and that you could fly in the air and that you could have that kind of control over something that other people can't and have that ability to fly around. I feel like a lot of people would take advantage of that if they could.
[00:13:39] Josh Hutchinson: I'd definitely be up there all the time, no hiding it, just look what I can do.
[00:13:45] Maya Rook: Yeah, I have the ability to lucid dream, and oftentimes, when I do tap into a lucid dream, one of the first things I start doing is flying, because why wouldn't I? Like, What else am I going to do? Okay, well, it is it's really fun. Something I will say that I love about, again, because I know we're going to keep coming to bring this back to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, vacuum cleaners. So they update it in the show when she's introduced to flying, she assumes it's going to be on brooms, but they actually use vacuum cleaners, and it's this really just quirky, fun, modern touch of why would we use an old-fashioned broom when we could use the modern vacuum cleaner to fly around in the air? And just one of those like silly moments that they put into the show.
[00:14:28] Josh Hutchinson: It evoked also Hocus Pocus 2, where they use a Swiffer and some Roombas.
[00:14:36] Maya Rook: Yes, I forgot about that.
[00:14:38] Josh Hutchinson: So yet another upgrade to keep up with the technology. But it's still rooted in that domestic sphere, which women were limited to during the witch hunting era in Europe and North America.
[00:14:59] Maya Rook: I think that's a great point, and I think that we do see a lot of that sort of domestication of the witch happening, as well, and some of the, if we're you know, want to still look at some of their powers, this connection there but following Glinda the Good Witch, I see that as this good witch lineage in the 20th century. And then all the witches that tend to be good witches are usually somehow associated somewhere in the household. So we have Samantha and Bewitched, and she's navigating okay, suburban housewife, and being a witch, what's the line between that? And then we have Sabrina, again, living in the suburbs, like a lot of her life takes place in the house with her aunts. They're in this domestic sphere, the vacuums, as we mentioned before, the flying on brooms.
I think that we also see, again, tracing back to the European witch trials, some of the things associated with witches take place in that world. I'm thinking of the Malleus Maleficarum, and this one story that's told in there about, there's some fear around midwives, and they're talking about how if a witch who is a midwife helps a woman give birth, they might pretend like the baby is dead so that they can take it away, or they might bring it, describing bringing it into the kitchen, holding it up by the fire, and offering it up to the devil.
And that is all the domestic sphere, that's all the women's world, what they're associated with. And it's being almost inverted in some way. Instead of the power of being by the hearth and the fire as this place to create life, it's then being associated with this darkness, right? So they are inverting their relationship with domesticity. And also some of the crimes they were associated with, infertility, miscarriages, the killing and the eating of babies, as well as even things like crops failing, livestock falling ill, all of that kind of has to do with instead of creating life and helping it to flourish, making it diminish.
So those are some of the more negative aspects associated with it. But I feel like that idea of rooting things in the domestic world we see continued throughout that whole trace of pop culture witches.
[00:17:11] Josh Hutchinson: And I was thinking the the Malleus was basically the pop culture of its day, so that's another pop culture portrayal of witches. Unfortunately, it's a very devastating one with real consequences.
[00:17:29] Maya Rook: I'll say one more thing about the powers of witches that we see, because the ones that I've mentioned so far, really, I think we see strongly in the European witch trials, but in the Western world, we can go back even further, and I do see some aspects of magic and witchcraft rooted in Greek mythology that we still see today.
So Hecate comes to mind, and Hecate was the goddess of nocturnal sorcery and crossroads and threshold boundaries, those kind of areas in between. And she was able to go between the mortal and the divine spheres. So she could go between the underworld and the earth. And even It's kind of funny that I see Sabrina going between those two worlds as well, right? Because she's half witch and she's half mortal, so she's straddling that line. And then Hecate was also associated with certain herbs, which of course we see to this day, the idea of like witches and witchcraft being able to have an herbal magic and be able to make potions and things like that. And then Hecate's daughter, Circe, had the ability to transform humans into animals. So most famously, probably in The Odyssey she transforms the men into swine. And you usually have a magic wand or a staff that was associated with that power. And so I think we still see echoes of that that come through the witch trials all the way up to the present day.
[00:18:51] Sarah Jack: The shape changing's one of my favorite portrayals of witchcraft. It's, sometimes it's very light hearted and fun, sometimes it's very deceitful and there's trickery. But yeah, I really enjoy the shape shifting. I don't shape shift. Yet.
[00:19:11] Josh Hutchinson: Working on it, though
[00:19:12] Maya Rook: Keep trying!
[00:19:13] Josh Hutchinson: Practice makes perfect.
[00:19:16] Sarah Jack: Alrighty.
[00:19:16] Josh Hutchinson: I'm glad you brought up the Greeks because when we think pop culture witch, of course we often think in today's terms of who's a 20th, 21st century witch, but witches have been in pop culture ever since there was basically writing, stories being told.
[00:19:40] Maya Rook: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's important to remember that humans all over the world have long believed in magic, right? It doesn't matter what culture you're in, what society, there's usually some notion that There's a magic in the world, there's an ability to manipulate the world around you, and that certain people hold that power and that ability. So the name for what that is can change over time and, depending on the culture, but there's usually somebody that you can make a parallel as being a witch.
[00:20:12] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We had Owen Davies on recently talking about The Art of the Grimoire, and there's grimoires back from 3000 BC, 4000 BCE. So witches have been in literature for thousands and thousands of years, and it's really interesting to watch this metamorphosis over time. You talked about how Hecate and Circe and then up to the Malleus, where the witch in European culture is this very malevolent figure, to now We have good witches and bad witches, but where do you think the witch is going in the future in pop culture?
[00:21:00] Maya Rook: That's really fascinating to think about. I don't think that we will tire of witches in pop culture, especially considering, as you just said, 3,000 years, 3000 BCE, I think you said, we have evidence of witches in pop culture, right? So they're not going to go anywhere. I think that we'll continue to navigate that and keep the witch, the person who has that ability to manipulate the world around them through that power. It'll continue.
How will it change? I think that more and more people are publicly Considering themselves witches and sharing what their connection is with magic and witchcraft in more public spheres. There's people talk about witchtok, witches on TikTok who share what they're doing, and, of course, across all social media, you have similar things happening. I think that's going to end up influencing the future of witches and pop culture. In some ways, it might become a little bit more normal, so we might start seeing films that are just otherwise just regular, a comedy or a drama, the story has nothing to do with witchcraft, but maybe there'll be a character in it who's just oh they're a witch. It's just normal. It's part of who is in our society, who's in our culture. And it might start being portrayed maybe even in a more positive light, maybe like a little more fun, a little more playful, perhaps more stuff for children but yeah, it's hard to tell.
People will never tire, though, of the evil witch. I am such a big fan of horror films, and I feel like, there's no way that you could have a lot of horror films out there. They need that dark character.
[00:22:44] Josh Hutchinson: For sure. But I liked what you said about normalizing portrayals of witchcraft and modern which practices just to see, they're just your neighbor. They're whoever regular people in your family and like practicing any other faith.
[00:23:04] Maya Rook: With the witchtok and the Instagram witches and stuff, I think it's fascinating to watch, and at the same time, it makes me also a little bit nervous of a watering down that could happen, or just doing it for the show of it, and I think that any spiritual practice in a lot of ways is more, a lot of the meaning is coming from your personal connection to it. That doesn't mean it's going to be lost if you share it with other people in a public setting, but I think people have to be careful about that too, because, if you're just doing something because you're like I have to create content and I've created this following and I'm going to do it, then what's your motivation behind are you is your intention really there to do this spell, to do whatever it is, or are you just trying to get likes and followers?
Maybe that's not what you think you're doing, but that's how it ends up unraveling for yourself. And so I think it's probably important for people to remember, if they go into that world, to check themselves and make sure they're really coming from a place of this is my spirituality, this is my practice and really considering what it is that they're showing the world.
[00:24:09] Josh Hutchinson: Instead of just making it flashy, putting in all the trappings of excitement, what is the actual practice that means something to you as a person, as a creator? That's a good point, too.
[00:24:27] Sarah Jack: I was really curious who your favorite horror film witch character is.
[00:24:32] Maya Rook: I really love The Witch that came out in, what was that, 2015 or so? I just find that a fascinating film. I was so excited when it came out. I had done so much research on the Puritans of the Mass Bay Colony, obviously the Salem Witch Trials, and I went to that movie and I felt like I was being really brought into 17th century New England.
I felt like I was really there with that family, even the way that they spoke to each other. It was the way that it looked, the dynamic, all of it just felt so real and captivating to me and then to watch the main character and her storyline unfold, and this potential, this fear around magic, this fear around the devil, and her sort of luring that comes into it, and then by the end, spoiler alert, for anybody who hasn't seen The Witch, pause this, go watch it, come back.
But to see her kind of give in to that power in the end is this really beautiful, incredible moment. And I just absolutely loved it. I've watched that movie several times now and I feel like it just doesn't get old to, to watch that unraveling.
[00:25:45] Sarah Jack: It's so crazy that you just said unravel because I was literally going to say the film is showing like the unraveling of the mother, of the faith, they were just really striving. They were there, spoiler alert, in the woods because of their strong, stubborn beliefs and they wanted to have things the way they wanted it. But then that's unraveling for them and then she's like blooming into this character. It's so intense.
[00:26:20] Josh Hutchinson: Thomasin is another person who doesn't feature a lot in conversations when I was looking around the internet, who are the top pop culture witches. She doesn't feature there, but that's cited as a top witch movie. So it's interesting that she's not thought of in that light.
[00:26:43] Maya Rook: Yeah, she in some ways doesn't have, you have to really get to the end of her story to see her as a witch when she's levitating in the air at the end. And I think that it doesn't have that same flashiness as when we think of like the Sanderson sisters from Hocus Pocus, right? But it's still really powerful and it's interesting. Yeah, she doesn't usually, Thomas and we're like, oh yeah, Thomasin the witch. It's like we think of her as a character and we think of the movie, which is called The Witch, but at the same time, it's like yeah, she doesn't stand out. But I think it's absolutely one of the best portrayals of witches and witchcraft that we have in popular culture and specifically, as you asked about in horror films, I think it's pretty high up there.
[00:27:24] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, another thing Sarah and I were talking about the other day. In The Witch, there is the older woman in the woods that's tempting her so that person is more or less the villain of the feature, other than uh, Black Phillip, depending on your opinion about him. But is it always an older figure targeting a younger figure when it comes to the villains?
[00:27:57] Maya Rook: That's a great question. My instinct is, yeah, it seems like it usually is somebody who's older. I think, I also feel like in cases where it seems like it's somebody who's younger, that it always ends up that they are actually older, the skin comes off and it's revealed they are actually much older, and they're just manipulating the way they look, so yeah, I think you might be onto something there, that it's typically an older witch villain, whatever, that is bringing and luring in the younger into their world.
[00:28:31] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we're thinking even, you go back to the fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, it's an older person stealing youth, either they want to eat the youth or they went to somehow capture it for themselves. And that seems to carry forward, Harry Potter's a school student and Voldemort. Oops, I said his name. He's obviously the older adult preying on children. So it seems like that Hansel and Gretel kind of role is still going on.
[00:29:10] Maya Rook: Yeah, absolutely, I'd agree. I'll have to think on it, though, and see if I can come up with any examples, like, where there's a younger witch luring an older person. It might be out there, but it could take some time to find it.
[00:29:23] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Another thing we were curious about, and don't know if there's been research done into this, but how many of a witch's victims are female versus how many are male? We see a lot of older women going after younger women or girls.
[00:29:42] Maya Rook: Yeah. When you ask that question, what it first makes me think of is that we see, I believe, a lot of times, with the older witch, it's and they're approaching a younger girl might be to actually lure them also into witchcraft, but when they're approaching men, a younger man, it's usually, there might be something sexual there. The older witch might be getting something out of it, pleasure for themselves, but then they discard the man or harm him in some way. So it seems almost a using and a violence against men and then like a bringing in, a manipulation and a bringing in of women into the world of witches and witchcraft.
[00:30:23] Sarah Jack: That initiation.
[00:30:25] Maya Rook: Initiation. Yeah,
[00:30:26] Sarah Jack: Do you think there are any witches in pop culture that challenge traditional stereotypes?
[00:30:31] Maya Rook: So when I do a lot of my work on pop culture witches, and I do usually culminate it with Sabrina the Teenage Witch I always see that household as really challenging some gender stereotypes and the way that a household is created, because there's really no men in that house, right? We have the two aunts, so we have this kind of alternative lifestyle. Neither of them are married. For a lot of the show, they're not even really in relationships, so they will be, but they're not like center stage. So we have the two sisters who are leading the household, and then they're raising their niece, right? Not even their child. So that's not a typical, standard house. And then the one male that you have in the household is a warlock who's, he has to live in the body of a cat for a hundred years because he tried to take over the world. So the man who's in the house has pretty much no power, always trying to get it, but he's dependent on everybody around him. So I think it really flips a lot of the what we think about in terms of gender and power in a typical domestic environment.
I'm also thinking about which witches buck the stereotype of a witch, and at this point we just have so many different images of witches, I'm like I feel like our pop culture just holds a lot of different representations that it would be challenging now to think of one in this moment of time that would somehow be going against what's already been created. It's possible out there, but I think we'd have to almost go back and think about, okay, what was the stereotype in this moment of time, what shifted it? And to me, that always comes back to Glinda the Good Witch as being that pivotal moment where the change happens.
[00:32:15] Sarah Jack: Is there a tie with Glinda's image and portrayal and fairies, fairy godmothers?
[00:32:23] Maya Rook: I do think so, especially in the way that she is presented in the film. I think it really pulls on that image of the fairy godmother being more benevolent, caring, showing up in that moment to be of service and to help whoever the protagonist is, in this case, Dorothy. But it's really interesting, L. Frank Baum, when he wrote The Wizard of Oz, his mother-in-law was Matilda Joslyn Gage. And she was an early suffragist and feminist before people were even really talking about those things. And she was also an early researcher of the witch trials and one of the first people to say this was an attack on women.
And so we're talking about somebody writing and researching and talking about this in the 1800s, late 1800s. She was also involved in spiritualism, so engaged in things like seances, and she was part of the Theosophical Society, so she was in touch with the world of magic, and she was very close with L. Frank Baum, so mother-in-law to L. Frank Baum, and it seems as though she had a pretty big influence on him. They talked about a lot of stuff, and a lot of people believe that she influenced his perception on witches and witchcraft, and that when he wrote The Wizard of Oz, because of that connection with Matilda Joslyn Gage, that he created this character that went against the stereotypes that were left over from the witch trials, and he had both of them included.
So I think that she's this kind of more unknown person, but I think has incredibly impacted our understanding of witches today and especially from that portrayal of Glinda the Good Witch.
[00:34:05] Josh Hutchinson: I'm so glad you brought that up.
[00:34:07] Sarah Jack: Me too. I'm wondering, and I'm thinking, of course, from the film perspective, what's the significance to the wizard just being an ordinary man?
[00:34:19] Maya Rook: Yeah, the wizard. And again, we talked about wizards before, right? They're like older, male, they're usually have, good magic and whatnot. And in this, yeah, he has no real, all his power is a facade and eventually has to admit that he's just manipulating people and almost doing little tricks to get people to believe that he's powerful, and people do, they do believe it, but it falls apart eventually, right? The man behind the curtain. And of course, in the story, that is this really important moment because it, for the characters, shines this light on they always had those qualities within them and so that power laid within. But yeah, it is interesting that you have this powerful male figure, but then turns out actually is just, just like an ordinary guy.
[00:35:14] Sarah Jack: So then I have another question. You've got, courage is found, the brain, the heart. Those weren't just people. They were made up characters. I wonder what, why he went that direction with those who found their, the lion finding his courage, so maybe, I don't know.
[00:35:34] Maya Rook: Yeah. I wonder... It could just be that it was like a kid's story, and he wanted to create a fantastical world in, they don't show this in the movie, but in the book, the Tin Man started off as a real person. So the Tin Man chopping wood cut off his foot and it gets replaced and it cuts off part of his leg as well, so eventually he becomes this Tin Man and I, it's a little bit fuzzy in my mind, but I think part of it is that he had been in love with a woman and by the time that it gets to the point of his heart being replaced, he can no longer have that love.
So coming back and that very much could be representative of the time. We have industrialization, we have people who are working more and more in factories, and a stripping down of people's humanity, and so a reminder that people aren't tin men, they're not robots, they're not just there to do work, but they actually have a heart within them that we have to remember that.
[00:36:29] Josh Hutchinson: What do you think are some common stereotypes of witches, some tropes that we see in pop culture?
[00:36:39] Maya Rook: One that we've been coming back to is definitely that witches are typically seen as women. Think of a witch, depict a witch, a lot of times it is a woman, it's a female character, and I really do think in that case we can look at some of the statistics from the witch trials and see that when the witch trials began, about half the people accused were men, half the people accused were women, and then over that course of 400 or so years, by the end, 80 percent of the people who are accused and executed are women. So that shift, it takes some time, but by the end of it, I think it's really solidified that this belief that women are the ones who are associated with the magic, with the witchcraft, and the potential to be witches. So that's one of the largest.
Other common tropes, I would say, spells and incantations oftentimes Creating potions, so that image of the cauldron will be associated, that's another common one. Potentially, you have the solitary witch, but a lot of times you do have the coven of witches as well. So usually, in that case, there'd be three witches who are doing their magic together, flying, especially broomsticks, trying to think of some other ones.
That, the eating of children, we get that in Hocus Pocus, we get that in the European Witch Trials, and we get that as well in Roald Dahl's The Witches, so that's one of the main motivations is is it that they want to eat the children or they want to just kill them? They want to rid the world of children, that's what it is, and so they try to use their magic as a way to essentially they want to turn the children into mice, I believe. It's been a while since I read or watched that one, but this anti-child trope, I think, for the evil witch comes up a lot.
Oh, and they have familiars. So that is another major trope for all witches, I think, good or bad is that they have a familiar. Originally, familiars were believed to be domesticated demons in the shape of an animal. So it could be a dog, it could be a cat, a snake, a frog, or something like that. And then a lot of times in the present day, familiars are seen, not so much as demons, but, as a companion that has a relationship with the witch and that maybe their sort of powers help one another. And that was a big shift in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch with Melissa Joan Hart, because Salem is there, so he's like the familiar in that case, the cat.
And then in the new version, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, where things get a lot darker and more occult, more satanic, they bring back that idea of the domesticated demon. So she gets Salem. She gets a cat, but it is actually supposed to be a demon in the shape of a cat rather than, a friend, essentially.
[00:39:27] Sarah Jack: I haven't had a chance to watch that. I was curious, do they, how does the Book of Shadows represent different in that series? Does it?
[00:39:37] Maya Rook: I cannot... I can't remember. I did go back and watch the first couple episodes. It's been a while since I saw The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. So I'm not remembering. Really specifically what happens with the Book of Shadows. I will say one thing I know about the show is that, it's not the Book of Shadows, but they, it's like the devil's book that they have to sign.
In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, in the 90s television show, their power is definitely not coming from Satan, it's coming from like an unknown source, but that's clearly a fairly good or neutral source that it's coming from, but then in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, for her to become a witch when she's 16, she does need to sign the devil's Book and give herself over to the dark lord. So they really hearken back to the image that was created during the Witch Trials, and I think that's a major difference between the two.
[00:40:36] Sarah Jack: Oh yeah, I'm surprised there's any room in that book after all the witch trials and signing that was going on.
[00:40:42] Maya Rook: Yeah, it's magical, right? So maybe just more pages just keep getting created.
[00:40:47] Josh Hutchinson: think so. And they used a lot of different writing surfaces in the witch trial accounts of that. So they must have just pieced it together in a big three-ring binder or something. He's got a scrapbook, the devil's scrapbook. Anyways.
[00:41:05] Sarah Jack: Is there anything else that you'd like to be sure to speak to you about this topic or Sabrina or any of it?
[00:41:14] Maya Rook: I feel like as we consume pop culture, just remembering, it's to have fun with it, and then have a little bit of a discriminating eye and see what might be laying beneath the surface and what it can tell us about who we are as individuals and our society as a whole.
And I'm very curious, since you asked that question about the future of witches and pop culture, how that's going to unfold, right? And what it's going to tell us about generations as they're growing and changing and as our society changes, as well. I think that our perception of witches will be an insight into it.
[00:41:51] Sarah Jack: And now, for a minute with Mary.
[00:41:54] Mary Bingham: We already know the Puritans look to counter magic for protection, the shoe in the wall, the horseshoe over the doorway. But what about a witch cake? And why bake this awful concoction and feed it to the dog? It seems evident that Tituba loved Betty Parris and Abigail Williams. She was so concerned for their well being, as she was probably horrified while witnessing seizure like symptoms the girls experienced. Not even a doctor could diagnose their illness, saying that the girls were "under an evil hand." Tituba decided to take matters into her own hands and called upon the help of the Parris family neighbor, Mary Sibley. They baked that cake, made out of some type of flour, most likely rye or barley meal, they mixed it with the girl's urine and ashes from the hearth, and they fed it to the dog.
I once believed that the dog had somehow identified who was bewitching the girls, but was this actually the reason for the two women to bake the cake? The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology by Russell Hope Robbins states that if the witch cake is fed to the dog and the dog shakes, the afflictions, be they fevers or shivering fits, would be cured.
So this makes me wonder, could Tituba have wanted to find out who was bewitching the girls? Did she think she was offering a cure for their symptoms? Or both? I will let the listener decide. Thank you.
[00:43:32] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:43:35] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:43:38] Sarah Jack: Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast and End Witch Hunts collaborate on the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project and will work earnestly for all names to be cleared and for all lawmakers and global leaders to become better educated about witch hunts past and present. Lawmakers of any party can support legislation that has a real and resounding local and global impact. Other countries need to see us take a deliberate stand for alleged witches in our history with expressed concern for stopping alleged witchcraft violence today. Official state acknowledgement of the innocency of the 17th century accused and hanged witches from the American colonies resounds globally.
Thank you, State of Connecticut, for officially apologizing to all your known witch trial victims. Thank you, Massachusetts, for beginning the work of exoneration by addressing the injustice against those convicted in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. But, it's time to begin the work to acknowledge the injustice of those convicted in Boston between 1648 and 1688.
Massachusetts, it's time to stand with Connecticut and include all those who suffered in your colony in an official apology. It's time to acknowledge the absolute innocence of all those accused of witchcraft and the injustices committed against them.
[00:44:49] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much, Sarah.
[00:44:51] Sarah Jack: You're welcome, Josh.
[00:44:53] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:44:57] Sarah Jack: Join us again next week.
[00:45:00] Josh Hutchinson: Review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:45:04] Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:45:07] Josh Hutchinson: Tell all your friends and family about the show.
[00:45:11] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more about volunteering and donating.
[00:45:19] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Join us for a fun bonus episode, as we review both Hocus Pocus movies and share our thoughts on the real history of the Salem Witch Trials, as it relates to the films.
SPOILER ALERT. We take a deep dive into the details of Hocus Pocus and Hocus Pocus 2.
We discuss:
What we like, as well as what we’re not so fond of.
How events in the movie compare to events in the real-life Salem Witch Trials and other witch-hunts.
The identity of Sarah Jessica Parker’s ancestor who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch-Hunt.
Theories about the origins of the Sanderson sisters.