Hot or Hag? : The Shifting Aesthetics of Witchiness in Pop Culture
Lau Guzmán
Graphic by Elliot Wright
“Since the goddess of birth is also the goddess of death, women are accused of bringing death into the world as well as life. This is why the witch is depicted both as young, beautiful and bedecked with flowers, and as a frightening crone covered with cobwebs. She represents all the cycles of life, and if she is terrifying it is because the cycles of life terrify. They are inexorable. They remind us of mutability and mortality,” - Erica Jong, Introduction to Witches
“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) threatens Dorothy (Judy Garland) in The Wizard of Oz (1939). After delivering what is arguably the witchiest line in the history of pop culture, Hamilton cackles, terrorizes some munchkins, and then disappears into a cloud of red smoke. Hamilton is wickedness herself; a shapeless black dress, lime-green pancake makeup, beaked prosthetic nose, claws, dark hair, dark brows, and dark circles. Her foil, Glinda the Good Witch of the North (Billie Burke) wears a technicolor spectacle of glitter and tulle, complete with a crown, healthy, glowing skin, and natural makeup.
This idea that witchiness is next to ugliness can be traced back to European folk tales of Baba Yaga and her cousins, the Grimm witches. Unlike fairies or sorceresses, the witches in these folk tales are always ugly hags; elderly women with drooping breasts, long noses, warts, and wicked plans to kidnap children for their spells. They are lonely women, travelling to their homes in the woods on brooms and whirlwinds. They wield enormous power, and are very telling of how Western culture views women and the protection of children.
Despite being the stuff of medieval folk tales, the ideas behind Baba Yaga lives on in Hocus Pocus (1993), a cult classic Halloween film that traces the story of the wicked Sanderson Sisters as they try to brew a potion that will allow them to live forever. Other than a very horny Sarah Sanderson (Sara Jessica Parker), the witches in Hocus Pocus aren’t young, but they REALLY want to be.
“We’re young!” Mary Sanderson (Kathy Najimy) exclaims after drinking the potion made by stealing the life out of a little girl. “Well, younger,” Winnifred Sanderson (Bette Middler) answers. “But it’s a start,” she adds gleefully.
However, popular culture has changed a lot since the Evil Queen from Snow White (1937) decided to become the fairest of all by disguising herself as an old peddler woman. The dichotomy between beauty and witchiness seems increasingly irrelevant to the twenty-first century. Today, apparently witches are… hot?
More like Circe and Hecate, dark Greek goddesses of magic, modern pop culture witches maintain their beauty quite independently of their relationship to goodness and children. Dramatizing the drastic aesthetic shift is Meryl Streep’s performance as the Witch in the film adaptation of Into the Woods (2014) which earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
During the prologue, the Witch bursts down the door of the bakery in a whirlwind of rats and leaves. The camera draws in, focusing on the large bags under her eyes, and then pans to her hunch, grizzled hair, and claws. She wants to be young and beautiful again, so she sends the Baker (James Corden) to acquire ingredients to make a youth potion. After a series of mishaps, the Baker gets the ingredients and hands them to the Witch in the chalice. Mirroring her dramatic entrance, thunder and wind catch the Witch’s cape and transform her into a goddess dressed in a cinched couture gown with gauzy puffed sleeves and a teal updo. No longer a Baba Yaga figure, the Witch becomes young, beautiful, incredibly powerful, and still thoroughly witchy.
Like Streep, other witches become beautiful even if they are evil. There is an ethereal, pure beauty to the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) from the Chronicles of Narnia (2005) despite the fact she kidnaps and imprisons children. Even though Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) from WandaVision (2021) are often morally ambiguous characters; both women look stunning when lit by flashes of red and purple light. Even the Wicked Witch of the West gets a makeover in the musical Wicked (2003). During “Popular,” a bubbly anthem to pretty girls, Glinda (Kristin Chenowith) teaches Elphaba (Idina Menzel) “what shoes to wear/ how to fix your hair/ everything that really counts.”
Beauty and age no longer seems to indicate a character's moral alignment. Instead, physical appearance in pop culture has become a way of showing the character of a particular witch. From the goth leather corset on Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bohnham Carter) to the velvet robes on Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith) in the Harry Potter franchise (2001-2011), each witch’s aesthetic serves her complex character. In Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Kiki’s short black robe/dress and red bow serve to show that she is a young, childish witch. Or in Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996-2003), Sabrina Spellman (Melissa Joan Hart) wears regular clothes to show that she is just a regular teenager trying to gain control over her powers.
Through fan culture, witchy aesthetics have moved online. Without the aid of a SFX team, young women all over the world are in the process of contributing to #witchtok, a catch-all hashtag that has amassed 20.3 billion views on Tiktok. Ranging from the beautiful to the chaotic and bizarre, the hashtag collects short videos on fashion, tarot readings, tea leaf readings, protection spells, sleight of hand tricks, and affirmations to "wake up that sesual [sic] GODDESS."
Blurring the line between fiction and real life, witchcraft and witch aesthetic, each short video on #witchtok adds to the shifting lore of the pop culture witch. Despite the differences in the types of videos, what holds #witchtok together is that witchiness is defined by the user’s desire to subvert expectations and create a new universe within the confines of a couple seconds of video. Ditching the claws, hunch, warts, wrinkles, and age of Baba Yaga, the #witchtok witch looks like a beautiful young woman with an old soul, someone who would wear a black hooded cloak with jeans and docs.