Waking the Witch

The witch, a figure as old as time, has cast her spell over practically every society, emerging as a seductive and sinister stand-in for all manner of ills. Witches were the subject of village whispers and passed-down rumors. They were the ones blamed for poisoning the bread and curdling the milk, for conjuring the storms that wiped out crops, and for making men impotent, all while enjoying a bountiful sexual appetite of their own. Many of those persecuted for witchcraft in the early modern era were local folk healers and midwives, women whose secret knowledge of childbirth and charms proved a threat to be policed. Is it any wonder, then, that feminists from the nineteenth century onward have recuperated this maligned character as an emblem of resistance and dissent? 

 

In her stirring new essay film, British filmmaker and musician Elizabeth Sankey centers the witch as a way to give voice to the largely unspoken horrors of postpartum mental health. Witches (2024) explores Sankey’s struggles with depression and anxiety following the birth of her son, an episode she likens to “living in a horror film.” Appropriately, Sankey turns to films about sorcery, persecution, and possession to examine a time when her mind was not her own. Emerging from the film’s potent brew of pop-culture analysis and feminist consciousness-raising, we hear the voices of real women—activists, specialists, and survivors—as they share their mental-health ordeals, find camaraderie in the coven, and exorcize their trauma through testimony. “Every woman is a witch,” Sankey tells us, “and every witch needs their witches’ council.” Amid this collective call to arms, Witches makes a pointed provocation: what if some of the witches burned at the stake were just regular women suffering from postnatal depression? A surprising idea, perhaps, but the links between witchcraft and women’s mental health are much closer than you think.

 

I. Demons of the Mind

In her spiritual autobiography, the fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe recounts in vivid and hallucinatory detail the madness that followed the birth of her first child. Kempe’s book opens with visions of “devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire, as if they would have swallowed her in, sometimes pawing at her, sometimes threatening her, sometimes pulling her and hauling her about both day and night.” She describes tearing at the skin closest to her heart, but being unable to do “something worse” because she was forcibly restrained. This harrowing experience, which is today understood to be the earliest written account of postpartum psychosis, catalyzed a crisis that ultimately brought the medieval mystic closer to god. Many women were not so lucky, and were instead hounded to death for being sick, mad, even possessed by the devil. 

 

In Witches, a contemporary writer offers a similarly feverish account of her experience with postpartum psychosis. Catherine Cho describes seeing devils dancing in her son’s eyes and hearing the voice of god, as invisible bodies seemed to brush past her. Hospital food suddenly resembled human flesh and nurses looked like demons. As Cho speaks, Sankey draws on otherworldly visions of brimstone and hellfire from the Swedish horror classic Häxan (1922). This magical, macabre film charts a history of witchcraft and superstition from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, and came out of director Benjamin Christensen’s close study of the witch-hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum (1487). Christensen also stars in his film as Satan, dragging his long, thin claws across the naked bodies of suspected witches, luring them to commit decadent devil worship. Sankey’s use of this material is eerily atmospheric: the terrors of a surrealist silent movie become an apt visual metaphor for the purgatory of postnatal psychosis. 

 

Like Sankey’s film, Häxan ultimately suggests that the witch hunts came out of a misunderstanding of mental illness. The witches’ insanity can be explained as nervous exhaustion, the film claims, with symptoms like somnambulism that “are consistent with the nervous diseases we call hysteria.” Though forward-thinking for its time, Häxan’s quest to fight superstition ends up reinforcing another form of magical thinking: the myth of female hysteria. This particular story would prove a fertile topic for second-wave feminism and its own upturning of old narratives. And Häxan? A new cut of the film was released in 1968, on the hallowed eve of that second wave. That same year, a group of socialist-feminist activists prepared to recast the witch as history’s ultimate rebel. 

 

II. A Spell Against the Patriarchy

On a cold Halloween, a group of women took to the streets of New York in pointed hats and long black capes, their broomsticks held aloft. Naming themselves WITCH, they huddled together to cast a spell on Wall Street. America’s financial district and the beating heart of capitalism, it was a site responsible, they argued, for subjugating women and working people. Holding placards with the group’s acronym writ large—Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, no less!—WITCH demanded an audience with Satan on the steps of the Stock Exchange, and cast a hex on the patriarchy. 

 

In one of their early manifestos, the group described witches as “the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists,” firmly framing the witch as a black-cloaked figurehead for women’s health. Years later, in their influential feminist pamphlet “Witches, Midwives, and Nurses” (1973), Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English fervently argued that witches were folk healers that had been wiped out by the male medical elite. Although this narrative has since been challenged by historians of the early modern period, it continues to hold a potent spell on the feminist imaginary, speaking to an imbalance of power still impacting women’s health today. Sankey, for her part, points to a moment in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987) in which Jack Nicholson’s character replicates this story with a delectable sneer of irony: “just another example of male-dominated medical society exploiting females for their own selfish purposes. Men are such cocksuckers, aren’t they?”

 

Witches shares an affinity with a broader cultural moment in which feminists are once again reclaiming the crone: from Trans Lives Matter witches at street protests to moon hexes going viral on WitchTok. Witchcraft, for Sankey, is simply another way of talking about power and control. In a memorable sequence, she turns to Rosemary’s Baby (1968), an unparalleled horror film about a demonic pregnancy that evokes the lack of control women have historically had over their own bodies. After being raped by Satan, Rosemary is forced to carry the baby to term. Her medical concerns are routinely dismissed by the doctor—"Ectopic? I thought you weren't going to read books, Rosemary."—and her husband allies himself with everyone but her. In a world where women's reproductive rights and proper maternity care are continually at risk, Witches finds a renewed resonance in Rosemary's Baby. If Sankey’s film heeds a warning, it is this one: we need to start listening to women, or else.