Reading/Watching Log #131

It’s October, which means my Tumblr feed is awash with images of autumn leaves, pumpkins, full moons and black cats, which is decidedly at odds with the weather we’re currently experiencing as the season edges into summer. And it’s going to be a hot one this year.

But we still celebrate Halloween at the same time as everyone else, though the weekend upon which Halloween took place had some pretty strange weather. The night before the 31st, I had a work function in which we all watched Sleepy Hollow – that day had gone from rain, to hot sunshine, to a thunderstorm (which was wonderfully fitting for the movie). Halloween itself was fairly fine, but a cold wind picked up around five o’clock… which is probably why I didn’t get any trick or treaters at my door. (It’s not really a New Zealand tradition, and Covid lockdowns pretty much destroyed what little there was, though you can tell some people are trying to bring it back).

But the theme of this year’s spooky season was WITCHES. Good ones, bad ones, ambiguous ones, clichéd ones, modern ones, fake ones… there’s plenty to choose from. 

This review of Bandidas points out something rather fascinating: that men come in pairs, women come in trios – especially if they’re witches. It’s no doubt because an awareness of the Fates and the Mother/Maiden/Crone triad lingers in our collective subconscious but you can see it everywhere: Macbeth, Hocus Pocus, The Witches of Eastwick – even Practical Magic has three sets of duos (the aunts, the sisters, and the daughters), while The Craft culminates in three bad witches pitted against one good one.

Of course, now that I’ve said it, I have to admit that only two of the things I’ve reviewed beneath the cut adheres to this rule: Charmed and Circle of Three. But the pattern is there, especially if you broaden the definition to female characters everywhere: The Powerpuff Girls, The Marvels, Charlie’s Angels…

Another interesting observation is that because of the significance of the Salem Witch Trials in American history, the visuals conjured up by New England and the Puritans are now an intrinsic part of the witchy aesthetic. The story will either posit that real witches were running around Salem (Hocus Pocus, I Married a Witch, Salem – duh) or at least mention it in passing, as though modern-day practitioners of witchcraft and Wicca were the true persecuted victims back in 1692 (Sweep, Charmed, The Secret Circle). And of course, Salem was the name of Sabrina Spellman’s talking cat.

The legacy of Salem also gave birth to (or at least heightened) fictional themes of persecution towards those who are different. Most witch-related stories include the threat of being identified or outed as a witch, which of course carries with it a LGBTQ+ subtext. It’s also not a stretch to theorize that this entanglement of secret identities and preternatural powers were the basis of superheroes such as the X-Men or stories that deal with the Christianization component of colonization (specifically things like Cursed, Merlin, the Grishaverse, or any other property in which magical minorities are targeted).

The waning fear over the existence of real witchcraft, coupled with the retrospective examination of religious persecution (which I touched on briefly in this essay), has led to an entire subgenre of fantasy-fiction surrounding a new archetype: Victimized Woman with Very Real Magical Powers. We’ll see a lot of this below the cut.

One last thing: because witches are so closely associated with folklore and myth, it was fun to see so many familiar devices and motifs pop up across such an otherwise wide range of tones and themes. For instance, the horror-comedy The Love Witch featured a brief play-fight between the Oak and Holly Kings, something that also turns up in one of the Circle of Three books, which is a fairly grounded series for teens designed to act as a fictionalized primer for studying Wicca.

And it turns out there were so many witch-related books, films and shows that interested me that I’m going to extend this theme into November. Even then, there’s so much stuff I have no chance of getting to: the two Sabrina shows, Sanctuary, Domino Day, Practical Magic 2, Good Witch, Salem…

Seven Havens: The Faceless, The One Left Behind, Night of the Afflicted

There’s no way I’m going to be able to keep up with reviewing these episodes in a timely manner, so these posts will simply arrive when they’re ready. Hopefully I’ll be able to watch episodes seven-to-nine in the coming week, and we’ll go from there.

The ominous figures we saw in the final scene of the previous episode are known as the Faceless, and are busy stealing grain from Ellora when Jae’s team interrupts them. Interestingly, all of them seem to be benders, and when one of the firebenders knocks out Uki, she says: “the Brigade just sees you as muscle, sister.”

Her use of the word “sister” is interesting – is it just a turn of phrase, is she using it to address a fellow firebender, or does she mean it quite literally? Is Uki her sister? I only ask because there’s a big emphasis on Uki’s family throughout this episode, and by the end of it, she’s been kidnapped.

Seven Havens: On the Horizon, Into the Storm, The Order

It feels like just yesterday we were watching Korra and Asami walk off into the sunset (or spirit world) together, and now it’s twelve years later. In fact, In-Universe it was over two hundred years ago, and there’s a new Avatar in town – two in fact!

These episodes are being released in sets of three, which is kind of a bummer since it means we’re already halfway through the season after just two weeks, but thankfully it’s recently been announced that Seven Havens will be running for four seasons and not just two. That puts it on par with The Legend of Korra, and gives it more scope for a larger, more in-depth story.

The name of this season (or “book”) is “Survival,” which calls to mind the difference between living and merely surviving. They’re two very different things, and it would appear that life in this reimagined world is a lot more tenuous than it was back in Korra’s day. Civilization has been destroyed and then rebuilt across seven fortified havens after something called “the cataclysm.”

It’s not quite post-apocalyptic, since society is still largely functioning, but it would seem food is scarce and bending abilities are on the wane, with less benders born every year. More concerning, the Avatar is considered an enemy of the people. Though details are still (deliberately) vague at this point, Korra is said to have “let [humanity] down” and elaborate skits are performed that blame her for the aftereffects of the cataclysm – which among other things, involve terrifyingly violent storms.

I’m sure we’ll get more details later, but for now a lot of questions are raised. Do people think she caused the cataclysm? Or just wasn’t able to stop it? Did they vanquish her as was depicted in the play? Or did she perish some other way? And why has there been such a gap between her and the emergence of the next Avatar?

Woman of the Month: Miss Eglantine Price

Eglantine Price from Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Every year I try to feature a spooky-themed lady for October’s Woman of the Month entry, and there’s a surplus of witches out there to choose from. The problem is, I’ve used most of them already: Katrina Van Tassel, Mary Sibley, Wednesday Addams (she’s kind of a witch) and Halliwell sisters from both versions of Charmed.

I was about to settle on one or both of the Owens sisters (especially with the recent release of Practical Magic 2) when I remembered – of course! – Eglantine Price.

Miss Price embodies most of my life goals. She’s a single middle-aged woman living alone in a giant manse, studying the art of witchcraft. She rides around on a motorcycle that releases large clouds of yellow smoke, and has a black cat called Cosmic Creepers. She’s very much the main character of her own story, driving the action of the film from start to finish, and wants to be a witch for largely noble reasons: to assist in the war effort and defend her home from the Nazis (this whole thing being set in 1940). For this, she wants no recognition or reward, and Angela Lansbury is game for a lot of singing and dancing and comedic pratfalls.

She’s also allowed to enjoy a late-in-life romance (which is rare, and therefore important, even though I didn’t really care about it) and commands immense magical power. Watching this religiously as a child, I never realized how special she was.

Of course, because this is a Disney film, she eventually has to give up magic in order to become a wife and mother. Boo. Back in 2021 I posted an essay on The Problem with Witches which roughly hypothesized that despite the allure of witches in our fiction, there is an anxious preoccupation with the idea of women wielding hard power. It was not a particularly in-depth look at the subject, but suffice to say that once storytellers got past the concept of witches as agents of the devil, the likes of Jennifer in I Married a Witch! and Gillian in Bell, Book and Candle are inevitably required to give up their magical abilities once they fall in love.

Much later on, after the dodgy implications of this were recognized, witches were either shifted into the superhero genre (the assorted women of Charmed) or were given no greater ambition through which to funnel their gifts than running a bath shop (Sally in Practical Magic). It is power, but it is severely limited power.

Eglantine Price falls smackdab in the middle of this evolution. By the end of the story the Nazis have destroyed her magical workshop, and in hindsight, it’s obvious her oft-mentioned poor memory is a device to prevent her from recreating any of her spells. But she’s resigned to it all, claiming that she secretly knew she had no business being a witch due to her reaction to the existence of poisoned dragons’ liver.

And even though it’s a Maybe Ever After with Mr Brown (who leaves to join the Home Guard) and she’s probably going to be more of a Cool Aunt than a surrogate mother to the three orphans, the fact remains that she’s no longer a witch and is presumably settling down into drab domesticity. It’s not as depressing as the sight of Jennifer knitting in a chair or Gillian donning a flowery sundress, but it’s still pretty depressing, especially when you recall the scene in which she unwraps her broomstick. There is palpable excitement and reverence when she holds it to her cheek and utters: “my first broom!” This is clearly a woman who relishes being a witch.

So, let’s remember her in the film’s climax, in which she demonstrates her incredible power by bringing to life a makeshift army of soldiers from across Britain’s history, commanding them from a broomstick flying the Union Jack with a cutlass in her hand. Because IT IS AWESOME.

Reading/Watching Log #130

I had three weeks off this month, so I spent most of it relaxing and catching up on various things – and also finishing things: Trollhunters, Hilda, DuckTales and The Owl House, which meant I got a little verklempt at so many emotional goodbyes between assorted animated characters.

I spent time diving into the last three Earthsea books, which I generally enjoyed (with some caveats) and watched plenty of black-and-white films that have been sitting on my hard-drive for years. Throw in my usual two Babysitters Club book, the fourth season of Outlander, and a rewatch of The Others, and it was a busy few weeks of couch-reclining.

The reason this is late is because despite winter coming to an end, some sort of bug managed to catch up with me just last week, so there’s been a lot of sleeping and groaning (and not much writing). But as always, better late than never.

Faerie Tale Theatre: Hansel and Gretel

Shelley Duvall passed away two years ago now, though back when I first heard the news I initially planned to return to a VERY long-gestating first-time watch of her passion project, Faerie Tale Theatre. I started this ten years ago, folks. All I can say is better late than never.

The show was best described as an anthology series, comprised of twenty-seven comic retellings of traditional fairy tales. They all look pretty low-budget, but there was some eye-opening talent involved (the ones I’ve watched so far have starred Robin Williams, Mick Jagger, Jeff Bridges, Christopher Reeves, Mary Steenburgen and Joan Collins – insane!) I’ve already covered the first seven episodes in the series, and this is its eighth: “Hansel and Gretel.”

The episode is different in a couple of important respects: firstly, that it actually casts children in the child roles (in “Little Red Riding Hood,” a fully-grown Mary Steenburgen played the titular character) and secondly, that it eschews a soundstage in order to go out on-location. Those real kids are in a real forest, and the Gingerbread House is clearly a real construct – not just a badly rendered drawing on a backdrop.

“Hansel and Gretel” is a quick, simple story, but one that’s surprisingly easy to adapt into a full-length feature. In fact, I grew up with a version that was part of the Cannon Movietales collection (another series of fairy tale retellings made in the eighties) and which clearly derived a lot of inspiration from this episode – particularly in the use of Engelbert Humperdinck’s score for his “Hänsel und Gretel” opera.

It’s also a very frightening story, featuring legitimate child endangerment not only from the cannibal witch, but also the children’s parents: a homicidal stepmother and a useless father. It’s only the quick-thinking of the children (mostly Gretel, which is surprising given the period when this tale was originally told) that gets them out alive.

I’d go so far to say that this fairy tale lies at the root of a huge chunk of our horror stories. Cannibalism, like in The Silence of the Lambs? You saw it here first. Child abandonment and/or endangerment found in things like The Black Phone? Has its roots here. Creepy old hags such as Aunt Gladys in Weapons? Definitely born from this story. Is somebody being tempted to do something or enter somewhere because of the delicious food on display, such as Ofelia in Pan’s Labryinth? That’s the Gingerbread House trope at work. How about aesthetics like those found in Robert Eggers’s The Witch or Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm? Goes without saying.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer pulled off a subversion in the episode “Gingerbread,” in which two dead children (referred to as “Hans and Gretta”) are actually a demon that feeds off the paranoia and mob mentality that follows in the wake of a tragedy. The first King’s Quest game requires the player to enter a Gingerbread House and win extra points for pushing the witch in the fire. I’m pretty sure one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies bases itself heavily on the story (sorry, I’ve only seen the first) and the phrase “follow the breadcrumbs” has entered the vernacular as a way of following clues left behind someone.

I believe even this year’s Obsession made direct references to the fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel.” In other words, it’s everywhere.

King's Quest: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder

It’s been well over a year since I last delved into the King’s Quest series, the computer games that defined a healthy portion of my childhood – but now it’s time to return to the land of Daventry and the adventures of King Graham, now in middle-age and with two grown children of his own.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, these games may very well be the source of my love for fantasy, mythology and fairy tales, as I really can’t understate how much I lived in these games as a little girl. Distributed by Sierra Entertainment and designed by Roberta Williams, I’ve already covered the first four in the series here. The first two feature Sir (then King) Graham as their protagonist, who wins a throne in Quest for the Crown, and then finds a wife in Romancing the Throne.

The next two games went in a markedly different direction, leaping forward eighteen years and featuring two new characters as protagonists: first Gwydion in To Heir is Human, the slave of an evil wizard who manages to escape captivity before discovering he’s actually the long-lost son of Graham and Valanice, and then Rosella in The Perils of Rosella, Gwydion’s twin sister, in an adventure that picks up only seconds after the conclusion of the third game.

So, now we reach King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder, and it soon becomes very clear we’re no longer dealing with standalone stories, but the interconnected saga of a single royal family. As Graham discovers over the course of his adventure, the actions Gwydion took in King’s Quest III directly shape the narrative of this game – specifically, that in escaping the evil wizard Manannan, Gwydion (or Alexander, as he’s now known) used a magic spell to transform his cruel master into a cat. Now Manannan’s brother Mordack is seeking revenge, transporting Castle Daventry and its inhabitants to his island fortress in order to extort Alexander into transforming Manannan back into human form.

For this reason, KQV feels like a turning point in the series – though not just narratively, but technologically as well. At the time of its release in 1990, there was simply nothing else like it on the market. The immersive graphics, the point-and-click interface, the story cutscenes, the voice acting – all of this was the first of its kind, and it ended up selling half-a-million copies, making it the best-selling PC game between 1990 and 1994.