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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in witchsploitation

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
In Praise of 'Rosemary's Baby'

"Anything they say about us becomes ours, to do with as we please."

(C. F. Moore)

 

If (like me) you're one of those who has read pretty much everything that there is to read on the subject of witches, let me ask you: what do you think of J. R. Hanslet's 1933 All of Them Witches?

Isn't it a classic? Beautiful writing, good research, and—best of all—all that hot, hot information on what the Craft looked and felt like back BW (Before Wicca).

If you've got a copy (that beautifully-crafted J. Waghorn edition, with the real gold lettering and the black goatskin binding), hold onto it. It's never been reprinted, and (if you can find one), it will go for more than $1300.

Ha! Gotcha! If you think that you've read Hanslet's magnum opus, apparently you're one of those witches (gods know there are plenty of us out there) who can't admit that there's anything Craft-related that she doesn't know. Call it the Granny Weatherwax Syndrome.

In fact, you can't have read J. R. Hanslet's All of Them Witches because there is no such book. It's straight out of Ira Levin's brilliant 1967 witchsploitation novel Rosemary's Baby. Remember? It's the book that Hutch leaves to Rosemary that enables her to figure out that her neighbors (the ones who brought over the black candles during the big power outage) are actually witches and are planning to sacrifice her baby to Satan.

Or so she thinks.

“It's a religion,” she tells her husband (but it turns out he's a witch too). “It's an early religion that got—pushed into the corner” (177).

Personally, I think Rosemary's Baby is required reading for every modern witch: a little black gem of a novel, beautifully structured, with lots of twists and a delicious hermeneutic of suspicion. Don't trust anyone: they're all of them witches.

And, I mean. When, in the closing scene, Roman Castevet ( Steven Marcato) cries out: “He shall overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples! He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and the tortured!” (236). Well, really, how can you help but chime in with a Hail Satan! or two, regardless of whether you actually believe in him or not?

Whenever I'm drawing up a bibliography on the Craft that lists enough books to make it inconspicuous, I almost always slip J. R. Hanslet's All of Them Witches in amongst the others. For those in the know, it'll read as a joke. For those that aren't, well...let 'em wonder. The god of witches—Old Wagtail Himself—is a notorious Trickster, and we, his children, are like him.

Because, best of all, Rosemary's Baby is a true story. That bit about the Horned siring children on mortal women: it's all true. In fact, my dear brother or sister in the Craft, he sired you.

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  • Paul B. Rucker
    Paul B. Rucker says #
    The movie version is also one of the most faithful adaptations of a book to screen that I have ever seen. I love this movie. My mo
Witchcr*p Is In the Eye of the Beholder

“Do you think you can get rid of these?”

I look dubiously at the bag of books that my friend has just handed to me. It's filled with what, 40 years ago, we used to refer to as “witchcr*p”: the dregs, books that didn't adhere to the Wiccan party line.

My friend and I are both Second Generation Craft in the US: not the founders, but those who learned from the founders. In those information-starved days, when you saw “witch” in the title, you bought it regardless, good, bad, or indifferent.

“Well, we'll see,” I tell her, reluctantly taking the bag. “I kind of doubt it.”

Boy, was I ever wrong.

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  • Murphy Pizza
    Murphy Pizza says #
    And please think of your Pagan studies scholars! I ransacked used bookstores during my research looking for sources like these --
  • Haley
    Haley says #
    We cleaned out this last haul as well! My own copy of The Golden Bough. Thank you!

John Alden Junior: What do they want, these terrible witches?

Cotton Mather: The same thing we all want: a country of their own. 


Wow, speaking of Witchsploitation: a new TV series, set (you guessed it) in Salem, Mass, 1692.

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  • Greybeard
    Greybeard says #
    Three of my foremothers (Lacy and Foster) admitted being witches in the 1692 Salem trials. Their family farm became a tourist att

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

witch•sploi•ta•tion n. In literature or cinema, the use of the Craft--or, more broadly, paganism in general--for sensationalistic (usually horror-inducing) ends.

You know the genre. Wicker Man I (“the one without Nicholas Cage,” as a local movie marquee put it during the midnight Samhain run last year), To the Devil a Daughter...so many to choose from. Somewhere off in the sticks there are (bwa-ha-ha) still real, live witches (or left-over pagans) and they still practice...(shudder)...human sacrifice. Whoa, dude, way scary.

A coven-sib recently confessed to me that her bookshelves are filled with trashy novels with the word “witch” in the title. Magenta, you're not alone. I resemble that remark myself, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

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