Witch Aesthetics: Music, Sound, and the Witch Archetype in Film (In Person)

The witch archetype is an unruly figure, a dark Other who troubles boundaries and power. However, the witch also emerges as a character with whom people identify, emphasizing her incredible flexibility as a signifier. This flexibility reflects how our cultural anxieties and projects change over time. In other words, we can create our individual and collective identities through the symbol of the witch. I use sound and music in film and television to explore what witch aesthetics can tell us about ourselves and our society.

Based on my study of more than 140 American films from 1927-2024, I argue that the witch is a profoundly musical and sonic creature predisposed to resonate with queer and feminist thought. Using examples from films like The Wizard of Oz (1939), I Married a Witch (1942), Hocus Pocus (1993), The Craft (1996), The Witch (2015), and more, I unpack the cultural freight of the sounds we hear when we listen to the witch.

One persistent sonic feature of the witch also stands in for modern cultural ideas of identity and power—the voice. The witch consistently sings and speaks to manifest her power across the century of film in my corpus. Fortified by the work of scholars such as Carol Clover, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Mladen Dolar, Freya Jarman-Ivens, and Steven Connor, I emphasize how the witch’s powerful voice intensifies the inherent uncanny and relational nature of the voice. Furthermore, the witch’s voice threatens the hearer’s too-open ear, which cannot easily resist being penetrated by the voice.

I consider the long-standing cultural significance of the witch archetype in American film, drawing particular attention to how voice, music, and sound inflect our understanding of the witch and of ourselves.

Note: This listing will allow participants to join us in person. If you’d like to join us online via Zoom, register here.

1. Articulate the roles of the witch archetype in twentieth and twenty-first century American film culture.
2. Describe the range of music and sound associated with the witch in American film, 1927-present.
3. Summarize philosophical thinking on the voice, connection, and identity as represented by the witch’s voice in film.
4. Reflect on how the witch represents our cultural priorities, concerns, and identities.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Doty, Alexander and Patricia Clare Ingham. The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan. Punctum Books, 2014.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press, 2019.
Eidsheim, Nina Sun. Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press, 2015.

Kosmina, Brydie. Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.