“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
What a horrible question.

In our society, steeped in patriarchal values, this question implies that a woman, the witch, is either behaving or misbehaving, obeying or disobeying. The question limits women in who they are and what they could become. Film has much to do with social and cultural perceptions of what a woman should be. The horror genre, especially, has had the ability to imprint itself on popular culture and mold social ideas of a “good” woman and “bad” woman. “Good” women, often Final Girls, traditionally abstain from sex, drugs, and alcohol; they are down to earth, amicable, and care about others, oftentimes more than themselves. Their opposites, the bad women, are outcasts, messy, and complicated. Their distinctions are always obvious, even color-coded. Though The Craft (1996) brought a chicness to the teenage witch, by the film’s end, the bad witch, Nancy, is institutionalized, left writhing enchained in her bed, incoherently yelling. This was the fate of many “bad” women. Remove them from society, as they are uncontrollable. The witches must be burned.

Elizabeth Sankey, writer and director of Witches, was institutionalized due to postpartum psychosis. Prior to her hospital admission, she found a group of women on WhatsApp with whom to air her fears about being a mother. All women in the group had a history of pregnancy or trying to become pregnant. All would be, by our strict social ideals, bad women: the WhatsApp coven included women with thoughts of killing their children and themselves.

Who can we trust?

Motherhood is a tricky subject. American history has shown that while we need mothers, their lives are often overlooked, the baby taking center stage. The opinions and fears of mothers are left to the wayside, resulting in feelings of isolation and anxiety. After all, pregnancy can be life threatening, and is in no way as clean as it had been presented on film for decades. The maternal mortality rate has hardly changed since 2019, with approximately nineteen deaths per 100,000 live births, according to the CDC. In 2021, according to the American Medical Association, the Black maternal mortality rate was 2.6 times higher than white mothers. Suicide is a leading cause of death for recent mothers. Sankey correlates medical shortcomings, bias, discrimination, and lack of mental health resources with the skepticism women feel when sharing pregnancy-related mental struggles with doctors. Crucially, Sankey urges that guilt and shame are preventing women and those capable of pregnancy from getting the help they need, fearful they will be judged and labeled as “bad mothers,” or worse, their children are taken away from them. There is a historical basis for this, with links to 17th century America.

“Embroidered on our bones”

Sankey includes several testimonies from victims of the Salem Witch Trials, many of whom were town herbalists, midwives, and healers. These women were the ones who helped others give birth and cared for them during their healing process. However, if you were socially linked to a perceived witch during the trials, you too could be implicated. The lessons that had been learned from those trials and the hundreds of others across America in the 17th and 18th centuries were not to trust a healing woman. 

Sankey posits that many perceived witches of Salem suffered from various mental illnesses, leaving them vulnerable to discrimination from accusing townspeople. No longer was the healing women counted upon for birth assistance — that was now the domain of male doctors. For centuries since, women have been taught to police their neighbors and friends, lest they be accused of being “bad.” Those accused suffered the social, physical, and mental consequences. There is hope for mothers when covens are reclaimed. Once perceived as wild women celebrating the devil and conjuring demons, the coven can and should be a source of not only support, but guidance.

The Spellbook

Sankey breaks her documentary down into five chapters. In the form of spells, she outlines how to survive maternal madness. She calls on viewers to “fall into madness,” “step into the circle,” “speak your evil,” “invoke the spirits,” and, finally, “embrace the witch.” I posit, however, that her most important spell is the third. Speaking your evil is extremely daunting. One woman in particular admitted to frightening thoughts of sexually harming her child as a result of maternal OCD. “It was torture,” she stated. She chose self-harm instead of sharing these uncontrollable thoughts with anyone, let alone other mothers. Sankey, herself battling murderous thoughts from postpartum depression, felt as though she was in her own horror film, with an overwhelming sense of doom – “Living, breathing terror.” She told no doctor of the “hideous scenes” playing in her head. Instead, she looked inward. Am I evil? The WhatsApp coven sprang to action to get Sankey help when she revealed she had suicidal thoughts after days without sleep. “If we didn’t, who would?”

The medical center where Sankey was admitted was for mothers and their children. She was stripped of any potential harmful belongings, and then left alone with her child. This was extremely unsettling and traumatic for the other mothers, with some revealing it was their “biggest fear.” Under 24/7 surveillance, the therapy began. “Now,” Sankey states, “I was surrounded by witches.” These women became each others’ support, and the doctors worked through patients’ perinatal mental health issues. Removed was the stigma of “bad” motherhood. The testimony from Sankey and her fellow patients is raw, real, and frightening. Stepping into the circle requires tremendous strength and trust.

Embrace the Witch

I want to be a mother, but I am scared. As with most of my fears, I turn to horror films to sort myself out. I think of Rosemary Woodhouse, whose own husband assaulted her, and, like a patient named Dr. Cho, saw the devil in her child’s eyes. She was gaslit, denied care, and almost died during the early months of her pregnancy. After birth, she was discarded. She was no longer of use, though she was granted permission to raise the spawn of Satan. She had no agency or autonomy. This is what scares me most, as I have heard too many horror stories of women not being believed. Worse, as someone living with a mental illness, I worry I will be perceived as a “bad” mom. 

In the US, findings from the 2020 Maternal Behavioral Health Policy Evaluation (MAPLE) study show “2683 out of 595,237 insured mothers aged 15 to 44 across the US had suicidal ideation or thoughts of self-harm […] the greatest increases seen among Black; low-income; younger individuals; and people with comorbid anxiety, depression, or serious mental illness.”

What if my depression becomes unbearable after giving birth? What if I have thoughts of harm? What if I become a statistic? 

It was Sankey who, despite the harrowing testimony, calmed me. I know I can look to my sisters. Witches is a cathartic documentary, with empathy at its core. I urge my fellow mothers-to-be to join the coven, to embrace the witch. Embracing the witch means to heal — to shed society’s expectations of “good” motherhood. You are enough. And you are certainly not alone. 

To hell with “good” and “bad,” so long as you are a witch.

You can stream Witches on Mubi.

Ahh, the mid-2000s. Brendan Urie was chiming in with, “Haven’t you ever heard of closing the God Damn door?”, metalcore blasted on every station, the smell of black eyeliner and nail polish wafted through the air, and everyone could only see about half of what was around them because of the deeply gelled fringes. Essentially, emo was all the rage. However, despite its clear, of-its-era connections to alternative subcultures, the horror genre was at a weird point in its expansive existence. Between countless torture porn sequels, Japanese remakes, and an endless slew of oversaturated slashers, many films were grouped in this era as “trash”. While, undoubtedly, some of them were, this generalization caused many phenomenal films to go unnoticed or completely under the radar. This is the case with 2005’s House of Wax.

Supposedly a remake of the 1953 Vincent Price film with the same name, it could have less to do with the original. A familiar setup sees a group of college kids en route to their school’s football game, caught out of luck with a broken down car. That’s where the fun begins. They wind up camped out near a ghost town, seemingly empty except for one Bo Sinclair, who promises to help them out. As they begin to notice, it seems the only operational business is a wax museum…From then on out, we are welcomed into one of the wildest, genuinely creepiest slashers in modern memory. With dingy movie theaters, a nightmare-inducing wax museum, and one of the most nauseating and original MOs of any slasher villain, the flick feels like a walkthrough of a skillfully organized haunted attraction. Plus, it’s crammed with 2000s nostalgia, with visuals that make it feel like you’re watching a full-length Hawthorne Heights music video, and a soundtrack that cements it as one of the most 2005 movies of, well…2005.

A Terrifying Pair of Killers

One of the absolute highlights of House of Wax are the two killers, the Sinclair Brothers. Initially conjoined at birth, these twins work in tandem to run the town of Ambrose’s waxworks from Hell. Bo is the brains, luring in teens with a disarmingly normal demeanor, and wax-faced Vincent takes care of the more troublesome aspects of the business, the brutal torture and creation of the statues themselves. It harkens back to classics from the golden era of slashers, their twisted backwoods family reminiscent of Texas Chain Saw, or even the Voorhees clan in Friday The 13th. Vincent is the Leatherface to Bo’s Choptop. The Brothers’ Mom, Trudy, made wax statues, and after her death, Vincent wanted to innocently carry on her work. However, the psychopathic Bo manipulated him to make them better…more realistic…and that meant using corpses.

The means of offing teens from these brothers are some of the scariest in slasher history. Victims are paralyzed, drowned alive in boiling wax. They are forced to suffer as wax statues until they eventually die. The mannequins in the town are wax-transformed corpses, victims preserved like in a museum. It is definitely a little cheesy, and feels a lot like an early-2010s Creepypasta, but is still considerably bone chilling compared to a simple hockey mask and machete. It is a highly original MO, not only elevating the film in its own right, but putting it a step above other films in the 90s and 2000s slasher revival.

It’s All in the Vibes

During a chase scene, Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) and Nick (Chad Michael Murray) find themselves hiding from a shotgun-wielding, trucker-capped Bo Sinclair in a grimy movie theater. The theater is disgusting, covered in dust and grime, and no living human sits in the audience-only wax-mummified corpses, laden in filth and creeping bugs. Projected on the screen is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a hammer-on-the-head parallel for Bo and Vincent Sinclair’s disturbed sibling relationship. As Bette Davis belts out, “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy”, Nick and Carly sit among the figures, hoping to remain still enough so the aisle-stalking Bo does not notice and fire at them. It is a genuinely edge-of-your-seat sequence, clever in its construction and framing, the use of the human mannequin’s doubling effect creating a genuinely disorienting feeling. However, what is truly striking here, as with the rest of the movie, is the aesthetic of it.

This scene is one of many examples of a movie that perfectly knows how to construct its setting and build a phenomenal atmosphere. The old creepy movie, the dingy cinema, rows of once-living mannequins, and a stalking serial killer’s slow-moving pervasiveness? Everything clicks perfectly here, and it feels possibly more akin to a Halloween Horror Nights event more-so than a movie…and this is actually for the better.

The rest of the movie feels the same, all of it having this Halloween-ish, grungy, 2000s tone to it. It feels reminiscent of Rob Zombie visuals, the palettes featuring a lot of dim yellows and gross-out, tree-greens. It is of its time, absolutely, but gleefully so. The movie basks in the era, in every aspect.

Speaking of the era, the soundtrack is pretty wild. It truly captures the best of music in that era, Interpol and Disturbed both get songs on there, as well as My Chemical Romance getting too. Hell, it does not get more emo than your film closing out with a smash-to-black on Helena from Three Cheers. In the 2000s, atmosphere was one of the strongest attributes of horror, with House of Wax being the crowning achievement.  It is disappointing how this, among many other movies, were lost or ignored due to the pure oversaturation of the genre. It is oftentimes a make-or-break for any horror film of any decade, aesthetic being debatably just as important in this genre.

House of Wax excels at all of this. Its setting, costumes, and props are all beautifully and skillfully created. Luckily, It has found its cult status in the last couple of years, but its over-the-top nature should have made it an instant classic upon release.