Witchy Business: Talking Feminism and the American Witch Film with Payton McCarty-Simas

Cody: 00:00:29

Hello and welcome to Box Office Pulp, your one stop podcast for movies madness, moxie, and tonight, more witches than you can shake a broom at. I'm going to assume I'm the only person who's ever made that joke, and if someone else has, I'll be crushed. So don't tell me if I'm wrong.

I'm your host, Cody, and joining me as always, are my co hosts, Mike and Jamie. We're also joined today by author Peyton McCarty Simmons to discuss their new book, that Very Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:00:54

Hi.

Cody: 00:00:54

That was just fun to say. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us on. I love a good subtitle in a book, too. That makes it seem so much more official.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:01:02

Thank you. I actually came up with the subheading first and then there were a couple titles we were debating.

One of them was all of Them Witches, Like Rosemary's Baby. And my editor said that she liked my original title better. So that Very Witch stuck. And I do like it a lot.

Cody: 00:01:18

Nice.

Cody: 00:01:18

Was it one of those situations where you had the whole book written and then you had to apply a title to it, or did you kind of had that subtitle and you're like, this will guide me. We'll figure out the details later.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:01:27

I definitely had everything else in place, but when I come up with a title, it usually is what stays on the page. So, like, every chapter, you know, every subhead in every chapter came to me pretty quickly. They used to be longer, actually.

I had quotes attached and, you know, all these bells and whistles. But I think there's definitely enough in there as it is.

Cody: 00:01:46

So I'm just looking through the chapter headings right now, too. All these are fantastic. Just for the readers at or listeners at home. Just to give you some of them. There's gender, genre, psychedelics and the.

And objection in the: 2010

Jamie: 00:02:05

I was so disappointed when I got to the end of the table of contents and then remembered, oh, this is just a review copy.

Cody: 00:02:11

Yeah, yeah, we just had like the first, I think, 45 pages. So I will probably accidentally ask something about the end of the book and you'll have to be like, you just gotta buy and read it, man.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:02:20

I can definitely. I can. I can give you little hints and little spoilers, you know.

Cody: 00:02:24

All right, now we're talking.

I will say, and I don't want this to sound like a complaint, but as I was reading through the book, I kept trying to think of discussion topics for this episode. And I'd find one and be like, oh, that's gonna make me sound smart. And then you would address that very topic like, two pages later.

So you're always, like, one step ahead of me. As I was reading through this thing.

I think the people at home are going to love it because it really feels like it's covering everything in so much depth. And that's only the first 40 pages. Who knows what you get up to in the rest of it?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:02:50

Oh, my God. Thank you. No, I mean, it's. It was a huge undertaking to try and cover, like, over 50 years of cinema history.

I mean, I touch On, I think, 13 presidential administrations in this book. So, yeah, it was, you know, it took me six or seven years to research, but.

But I really wanted every chapter to feel like a mini history, not just of the which films I'm talking about, but of the cinema history of the period, the feminist history of the period, and just kind of like a litmus test for the era itself, like what's going on in American history at its broadest. So I'm glad it felt. I'm glad you guys felt, you know, that it was comprehensive on that.

Jamie: 00:03:29

Yeah, yeah. I'm addicted to having as much context as possible whenever I'm reading up on stuff like this. So this was like catnip for me. Like, no, I have.

I have to know who was president when this movie came out and what, what people were wearing and what was going on in the country at the time. Because so much of that stuff ends up falling by the wayside with overviews that are more focused on just the actual filmmaking.

The social context can be lost so easily, and then that just leads to us forgetting all of that stuff totally.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:03:58

Especially since the social context has such an impact on. On filmmaking. Right. Like, it's.

It would be, I think, remiss for an author to not mention when talking about, you know, for example, like, witch films in the late 50s that in the UK, Britain had actually just repealed their anti witchcraft laws around that same time. Oh, yeah.

So there's just so much stuff going on, like knowing when a writer's strike is happening, knowing who's president, especially under Reagan in particular, who is such A cinephile in his own way. Or, you know, it's just. It's important context. It shapes the movies and, you know, adds flavor, but also depth, I think.

Cody: 00:04:36

Yeah.

e you had brought up like the: 1950

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:04:51

Totally. There are definitely a lot of parallels there. Anytime we introduce a new format or a new mode, there's one of these crises in cinema.

And a lot of film historians have argued that we're in a bleaker period than the 50s, which is deeply grim.

Cody: 00:05:08

You know, where's our CinemaScope? We need a Cinerama or something right now to pick us back up.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:05:12

Oh, I think that's 40x.

Cody: 00:05:14

Good point. Who doesn't love seeing Twisters with your seat shaken?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:05:18

Oh, my God.

Jamie: 00:05:18

I've lost count of how many times just this past month Mike and I have been watching B movie from the 50s and just turned to each other and said something along the lines of, man, they just kind of forgot how to make movies for like 10 years.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:05:31

It's. Yeah, it's true. Although I feel like today we've forgotten how to light a movie.

Cody: 00:05:36

Oh, yeah, yeah. And then we just end the show here with everyone being very depressed.

Jamie: 00:05:42

Honestly, the thing you pointed out that really stopped me in my tracks was. Yeah, we are kind of addicted to.

Well, when times get tough for movies, bloating the run times, instead of shrinking them down, which you think would be like the logical thing to do when movies are in trouble. We get the three hour epics.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:06:01

Yeah, totally. Because it's, I think the, the idea.

There's a historian named Foster Hirsch, has an excellent history of 50s cinema, and he spends a lot of time talking about how it's trying to sell you an experience. Right. In a different way. Which sounds very familiar today with, you know, immersive experiences at, you know, whatever museums.

But also, like, we come to this place for magic. And the fact that the AMC lead up is now like 25 fucking minutes long. They're selling an experience.

Cody: 00:06:29

Or for the theater nerds, like, check it out, this was filmed at 30% on IMAX cameras. It's bigger, which I will say, I do. Eat up. They got my number there. But it's still a funny way to promote a movie, truly.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:06:40

I mean, you know, maybe I'm the only, like, avid Stubbs Head here.

But, like, they have this new thing they play before the IMAX where it' the guy where he's mic'd too close and his voice is too low, and he's talking about, like, the specifics of how the light works through the camera. And I'm like, this is too nerdy to sell anything bad.

Jamie: 00:06:59

Asmr.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:07:00

Do not care about the xenon balls, guys. Like, please.

Cody: 00:07:03

Someone out there has to care.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:07:05

Yeah, Martin Score says he's going to come and kill me in my sleep.

Cody: 00:07:07

He's the only one I saw recently. He just said that he doesn't go to public theaters anymore because the audiences are too disruptive. And it's like, we're screwed. We're. We're cooked.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:07:15

We're totally cooked.

Cody: 00:07:16

Yeah, it's over.

Mike: 00:07:17

Called it.

Cody: 00:07:18

It does remind me when I saw the Witch in theaters, that was one of the worst audiences I've ever seen. Like, those people were complaining the entire time that the witch wasn't both.

It was too boring and too scary and not scary enough because they brought their, like, three year old with them. They didn't know what was happening. They were unhappy, stayed for the entire movie and complained the entire time.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:07:35

And that kid was changed forever.

Cody: 00:07:37

I can only hope that kid just grew up to really love horror movies or was traumatized. I don't know which way.

Mike: 00:07:43

Same deaf.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:07:44

Yeah, probably both. That was definitely me with some early Paranormal Activity movies.

Cody: 00:07:48

I don't know. We've got Mike, on the other hand, who I guess was watching Hellraiser like, as soon as he emerged from the womb.

Mike: 00:07:53

I was five.

Cody: 00:07:54

Oh, five.

Jamie: 00:07:55

Sorry.

Cody: 00:07:55

My mistake.

Mike: 00:07:56

I think Videodrome may have come earlier, and I have, of course, the Christmas Eve memory of the Fly.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:08:01

Whoa.

Jamie: 00:08:01

Honestly, I would argue that prepared you for life more than most other cinema experiences.

Mike: 00:08:06

Prepared me for life. Prepared me for doing a movie podcast. Little wins.

Cody: 00:08:10

So a couple of the things I was trying to brainstorm through and then you actually mentioned one is Stephen King's theory that economic or political hardships really tend to strengthen the horror genre. And you touched right on that. So I guess I can't steal too much from you there because it goes into it in the book.

But how do you feel the witch film stands currently with everything that's happening around us, because things feel bleak enough where we should be getting the best witch material possible.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:08:35

It's complicated, honestly, because for in the book, I'm arguing that it's in relation not just to moments of, like, economic turmoil, but specifically moments of social and political unrest.

ee that again in the mid late: 2010

And that coincides with the MeToo movement. That coincides with. With Trump and so many other things. Right. So you have these spikes.

And I wrote at one point, I'm trying to remember, when I wrote this article. It was a. I'm a film critic. So it was a piece in the Brooklyn Rail. It was for the Macbeth movie that one of the Coen brothers did.

Cody: 00:09:22

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:09:24

And I was writing about the fact that the quote, unquote, elevated horror cycle had run its course and yada, yada, yada. But it's one of those things where Covid really scrambled our typical cycles, I think.

So things have kind of expanded and mutated and stretched in a lot of really interesting and unexpected ways. So if you look at our current deeply fractal film landscape, you can point to a ton of different things happening for witches all at once.

You know, in moments of social conservatism and its Preponderance, like the 80s, you have movies that kind of satirize the witch and make her into a comedic figure, kind of diffusing the feminist power of a figure who, you know, at the height of the second wave, was genuinely scary in the movies. And here you can see movies like Wicked, where she's, you know, a kid's figure again.

Cody: 00:10:16

Right.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:10:17

At the same time, you can also see a lot of, like, they're doing a witchboard remake. They're doing practical magic, too.

So it's all over the place in a way that I think indicates that we don't really know where we're going, which is part of what's so scary about. About our. Our time.

Cody: 00:10:33

The point about Wicked is really interesting to me because the way I was looking at most trends is the opposite of that. Maybe start from a comedy place, and then you would move into a serious, more grim, dark adaptation.

I'm thinking mostly like Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

When they readapted that for Netflix and they decided, okay, instead of going the kind of combi route, let's make this the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and go with the dark version of that. But Wicked is, like you mentioned, the complete opposite. All of a sudden, it's the musical. You took something that used to be terrifying.

The Wicked Witch scared generations of kids, especially the flying Monkeys. And now it's not trying that at all. But it was massively successful, so who knows what people actually want?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:11:10

Yeah. And Sabrina. What is Sabrina if not a rearticulation of what was going on in Bewitched, you know? Oh, yeah, they come and go, they come back.

It's eating a little bit of the Addams Family. There's a lot going on in Sabrina that's reflecting a lot of older, specifically comedy witches.

But yeah, I like, I like that they did the chilling adventures of Sabrina. I don't watch, I don't watch any television because I don't have time. But. But I dug that one as a, as a thing that exists. Same with Wednesday.

I think it's cool that the goth kids have some, some media to consume.

Cody: 00:11:42

Yeah, totally.

Jamie: 00:11:43

Well, it kind of seems like these days with them casting such a wide net for any property, it seems like most figures in our pop culture wear two faces now where they're. It's almost necessary that everything have a fun, light version for certain audiences and a much darker, more intense version for.

For different audiences there.

And I've definitely seen that starting to happen in horror now as we're finally breaking away from the very serious decade we've had to where it kind of feels like we're going towards a 50, 50 split between what used to be considered elevated horror and goofy horror again.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:12:25

Yeah, which feels very much like the 80s to me. It's the, the exhaustion with the serious. The exhaustion with the art house, the, the triumphant return of.

Of, you know, these big budget, big action horror comedies and, you know, like, it's the Revenge of the Ghostbusters kind of a vibe. Even though Ghostbusters did not do well.

But, you know, like the Sinners, for example, is an excellent reminder that you can do a big fun action horror movie and it can be smart and interesting and it doesn't have to be sodden and kind of maudlin at the same time. And I love a lot of elevated horror.

I talk a lot of elevated horror in the book, but I'm very much enjoying the return of energy and a renewed, like, different, like a change of direction. I think we needed it.

Jamie: 00:13:11

Horror definitely feels less mournful now is, I guess the word I would use.

Mike: 00:13:16

To describe it very much.

I think a lot of it has to do with pretty much an entire generation just went through a massive bit of trauma and we're seeing sort of the fracturing of tones that's happening from that.

I think that's one of the reasons that it really feels like Everything's sort of manic in regards to what's coming out, what's hitting with audiences, what's not. It's going very back and forth.

It's like yearning for going deeper but then can only take so much of it for so long, has to go in the other direction. And then, okay, now, now we're calm, calm again. Let's go back in the, in the other and dig a little bit deeper now.

And we're at this kind of like psyche fracture moments, especially right now, where there's a feeling of not knowing where the importance lies, I think. And that's also a place where movies are having a hard time in general finding their identity.

And horror is always like an interesting time whenever there is that identity search for society during certain periods. Like flipping from the 70s to the 80s, stuff like that.

And I'm really curious what the horror film would look like a year from now versus what's coming out and what's planned. Like what it will start going into the pipeline a year from now.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:14:34

Sinners two, he said that was a lie.

Cody: 00:14:37

He said that was surprising. I kind of like the idea of him sticking to his guns, being like, nope, yeah, we made a ton of money. Let's just leave this one and let it go.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:14:45

Yeah, no, yeah, I think you're totally right. Like a lot of the work I'm doing in the book is to think about movies. Movie cycles tend to last a decade, but the kind of historians decade.

So like the long 60s, right. You know, they don't actually coincide neatly with the years.

ement where it's like and now: 1990

We don't know what the: 2000

And yeah, you can identify these threads, like the return to these big bloated epics like the 50s, the return to this kind of, you know, action movie stuff like the, like the 80s. But you know, there's also this vibrant indie thing going on. So yeah, we'll just have to see. I hope we can.

With a little bit more perspective and a Little bit more time, we'll be able to get a sense, a better sense of what's going on. But. But, you know, I really can't complain. I feel like people were complaining last year that there weren't that many good movies.

But I do feel like we're, you know, box office aside, I think we're in a pretty good moment for filmmaking.

Cody: 00:16:10

Yeah, I'm definitely still finding things I enjoy. It's just a little tougher because the guaranteed blockbusters aren't necessarily scratching the itch they used to.

Mike: 00:16:18

People get very hung up on, oh, no good movies came out because nothing made any money. Which is odd because do you have stock in that particular company or not? You know, it's just like that's not the stuff.

Like I get it from a point of like, oh, I'd like my movie to go, you know, the movie that I enjoyed to do well and other people to have been able to see it and enjoy it. And I would like. When movies are successful in general, even if it's stuff I don't like, I think we're kind of past that point.

Points of like the basic model where that's going to be a thing to even focus on anyway, that people kind of got to get out of that mindset.

Jamie: 00:16:53

I also think people kind of need to let go of the mindset that it feels weird saying this as such a movie fan. People need to let go of the idea that blockbusters are supposed to be good because for most of history, blockbusters have been mostly bad.

It's actually kind of miraculous that we had about eight years where it felt like most of the blockbusters coming out had a lot of quality control and, and had a little bit more to say than they were supposed to. But it's kind of like longing for the 70s autour era all over again.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:17:27

Half the movies were past is the past.

Jamie: 00:17:32

Yeah, people forget that the Poseidon Adventure came out like right before Star Wars. They were still making blockbusters before Spielberg and Lucas rediscovered them. They just weren't good.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:17:42

Totally.

Cody: 00:17:43

To change topics slightly here, I was kind of curious because I love the idea of defining the witch in terms of American versus European.

When you were going through doing research for this, did you find that you had to totally exclude European films while writing or was it a matter of I have to watch these just so I can define the American side of this but not fixate on the other half?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:18:07

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where there are witch like figures in almost every culture on Earth and They all look different and do different things.

So I always like to highlight the fact that witches are unique in the pantheon of horror movie monsters because a, they are the only predominantly feminine horror monster. Like, when you think about witches, you're usually thinking about women, which often comes with, like, this bioessentialist thing going on.

Because it's a medieval archetype. Right. So that's a whole can of worms. But at the same time, it's also an archetype based in a real history of femicide.

And so when you look at different cultures, you know, East Asian witches have a more ghost like history. They're also a little bit more vampiric. Eastern European witches have a very vampiric quality.

So if you think about movies like Valerie and her Week of Wonders, that's a witch movie, also a vampire movie. You know, like, you've got the. The Latin American witch, which has a completely different valence than the, you know, European.

The even Western European witch. Right. So it's like, in order to clarify these things, you have to get your cultural context in order. I reference several movies.

I cheat a little bit and reference a couple movies from Europe and one movie from Japan that I just absolutely adore. The reason I do those things when I do them is if they had some importance in the United States. Right.

It's a, you know, it's a cultural history, and cinema is a global art form. So I also talk about Black Sunday, the. The Baba film.

Cody: 00:19:44

Yeah, that movie, my personal favorite.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:19:46

That's so good.

But that movie was based on a Russian short story shot in Italy, dubbed in English and starred by actors from various countries, then imported here by aip. Right. So the international quality of these movies is important. Right. Like, Don't look now, which is another favorite.

Which movie of mine is American Actors in a British Film? You know, there was an Australian contingent, but the reason I really focused in on America was because I am a scholar of American history.

And I think there's something very particular with our nation's history of American witchcraft. Right.

Like, you can bring it back to the Salem witch trials and the way that American feminists in particular have deployed this archetype as a symbol of feminist resistance. So that history is both global in that it happens everywhere and specific in that its impacts and the shapes and forms it takes vary.

So I focus on America because it's what I know. I'm passionate about it. And I think this book for me was a little bit of a form of therapy. A little bit.

It was like, how did we get to this fucked up place we're in. Why. Why are the politics the way they are?

And what can the media that we make that presents us with our unconscious fears illuminate about that history?

Mike: 00:21:09

I think that's what I think.

Like that last point is what was so interesting to me about the book when I was reading it is whenever we look back on movie history and we to look at, oh, what was society going through at the time, blah, blah, blah, it's always in very broad strokes, it's usually pop culture. And then a little bit of, well, here's what's in the zeitgeist, you know, here. Well, Vietnam's happening, so obviously this influence.

Cody: 00:21:31

You know, it's always that Mike wants more Iran Contra. He just needs to know about it.

Mike: 00:21:35

But what we don't really focus on is like getting into the nitty gritty.

Like, because America, even more so than other countries, really utilizes its media, its movies specifically, even from early on, as propaganda to try to sway public consciousness.

And no one truly examines the contingent of movies that do exist, particularly from older periods, but even to modern day, that are made by people who are trying to reverse course on things negatively and occasionally, possibly, but more often than not just negatively, particularly from big studios or things that get big release, you start feeling the American complex infect movies starting at a certain point. And I've never really seen it viewed through specifically the witch film.

And how kind of hard of a turn every time it felt like, oh, no, we don't like that there's progress in any direction. Let's use a witch movie to try to get our point across about what we think reality should be.

Jamie: 00:22:43

That was like a canary in the coal mine. Like, oh, are things getting too progressive? Check and see if there's a witch movie out.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:22:48

Yeah, totally. Exactly. It's so, yeah, it's one of those things where that, that fascinates me too, right. Because it's not, it's not just conscious, right.

Where you have. I always come back to Reagan because he was so deliciously unsubtle with his, his movie nonsense, right.

But he, he watches War Games and that shapes his, his like, you know, global policy. And then he starts, he calls this thing Star wars, right? You have these, these figures who watch media and that informs them and vice versa.

But I also tried to highlight, in periods of transition, movies that weren't very successful but that were hyper commercial, like exploitation movies, I think can tell you more about what's going on in the culture and than anything else because what those people do is they identify a trend and then they make the movie without doing any research or thought based on what they think people want to see.

Jamie: 00:23:45

And that no sociologist has his finger on the pulse of America like Roger Corman did.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:23:50

Dude, Roger Corman was great at it. He was brilliant at doing it. And he pushed the needle right. With his. His psychedelic horror cycle.

Like, that was tremendous and a reflection on what was going on with Tim Leary and with Nixon's burgeoning war on drugs. And he was also just like a king for doing all of it. But. But those were overtly political movies.

And you know, am I saying that afraid from last year or this year or whenever the hell that was is a good film? No, but am I saying you could probably look at that movie and unpack a little bit of what's going on right now with our concerns around? I. Absolutely.

You know.

Cody: 00:24:27

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:24:28

One thing I've noticed that's been on my mind since reading the early chapters of your book is while this happens all around the world with their media cycles, it feels that America is the most hardcore about using genre to launder ideas into greater society.

Like first with pulp novels becoming movies that then go on to be influential, and now with this, the genre movies themselves going on to influence people. Like, and you get things like William Peter Blatty and Ira11 accidentally triggering the satanic panic because of their novels.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:25:08

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:25:09

It just, it feels like again, every country does this, but America makes it their bread and butter.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:25:15

Yeah. And the 60s and 7, like the. The mid-70s transitioning into the 80s are such an excellent case study for this. Right.

Because if you want like a formula for how these kinds of panics emerge, it's like, you know, resurgent social justice movements meets a renewed wave of evangelical Christianity equals big conservative backlash, equals paranoia. And then you get things like the satanic panic or QAnon, you know, and. And it just happens over and over again.

I think part of it is because we're such a diverse and polyglot enormous nation of immigrants that it leads to this. This mixing that our mass media is kind of a reflection of. It's a release valve for a lot of the tensions we have.

And because Hollywood is such a hegemonic force. Right. It's going to be more prominent here than in like a smaller country like, you know, England, where they're.

They're interesting because they're like less subtle with it. Right.

Where the video nasties scare is just a much more overt and direct and legal way of doing the same thing we did in the US where evangelical pastors were burning copies of the Exorcist and going on their TV channels to be like, this is porn. You know? So it's a combo of how diverse we are and our free speech protections and the history of our cinema means we have the space to.

To explore these fears in a. In a different way. I'd say this is all spitballing, but that's what. That's what that made me think.

Cody: 00:26:51

It was all confident enough to make me believe I'd put it down on paper. Oh, nuts. I was making that joke and I forgot the comment I had. This is what I get for trying to make jokes.

No, I think I was going to rewind a little bit to America as a backdrop for these stories, just because it feels to me like there is a trope in a lot of horror witch films where they're bifurcated in timeline. Like they always have a prologue setback in the Salem witch trials or some sort of fictional approximation of it.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:27:17

Yes.

Cody: 00:27:17

And it really feels like they're setting up the idea of this is America's original sin. And then we jump forward into the present day where that evil has been unleashed. Or maybe not even evil, depending on how the movie is set up.

This could be like a righteous vengeance or maybe a vengeance out of control. There's always.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:27:34

And it's so fun. Like, that's part of what makes these movies cathartic. Right.

Is like, you know, even the really terrible ones, like, there's some really bad 80s witch movies that use that trope, but it's super cathartic because it's. These movies often center women. They present you with the image of women being, you know, murdered for the crime of being too hot.

And then the woman in the present. Oh, yeah. There's a movie called the Devonsville Terror that I absolutely love on this. It's got a very checked out Donald Pleasence in it.

Jamie: 00:28:08

It's Donald Pleasance.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:28:10

Yeah. But it's a really cool one for that.

Jamie: 00:28:14

It's.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:28:14

It's very explicitly feminist. It kind of falls off at the end. But.

But yeah, in terms of that presenting, foregrounding the history of violence against women and then drawing that through to the present in the diegesis of the film, where it's like they start a new witch trial, like, witch hunt against these women who are single and have jobs.

Cody: 00:28:32

How dare they?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:28:34

Yeah, so. So, yeah, it's. It's cool. Not all of them do it, but they definitely center that history in one way. Or another.

And then you have other counter examples where it's like that history is presented as more fearful than tragic, and that. That also says a lot about the film's perspective and the fears we're exploring.

Jamie: 00:28:53

hat happened in Europe in the: 1600

But the fact that that happened over here too, like, we acknowledge it as terrible, and obviously that's. That really speaks to the heart of what's wrong with America and our puritanical roots.

But at the same time, isn't it kind of wicked that the Salem witch trials happened? Kind of like an identity crisis we have as a country?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:29:34

Yeah, totally. It's. I mean, we're such a comparatively young nation that I think we just take our. The specifics of our early history incredibly seriously in a.

In a pretty distinct way.

Jamie: 00:29:48

Right.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:29:48

And this is, like, built into the fabric. It's a counterpoint to the. One of the.

Many counterpoints to the kind of elementary school narrative around, like, the Puritans, and they came in and they rocked and they killed all the Native Americans and their wives because they didn't like them anymore, you know, so. So it's just one of those, you.

Jamie: 00:30:06

Know, the first Thanksgiving.

Cody: 00:30:07

Yeah.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:30:08

And that was the blood. Yeah.

Cody: 00:30:11

All right, now everyone draw your hand turkeys.

Jamie: 00:30:13

So.

Cody: 00:30:14

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Jamie: 00:30:15

No, you mentioned earlier about there being a lot of bad 80s witch movies in particular, and I was curious about that bit because you're right, witches didn't go away in Cinema in the 80s, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a single iconic witch from that decade. I'm curious if you have any perspective on why that would be, because it's not like those social issues weren't at the forefront during that decade.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:30:42

Yeah. That chapter, that part of the book was probably the most complex to write because it.

It centers around a paradox, which is if the Satanic panic is positing that in America, one of the major central problems is witchcraft, then why are there no witches in the movies? Where did they go? What. What does that say?

Jamie: 00:31:05

Into warlocks at the time, for some reason.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:31:07

I just wrote a paper about that, actually. Yeah. And I said that was because of the AIDS crisis, you know, so. Preview of. Of coming papers, I guess. But. But yeah, like the. The response. My.

The thing I was talking about there is like, the way backlash operates is to diffuse the power of the symbol by presenting it as cliched and tired. And, you know, like, feminists are.

Are not fun, and they're not sexy, and they're frumpy, grumpy women who, you know, don't want to, like, have a home life or a sex life. And witches are scary and sexy and hot, so you need to kind of downplay that in order to make that work. Whereas warlocks are. Are the opposite.

You know, they.

They come to the fore for a kind of inverse reason where, you know, you can talk about, like, the celluloid closet, right, where you've got this preponderance of comic buffoon homophobic stereotypes and horny, evil homophobic stereotypes that. That come together in the warlock to present, like, this danger to our young boys, Anita Bryant style. But.

But if you look slightly outside of the frame of horror proper, you will see several iconic witches in the 80s, specifically Elvira, Queen of my life, in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, who is a really great ambassador for, like, you know, sex, positivity, and counterculturalism in a decade bereft of both, because she's not scary, she's fun, she's reassuring to an audience that even your friendly neighborhood goth is friendly and comes in peace. And then on the other side, you have the witches of Eastwick, which. I love that movie.

That movie is deeply conservative, and nobody likes to talk about it because it's got the three coolest women of all time and Jack Nicholson, and it's really fun, but it's very conservative, and it's based on an even more conservative novel written to explicitly denigrate sexual liberation and tell women to go home.

Jamie: 00:33:07

So, you know, again, another piece of context about that book that was just lost by history. Yeah, I know. Sometimes books and movies are made for reasons.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:33:16

Dude, no. I read a piece when I was writing this book that called the novel the Witches of Eastwick. Something delicious.

It was like the ultimate misogynist screed of its era. And I'm like, okay, I wouldn't go that far, but it is really bad.

Jamie: 00:33:31

So I'm sorry. I adore Jack Nicholson, but the moment he walks onto set, your movie has become sexist. It's the law of the universe.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:33:39

They were like, oh, yeah, the guy from the Shining will be perfect.

Jamie: 00:33:41

Actually, you mentioned Elvira. I'm curious. Have you ever seen the pilot to the unmade Elvira sitcom from the 80s?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:33:51

Oh, my God, no.

Jamie: 00:33:52

Oh, my God. You can find it on YouTube right now. It's fascinating. It was made like 88, I think.

And it's just Sabrina the Teenage Witch with Elvira complete with a talking cat. But years before Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:34:07

That would have been better. Sabrina. I'm trying to remember that actress's name. She disavowed the show because she's an evangelical.

Jamie: 00:34:15

Oh, Melissa Joan Hart.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:34:16

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:34:17

Yeah. She makes pure flicks movies now.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:34:19

Yeah. Elvira would never. Because Andrew Peterson would simply not do that. She's great. I'll have to check that out.

Cody: 00:34:25

So when you were writing the book, how did you navigate kind of the blurry thresholds between like the folk horror sub genre and which specific films or did you not really have to worry about that since America doesn't necessarily make as many folk horror film?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:34:39

Yeah, it gets complicated where I feel like. And hopefully when people read this book, they'll share my curse. Right.

But it's like once you start thinking about this, you will never stop seeing witch movies. They're everywhere all the time. It's just a thing.

And so creating those delineations can be challenging because supernaturalism is just an American hobby. But there I watched over. I think I watched like somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 films for this book.

And every one of those films had a witch character, like an explicitly witch character. So I tried to keep it really within that realm right there. I mean, there are some where you could argue that it's not witches per se. Right.

Like someone told me that they didn't think that Midsommar counted when that's a neo pagan community. That to me is. It's explicitly practicing witchcraft. Right. So yeah, that's witches by another name.

But beyond that, there really aren't any other examples like that in the book.

And so, yeah, I mean, if you went outside the realm of there is a witch in the film, then you would be watching like a good 30% of American horror films.

Cody: 00:35:49

I mean, even if there is just a witch in the film, I feel like there's probably a lot of edge cases in there.

I mean, if you really wanted to be a stick in the mud, you could make a case that the Blair Witch Project, since it doesn't explicitly show a witch, couldn't be considered. This is devil's advocating here. I don't know if I would make that argument myself, but I could see someone making it who's pedantic like myself.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:36:08

Well, I actually didn't write about. I had a section on the Blair Witch Project and then I cut it because it wasn't. It didn't feel necessary.

Which might sound odd given its tremendous popularity and impact. Right.

Although it's interesting because that movie itself doesn't abide by any of the tropes, but they had a tie in TV special as one of their gimmicks.

Mike: 00:36:33

Yes.

Cody: 00:36:33

Yeah.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:36:34

And that movie. Yeah, it's so good. And it touches on basically the entirety of the meta history around witchcraft in America. Right. Where it's got the.

One of the talking heads is like a hippie dude who's talking about, like, you know, witch chicks in the whatever. So it's just kind of acknowledges that history in its broader landscape in a way that I think really proves a lot of my thesis.

I watched that and I was like, I knew it. But that didn't make the book either, because there was nothing to say beyond, look, it's what I already said.

Cody: 00:37:07

Yeah, that's got to be the hard part. There's, you know, thousands of movies out there. You can't include them all. Even if they are popular or one of your personal favorites.

It won't necessarily fit with everything else. You got to streamline parts of it.

Mike: 00:37:18

So I will bring up one thing about Blair Witch Project, the film proper. And arguably you could say that outside of Curse of the Blair Witch, there isn't really much quote unquote mythology that's in the film proper.

And as that universe got expanded, witch is just the term that's used for the entity that's there, that it kind of latched on to the Americanized concept of a witch and the fears the town had on someone who they accused being a witch.

But the interesting thing is, outside of that, the Blair Witch was inspired by another, an actual quote unquote Marilyn witch named Maldire, who I currently live near the Maldire Rock, which is the rock she was supposedly executed on. But here's the interesting thing.

Maldire may not have actually existed and essentially been a witch movie conjuring by the people of Maryland at the time to essentially spread what is a witch legend that's demonizes women and demonizes. Like, I think she was supposed to have come over from a ship, like, so she's a little bit of an.

Of an Other that immigrated here and like all this stuff. And it's possible maybe she was partially inspired by someone in a really Greek mythology sort of way, someone who was walking around.

But for the most part, it's likely most things about her completely made up at the time to essentially spread this story to create fear.

Cody: 00:38:48

So a Hansel and Gretel kind of Thing like, eh, here's a scary story. Stay straight and narrow.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:38:53

That's totally fascinating.

Cody: 00:38:54

So as we're kind of running short on time, let's just do one more question to kind of wrap things up here.

As you were going through doing all of your research, what are some of the witch films you think would be really helpful for people to watch maybe before reading the book or some you feel are maybe just underseen and folks really need to give a shot?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:39:12

Totally. I'm actually programming a series of witch films in the summer in New York with that premise.

But underseen movies that I'm really excited for people to dig into after reading this book. One of them is Herschel Gordon Lewis's Something weird.

It's a: 1967

It involves like, LSD and karate and there's an invisible sheep ghost that gets fought it slaps. Would recommend.

But in terms of like, actual impactful and meaningfully good movies, I would say above and beyond, I would absolutely recommend everyone check out George Romero's Season of the Witch. It's so amazing.

As both a feminist film and as just like an underseen gem from his filmography, he was responding to women's liberation and the like, the occult revival of the sixties in the same way that Stephen King was with Carrie. And it's. Yeah, it's a really cool text.

Beyond that, I think there are definitely films in here that if you haven't already seen them, like, you should like people who haven't seen practical magic, go watch practical magic and cry and eat popcorn. But yeah, I feel like once you start watching witch movies, they stay with you forever.

There's something very cathartic about this sub genre because usually it's women kicking ass and getting revenge. And who doesn't like that?

Cody: 00:40:41

I don't have anything better to say. That's a great way to tag the show. That should have been like a subtitle on the book. Mike, steal that for the title of the podcast. The description.

Good work. All right, well, I think we've taken enough time for today. Thank you so much for joining us.

For the audience at home, where is the best spot for them to purchase the book?

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:40:57

You can pick it up wherever books are sold. It's available for pre order on Barnes and Noble right now. You can follow me on Instagram and I post updates there.

So yeah, it'll probably be at your local bookstore. I'm excited.

Cody: 00:41:11

Awesome. Thank you so much everyone at home.

If you do not buy at least one copy of that very Fear of Feminism and the American Witch film, we're not friends anymore. It's that serious. So go out, get your pre orders in. Let us know what you think of it once you get a chance to check this out. I'm a huge fan.

I can't wait to read the rest.

Jamie: 00:41:26

Of it and stay friends with Cody.

Cody: 00:41:28

That's it. The only cudgel I have to wave at, folks. All right, well, I think that's going to do it for us. Thank you again so much for joining us.

We'll have to get you back sometime for like a commentary on like witching and bitching or something.

Payton McCarty-Simas: 00:41:40

Totally. This is a blast. Thank you.

Cody: 00:41:42

All right, folks, thank you for joining us. You can find more Box Office Pulp wherever we get your podcasts. We're on Spotify, itunes. Does itunes exist anymore?

I'm just saying that we're out there. Just look up Box Office Pulp. Anyways, thanks for listening. That's a wrap.