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Witches Who Bewitch and Beguile — According to Men
On “Practical Magic” and other Hollywood witches
Most people consider Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel Practical Magic as nothing more than the basis for the popular movie starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. In the film, sisters Sally and Gillian suffer from an ancestral curse which kills any man who falls in love with them. The curse has been sent upon their lineage by their ancestor Maria Owens who was abandoned by her lover and banished from the village on accounts of witchcraft. In order to find love, Sally and Gillian need to break Maria’s spell.
Interestingly, this generational curse is absent from the novel, and yet it became the driving force of the movie written and directed entirely by — yes, you guessed it — men. Who else would think up a storyline in which the female protagonists’ sole purpose is to… get a man?
Gillian: “Honey, I need your pocketknife. My blood, your blood, our blood.”[1]
To understand whether Alice Hoffman, the author of the original story, has done a better job portraying female characters than the four men — three scriptwriters and a director — behind Practical Magic, or whether she herself fell victim to sexism, we must first look at the “witch genre” in Hollywood.
