Payton McCarty-Simas on Hunting the Witch in American Cinema
In their new book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, the film critic chases a powerful archetype across decades and genres
Interview by Lana Thorn Originally published July 2025 in Phantasmag Issue 003
Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) © Columbia Pictures
Perched on her broomstick, the witch has travelled every corner of American popular culture. Whether the subject of a harrowing horror film or a cheerful 60s sitcom, any given sorceress is a marker of the sociopolitical issues of her era. As Payton McCarty-Simas argues, she is an indispensable tool in understanding feminist movements across time.
In her first book, One Step Short of Crazy, the 26-year-old author (they/she) used the National Treasure franchise as a vehicle to examine American conspiracy culture. Now, ahead of the release of That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, McCarty-Simas calls us over Zoom from their home in New York City to discuss magical comfort movies, the psychology of WitchTok, and what it means to release their second book in Trump’s second term.
Phantasmag: I first wanted to know what initially drew you to horror. Were you a lifelong horror fan?
Payton McCarty-Simas: Absolutely. I have a spooky background: I grew up in Massachusetts, my parents got married in Salem, and I’m actually getting married in Salem this fall. I was a huge Scooby-Doo kid, and I read a ton of horror and science fiction. Also, I was so good at freaky campfire stories—I was always trying to make somebody cry with those. We had a TV, but it only had a VCR. My mom was pretty strict about only watching TV on the weekends. So it was just me and my Scooby-Doo tapes. Once I went to high school and had a laptop, I was able to expand my cinematic horizons. Since then, I’ve been watching as many scary movies as I can.
P: Speaking of Mystery Inc., we’re counting down the top 10 queerest Scooby-Doo films/episodes this issue.
PMS: Oh, fuck yeah. So #1, the Hex Girls…
P: They made the cut! After graduating from the Scooby tapes, what kind of horror did you start with?
PMS: I bet my first theatre experience was probably a Paranormal Activity movie with friends. Just one of those PG-13 jump scare types at the back end of the 2000s. I’ve always found it interesting that, growing up in the 2000s, horror was a deeply disreputable genre. It was something your friends or your brother in a band t-shirt would dare you to see, but no one took it seriously. Since so much time has passed now, we’ve been able to reappraise the horror of that period.
© Luna Press Publishing
P: In your book, you write that ‘the witch film proves itself an excellent sponge for cultural anxiety’ (14). How did you first come to this realisation?
PMS: The book was inspired by a pattern I started noticing when I was in college. I was watching these witch movies that not only had remarkably similar themes but remarkably similar and provocative closing images. I’ll let you read the book for details…
What drew me to the subject is that it’s a very coherent archetype, but it’s deeply flexible. Once you understand that, you can start looking into questions like ‘Why does she change when she does?’ and ‘What’s going on around her?’ We were just talking about the Hex Girls, and they call themselves Eco Goths, right? Well, The Craft had just come out with that punk aesthetic, and you had all of these little witch primers for teens. It was just in the air, at a moment when evangelical Christianity had had a couple of decades to build a base in the United States. The controversy surrounding Harry Potter was starting to brew [evangelical Christians suggested the depiction of witchcraft was dangerous to children]. I love pulling those threads together and being able to unpack history through its imagery. Our first access to a lot of history is often the media we consume—it’s the cartoons we watch on Sundays. And for most people, analysing that media is a much more fun way to talk about the past than sitting in history class.
I Married a Witch (1942) © United Artists
P: You write about how the ‘medieval construction of femininity as abject’ (6) was used to support the conversion of European societies to capitalism. Can you talk to me about the connection between capitalism and the witch throughout history?
PMS: The witch is interesting because she is the only predominantly female horror archetype. There are female vampires, there are female werewolves in films like Ginger Snaps. But when you think about witches, that’s a woman. Typically, a cisgender woman—and there’s a lot going on there in terms of the bioessentialism that comes from this medieval trope—but basically, the witch was used in medieval times as a yardstick for what women should not be. They should not be outspoken, they should not form a community with each other, and they should not be engaging in sexuality at too old an age, too young an age, or outside of wedlock. In terms of capitalism, ‘witches’, generally speaking, were healers in the community. Burgeoning capitalism and Catholicism were intertwined in a lot of countries, so one of the problems for that system was that these witches had the power to cure people outside of the Catholic Church. And they did not necessarily ask for money. The label of ‘witch’ was used as a way to demonise women with power who threatened both a Catholic and a capitalist framework. Accusations of witchcraft would take women’s property from them. Silvia Federici gets into all of this in Caliban and the Witch. It’s fascinating and tragic. So the ‘witch’ can be read as a byproduct of the disempowerment of women on a systemic level.
P: What was the research process like?
PMS: The research for this took years. I like to think of each chapter as a media survey—a look at the films of that period—but also as a capsule of political history in terms of feminism and a wider context. I try to paint a picture of what’s going on in the movies, what’s going on with women, and what’s going on in general in America. To do that work of consolidating so much cultural and political history, I read Variety, Rolling Stone, feminist zines and publications (like Red Stockings and Herstory), a lot of TIME in the 80s, a lot of Ms. magazine in the 90s, and hundreds of Playboy articles. If you want to talk about the history of feminism, you need to talk about the history of sex. And if you want to talk about sex in America, Playboy is a great bellwether to understand the mainstream consensus on sexuality. More broadly speaking, three of the books that form the theoretical basis of That Very Witch are Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and Jules Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft.
The Craft (1996) © Sony Pictures Releasing
P: What was your favourite period of witch film to research?
PMS: It’s gotta be the 60s and 70s—the rise and fall of the counterculture, which peaked in 1968 and petered out arguably by 1974. Those movies are bananas. Shit like Easy Rider, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, you know. It was New Hollywood: sexy, experimental, and people were trying things out. That’s the period when the X rating was a viable cinematic mode. And exploitation films still had some meaning. So high art, low art, capitalism, and the idea of art outside of capitalism were all blending and feeding off of each other.
The period I struggled with the most, because of quality and sheer volume, was the 1980s. VHS had exploded onto the marketplace, so there was a barrage of witch films straight to VHS. Most were quite bad. But, if you’re like me, and your tolerance for bad is quite high when there’s something interesting going on, then I can recommend some films: this super weird one called Necropolis is pretty cool, Wicked Stepmother is something if you’re looking for a trainwreck... But the 60s and 70s? Almost all bangers.
P: Do you have a comfort witch film?
PMS: I’ll usually go to one of three films. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark—rocks my socks, warm and fuzzy. She’s the baddest bitch ever, mother to us all, and a bisexual queen. Or Practical Magic, which is not a horror film, but draws so aggressively from the genre that I felt it was important to include. When I was writing that chapter, I would watch maybe five minutes of that movie, and I would literally be crying while typing. Or The Craft, but I would turn it off before the last 20 minutes. Let’s end when things are still normal. Because I maintain that Nancy Downs—a true witchy role model—did nothing wrong. Nancy Downs is innocent!