To the extent that folklore has any sort of a reliable taxonomy, I think “hag” is the word you’re looking for there.
They’re actually explicitly referred to as demons by the grandmother, although I can’t remember if this is meant literally or if it’s more a description of how evil they are. In folklore terms then “hag” probably is the most accurate term.
I just looked up some more info about the movie The Witches (which I don’t remember as clearly as the book), and it may not count for the purposes of this thread after all. The movie adds a character played by Jane Horrocks who’s an assistant to the Grand High Witch and winds up helping the hero in the end. I have zero recollection of this character, but it sounds like she was a witch who was capable of doing good and not a regular human who’d wound up working for a witch.
As long as we’re being nitpicky, I feel obliged to point out that this is a change that the moviemakers made to Baum’s book. In the book, Glinda is the Good Witch of the South, and Dorothy doesn’t encounter her until the end of the story. It’s the Good Witch of the North who greets Dorothy upon her arrival, and she is unaware of the power of the [del]ruby[/del] silver slippers.
As I understand it, the real-world witch hunts took place in a context where witches were considered evil by definition because they were (believed to be) in league with, and derived their power from, Satan (and used it to do things like curse people and animals and crops). It sounds like you want the kind of movie in which this is the reality.
Yeah, that’s the real-world explanation for Glinda’s odd behavior in the movie, but within the context of the movie it does seem a bit fishy.
IIRC then in the book the wicked witches are unrelated. The Wicked Witch of the West is thus a bit more sympathetic in the movie, since she had legitimate claim on the slippers and might understandably (if unfairly) have blamed Dorothy for her sister’s death.
As I said earlier, my memories of Horror Hotel were fuzzy, but I found some clips on YouTube, and I was right about one thing: it opens with a 17th century witch being burned at the stake. And the movie presents her as a genuinely evil witch who deserved it.
But for some reason, the burning didn’t take, and the witch Elizabeth Selwyn was still alive in the 1950s.
Not always innocent. In Roman times, witches were known as poisoners. Also, later of course some were fortune tellers and purveyors of bogus potions- also known to cast “curses” on others. Altho of course we know that those curses are useless, people were frightened of them in olden days and it seems on several cases those curses caused the death or the cursed one.
Even today fortunetellers and psychics are often scamsters, out to steal everything they can from the easily deluded.
Of course, today we’d think that hanging a scamster is too much, they hanged people for rather minor thefts back then.
If a thief gets hung for stealing, why not a con-artist /scamster for doing the same?
Certainly during some of the crazier times, people were accused of witchcraft that did none of these things. But some were guilty, even if “magic” doesnt work.
I am a little surprised The Seventh Son has not made the conversation.
Not all witches in the movie were evil, but the mindset of Gregory was all witches had to be destroyed.
Since this is being resurrected:
Häxan quite emphatically makes the case that witchhunting is a very bad thing. That “witches” were just mentally ill, or tortured, or both.
Glinda is also, in the movie, the only exception to magic == bad - the Wizard is a humbug, Ozma is never introduced, and Glinda (Good Witch of the South in the books) is combined with the Good Witch of the North.
On American Horror Story - ‘Coven’ - the witches had a conclave and determined that one of their own - the frizzy red-haired one, Frances McDormand? - deserved to be burned at the stake. So they did set her on fire, and she (a great fashionista) went out in a burst of flame screaming ‘Balenciaga!!!’ (matter of fact, in the last episode of AHS just last week, the witches torched three more of their own out in the desert). But I’m not sure if these were ‘good things’ or not.
Thats my fave line!
This was my thought too. Snow White and the Huntsman is just a re-imagining of the former, but it would count as well, I think.
The more I real the various qualifications of the premise, the more I agree that Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters fits the bill.
Evil witches seek only to destroy the social order and eat human babies. H & G kill them.
Gretel saves the good witch, declaring her non-witch, aka non-killable. She obviously has herbal healing knowledge, but that doesn’t make Hansel take back her immunity, and its a witch that kills the good witch – effectively also labeling her as witch-killable, aka a human or human sympathizer.
Heck, what do they call the guy who brews up porcine insulin for Hansel to inject? That guys gotta be so outside contemporary science that he looks magical. But they don’t try to kill him.
I think Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters does count, sort of.
At the beginning of the movie, Hansel and Gretel are hunting and killing any and all witches they can find, and this is depicted as noble and heroic work. Through the course of the movie, though, they discover that not all witches are evil. Some are witches are “white” witches that help people. In fact, they discover that their own mother was a white witch, so they are half-witch, and Gretel inherited some of her mother’s powers. (Witches in this world apparently are some sort of near-human, mostly immortal race. Or something. It’s not very clear). “Black” witches apparently are inherently and irredeemably evil, so hunting and killing them is still noble and heroic - Hansel and Gretel just learn to be careful to make sure the witches they are hunting are actually “black” witches.
Suspiria (1977) is a horror movie about an evil coven of witches in a dance academy.
Here’s the ending scene (contains spoilers, horror, violence)