9 Pop Culture Icons With Big Witch Energy I'd Like to Celebrate This Halloween
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I mean no disrespect to Sabrina Spellman, but you already know she's a witch. The same goes for Willow Rosenberg, Samantha Stephens, Glinda the Good, and the Wicked Witch, to boot. But there are many less obvious and no less witchy individuals scattered throughout popular culture; icons who, when the weather turns crisp and we carve up gourds, we might miss the chance to honor for their Big Witch Energy.
And what is Big Witch Energy? It's powerful. Beautiful. Strange. It can be dark. It can be queer. It can be kind. For someone with BWE, it can carry them away, change their lives, or change the lives of others. BWE is transgressive and transformative, unboxable and undeniable. Because witches, beyond cauldrons and broomsticks, represent something joyfully, powerfully, and unrepentantly outside of the paradigm; something oppressive forces cannot understand or control, so of course they seek to hunt it out.
Today I seek not to hunt out but to celebrate. By the power of three thrice over, I present: a Big Witch Energy honor roll.
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Tim Curry
I considered highlighting Dr. Frank-N-Furter specifically, or Wadsworth the Butler, or his gleeful acid trip of a turn in The Worst Witch, but all this power is coming straight from the source — Tim Curry IS Big Witch Energy, personified.
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Mary Katherine Blackwood
The narrator of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the final novel published by Shirley Jackson — herself an absolute BWE queen — nails books to trees and buries silver to shield herself and her sister from the cruelties of the world. The world gets in anyway, but one has to wonder how much worse it would've been without Merricat's interventions. The film adaptation stars Taissa Farmiga as Merricat, which is oh so appropriate considering how many times she's played a witch on American Horror Story.
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Nate the Great's Rosamond
From Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great series of kids' books; Nate's neighbor, who "looks like she always looks: strange." Rosamond dresses in black, has the best fringe in children's lit, and keeps four black cats: Super Hex, Big Hex, Plain Hex, and Little Hex.
The Craft's Nancy Downs
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OK, you know Nancy, played by Fairuza Balk in seminal '90s teen film The Craft, is a witch. And Balk brings her own personal BWE to any role, not least as the most badass Dorothy ever to Return to Oz. But Balk as Nancy is the full package: brutally alive, transcendent, tragic. She's the girl you knew in high school, witch or no, who burned herself out.
Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey, who died in 2000, was an illustrator, cat-lover, and drawer of circular-headed humans in myriad scenes of genteel and obscure peril and depravity. With a few delicate lines of ink, he created creeping, adorable dread, which are mandatory viewing come Halloween. See also: Charles Addams.
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Janelle Monáe
It may be reductive to call what Janelle Monáe has Big Witch Energy. Her power — brimming with light and dark, creation and expression, soul and life — is a power for all times and seasons. She bends the world. See also: Solange Knowles, Prince, David Bowie.
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John Wick
They don't call him Baba Yaga for nothing. Marjorie Liu already wrote the definitive case for Keanu Reeves's boundary-busting appeal, but a list of BWE icons would be incomplete without his unwavering, unstoppable, and terminally professional puppy-avenging assassin.
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Alice in Wonderland's Alice
Yes, that Alice! An absolute outsider who refuses to be gaslit, calls out the insanity of the world around her, and is ultimately tried and found guilty for simply naming the objective ("you're nothing but a pack of cards!") truth? I can think of nothing witchier.
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Mary Poppins
Guys, she's a witch, and she always has been, hiding in plain sight behind the glorious glow of Julie Andrews and all the Disneyfied trappings of traditional feminine beauty and grace. But make no mistake: she's brimming with BWE, moving things with her mind, slipping between dimensions, and saving Mr. Banks from the patriarchal maw of capitalism.
Kate Racculia is the author of Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts: An Adventure, which is on bookshelves now.