Movies about Witches: Essential Films
This watch list captures the breadth and cultural significance of witch cinema across decades. We've included foundational classics like The Wizard of Oz, influential horror milestones such as Suspiria and The Blair Witch Project, cultural phenomena like Hocus Pocus and The Craft, and modern folk horror achievements including The Witch and Hagazussa.
From atmospheric slow-burns to campy cult favorites, from witch hunters to powerful covens, these films represent the diverse ways cinema has explored witchcraft. The list encompasses Italian giallo horror, teen supernatural drama, romantic comedies with magical elements, and harrowing period pieces that examine historical persecution.
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The Wizard of Oz
Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives. The Wicked Witch of the West is the only thing that could stop them.

Black Sunday
A vengeful witch, Asa Vajda, and her fiendish servant, Igor Jauvitch, return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch's beautiful look-alike descendant: Katia. Only a handsome doctor with the help of family members stand in her way.

Rosemary's Baby
A young couple, Rosemary and Guy, moves into an infamous New York apartment building, known by frightening legends and mysterious events, with the purpose of starting a family.

Witchfinder General
England, 1645. The cruel civil war between Royalists and Parliamentarians that is ravaging the country causes an era of chaos and legal arbitrariness that allows unscrupulous men to profit by exploiting the absurd superstitions of the peasants; like Matthew Hopkins, a monster disguised as a man who wanders from town to town offering his services as a witch hunter.

Suspiria
An American newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a front for something sinister amid a series of grisly murders.

The Witches of Eastwick
Three single women in a picturesque Rhode Island village have their wishes granted - at a cost - when a mysterious and flamboyant man arrives in their lives.

Spellbinder
After leaving work one night, Los Angeles attorney Jeff Mills and his colleague rescue a young, beautiful woman from an abusive boyfriend. Jeff soon becomes romantically involved with her and embroiled in the web of intrigue that follows her, despite a string of ominous happenstances and repeated warnings from his secretary.

The Witches
A young boy named Luke and his grandmother go on vacation only to discover their hotel is hosting an international witch convention, where the Grand High Witch is unveiling her master plan to turn all children into mice. Will Luke fall victim to the witches' plot before he can stop them?

Hocus Pocus
After 300 years of slumber, three sister witches are accidentally resurrected in Salem on Halloween night, and it is up to three kids and their newfound feline friend to put an end to the witches' reign of terror once and for all.

The Craft
A Catholic school newcomer falls in with a clique of teen witches who wield their powers against all who dare to cross them -- be they teachers, rivals or meddlesome parents.

Practical Magic
Sally and Gillian Owens, born into a magical family, have mostly avoided witchcraft themselves. But when Gillian's vicious boyfriend, Jimmy Angelov, dies unexpectedly, the Owens sisters give themselves a crash course in hard magic. With policeman Gary Hallet growing suspicious, the girls struggle to resurrect Angelov -- and unwittingly inject his corpse with an evil spirit that threatens to end their family line.

The Blair Witch Project
In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.

Sleepy Hollow
Skeptical young detective Ichabod Crane gets transferred to the hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where he is tasked with investigating the decapitations of three people – murders the townsfolk attribute to a legendary specter, The Headless Horseman.

The Covenant
Four young men who belong to a supernatural legacy are forced to battle a fifth power long thought to have died out. Another great force they must contend with is the jealousy and suspicion that threatens to tear them apart.

Stardust
In a countryside town bordering on a magical land, a young man makes a promise to his beloved that he'll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm. His journey takes him into a world beyond his wildest dreams and reveals his true identity.

Sennentuntschi: Curse of the Alps
1975, Swiss Alps: In a remote mountain village, a beautiful and mysterious woman shows up. Only the village policeman takes care of the strange woman and tries to find out who she is. There are hints that she came from the Höhenalp Alp, where herdsmen do unthinkable things to get the company of women. Many dark truths are revealed that should better have remained hidden. A tragedy of lust, insanity and murder is brought to a seemlingly pure and perfect world. It is the beginning of a nightmare of religious insanity, hypocrisy, abuse and belief in demons, who destroys a young family and brings a whole village to destruction.

Season of the Witch
A 14th century Crusader returns with his comrade to a homeland devastated by the Black Plague. The Church commands the two knights to transport a witch to a remote abbey, where monks will perform a ritual in hopes of ending the pestilence.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
After getting a taste for blood as children, Hansel and Gretel have become the ultimate vigilantes, hell-bent on retribution. Now, unbeknownst to them, Hansel and Gretel have become the hunted, and must face an evil far greater than witches... their past.

Into the Woods
In a woods filled with magic and fairy tale characters, a baker and his wife set out to end the curse put on them by their neighbor, a spiteful witch.

The Last Witch Hunter
The modern world holds many secrets, but by far the most astounding is that witches still live among us; vicious supernatural creatures intent on unleashing the Black Death upon the world and putting an end to the human race once and for all. Armies of witch hunters have battled this unnatural enemy for centuries, including Kaulder, a valiant warrior who many years ago slayed the all-powerful Witch Queen, decimating her followers in the process. In the moments right before her death, the Queen cursed Kaulder with immortality, forever separating him from his beloved wife and daughter. Today, Kaulder is the last living hunter who has spent his immortal life tracking down rogue witches, all the while yearning for his long-lost family.

The Witch
In 1630, a farmer relocates his family to a remote plot of land on the edge of a forest where strange, unsettling things happen. With suspicion and paranoia mounting, each family member's faith, loyalty and love are tested in shocking ways.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe
Father and son coroners receive a mysterious unidentified corpse with no apparent cause of death. As they attempt to examine the "Jane Doe," they discover increasingly bizarre clues that hold the key to her terrifying secrets.

Pyewacket
A frustrated, angry teenage girl awakens something in the woods when she naively performs an occult ritual to invoke a witch to kill her mother.

Hagazussa
In the 15th century, a young goatherd living alone in a mountain hut feels a dark presence in the woods.

Suspiria
A darkness swirls at the center of a world-renowned dance company, one that will engulf the artistic director, an ambitious young dancer, and a grieving psychotherapist. Some will succumb to the nightmare. Others will finally wake up.

The Witch in the Window
When Simon brings his twelve year-old son, Finn, to rural Vermont to help flip an old farmhouse, they encounter the malicious spirit of Lydia, a previous owner. And now with every repair they make – she's getting stronger.

The Wretched
A rebellious teenage boy, struggling with his parents' imminent divorce, encounters a terrifying evil after his next-door neighbor becomes possessed by an ancient witch that feasts on children.

Gretel & Hansel
A long time ago in a distant fairy tale countryside, a young girl leads her little brother into a dark wood in desperate search of food and work, only to stumble upon a nexus of terrifying evil.

You Won't Be Alone
In an isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia, a young feral witch accidentally kills a peasant. She assumes the peasant's shape to see what life is like in her skin, igniting a deep seated curiosity to experience life inside the bodies of others.
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