Horror Movie Marathon of the Day: Witchcraft

Every weekday until the end of October, CraveOnline will present an all-new Horror Movie Marathon to help you avoid showing the same old movies at your Halloween parties. Keep coming back every day for new schedules and party ideas!

Let’s Be Witching

Witches are a prominent part of the popular culture, and not just because everyone loves pointy hats. There’s no shortage of witch movies in a variety of genres – horror, comedies, documentaries and adolescent power fantasies – and there’s something to love about a lot of them. So it makes sense to organize a whole Halloween horror movie marathon around them, right?

Well, yes, but you’ve got to keep in mind the cardinal rule…

Rule #1: Be Respectful

Witchcraft comes with an awful lot of cultural baggage, and you will want to take that into account. Some people have very staunch religious beliefs and don’t believe that witchcraft is a matter to be taken lightly. So you may want to be careful about inviting them to a party that celebrates the iconography and cultural impact of witchcraft in the popular culture.

Then again, a lot of people equate witchcraft to the systematic persecution of people whose religious beliefs don’t fit in a traditionally Judeo-Christian paradigm. You don’t want to look like you’re making light of historical tragedies that befell people in Salem, in the Spanish Inquisition, and beyond. So watch your mouth and remember that witches in movies can be fun, but in reality people given that label have had a very hard time finding acceptance in patriarchal and religious parts of the world (read: most parts of the world).

Some movies about witchcraft are serious indictments of persecution, and may throw a pall over your evening. (Then again, a little education ever hurt anybody, just be aware of the impact certain films can have on your audience.) Many others are empowerment fantasies about finding confidence and power within an individual or smaller, outsider communities.

And most – not all, but most – are about the conflict between women and men throughout the history of the world. When women attain positions of power or self-actualization, they are often labeled as being dangerous by… well, jerks. Some films dramatize this conflict from the male perspective and treat witches as scary monsters (often with no small amount of irony), while others side with the witches and portray everyone else as ignorant mobs with torches and pitchforks. Some of them try to find a balance between those two approaches, to various effects.

The important thing is to be aware of the films you are showing and think ahead about what kind of conversations and interactions they could inspire with your guests in a social setting, particularly if booze (and/or other substances) are around. It’s entirely possible to have a great evening with films about witchcraft, just make sure you’re not pushing anyone’s buttons on purpose or mixing groups of people who might have wholly different reactions to the same stimuli. 

You want people to have a good time, and hopefully even have some productive conversations about history and sexism. Be careful who you invite and what you show them. Once you’ve done a little planning ahead (we’ll help you out with the movies), you should be free to have a grand old time.

Related: Horror Movie Marathon of the Day: Zombies

Get Your Apartment/House Ready

Filling the house with candles is a nice touch. If any of your friends are palm readers, comfortable with a Tarot deck or know their way around a Ouija board, that can make a good pastime too. 

Foodwise, you may want to get some plastic (or better yet, real) cauldrons with snacks. That’s a harmless enough visual image. Candy apples are a fun way to evoke Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs without getting into sticky conversations about all the backwards Disney themes of fantasy marriages or outmoded good/bad female archetypes.

Although there are some films about male witches (some bother calling them “warlocks,” some don’t), you may want to stick to a female empowerment theme for your party soundtrack. Invest in Riot grrrl bands like L7, Pussy Riot and Bikini Kill. You’ll be glad you did. Or, failing that, putting on the soundtrack to The Craft should be perfectly satisfactory too.

Get The Right Movies

You can find a lot of decent, sometimes even great horror movies on Instant Streaming. Then again, so can everyone else. If you’re hosting a horror movie marathon, your guests expect you to show them something they haven’t seen before along with a handful of classic standbys.

So go to your local video store – the odds are good it still has a better selection than Netflix – or, if there aren’t any left in your neighborhood (such a shame), track them down online. Most of the movies we’re recommending are great movies that are either so popular they’re pretty cheap by now, or so obscure they are probably priced low since the demand isn’t high. But obscure movies can be the best surprises, and trust us, we’re about to recommend a ton of them.

Related: Horror Movie Marathon of the Day: Ghosts

Put a Schedule Together

The film critics at CraveOnline have a tried-and-true formula for movie marathons. You start with a “Duh” movie (a popular film everyone has seen), partially to get it out of the way and partially because there’s a good chance some of your guests will arrive late and you don’t want them to miss the good stuff. 

Then you get everyone’s attention with the “Unknown Classic,” a film that none of your guests have (probably) seen, so even someone who goes home early will feel like they got something special out of the evening.

Follow that up with some “Background Noise,” i.e. a film that won’t necessarily capture everyone’s attention. That’ll play in the background while everyone socializes. But you’ve got to make sure it has enough good parts that people don’t take their eyes off the TV for too long and forget why they came.

Now the time has come for a “Jumpstarter,” a really lively, crazy film that’ll grab everyone’s attention again. You’ll follow that up with something even weirder, the “Oddball,” to reward the folks who are still going. This will be the strangest film of the evening, maybe a genre-bender or the work of a mad genius, and it will be a great capper for the masses who will probably call it an evening afterwards.

And now that the evening is coming to an end, you’ll want to throw in something stupid. A real “Stinker.” Take the edge off the night’s festivities by talking back to the screen or falling asleep to a film that doesn’t really deserve your attention. It’s the perfect way to end an evening of otherwise great movies.

Then again, you may want to just pick films from one of those categories to test your endurance. How many classics can you get through in one night? How many unsung classics can you discover? How can one weird-ass film top the next? We have multiple suggestions in every category to get you through the night, if that’s the way you want to play it. 

Just remember: don’t overextend yourself. Six movies is probably the maximum number that anyone can handle. Don’t feel bad if people leave early. Just make sure the folks who stay get something special for their trouble. 

Let’s Plan Your Witch Movie Marathon!

William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.