Directed by Nicolas Roeg • 1990 • United States
Starring Anjelica Huston, Mai Zetterling, Jasen Fisher

Nicolas Roeg brought Roald Dahl’s deliciously dark children’s story to the screen with its wit, imagination, and sinister undercurrents fully intact. Anjelica Huston delivers a fabulously camp ...

Directed by Tibor Takács • 1996 • United States
Starring Melissa Joan Hart, Sherry Miller, Charlene Fernetz

Before the beloved sitcom that shaped a generation, there was this bewitching Sabrina movie, based on the Archie comic book series of the same name. Melissa Joan Hart stepped into her best...

Directed by Roman Polanski • 1968 • United States
Starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon

Horrifying and darkly comic, ROSEMARY’S BABY was Roman Polanski’s Hollywood debut. This wildly entertaining nightmare, faithfully adapted from Ira Levin’s best seller, stars a revelatory Mia Farro...

Directed by Nicholas Hytner • 1996 • United States
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Joan Allen

Adapted by Arthur Miller from his own acclaimed play, this searing drama of persecution and betrayal—often read as an allegory for the McCarthy trials of the 1950s, but possessed of an evergree...

Directed by Anna Biller • 2016 • United States
Starring Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell

Elaine, a beautiful young witch, is determined to find a man to love her. In her gothic Victorian apartment she makes spells and potions, and then picks up men and seduces them. However, her sp...

Directed by Mauro Bolognini, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi, and Luchino Visconti • 1967 • Italy, France
Starring Silvana Mangano, Annie Girardot, Massimo Girotti

Five of Italy’s greatest directors contributed segments—each starring the divine Silvana Mangano—to this offbeat...

Directed by Dario Argento • 1977 • Italy
Starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci

One of cinema’s most potent hallucinogens, Dario Argento’s witchy freak-out is a sustained spectacle of outrageously stylized violence and eye-popping art direction. When doe-eyed American ballerina S...

Directed by Mario Bava • 1960 • Italy
Starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi

Italian maestro Mario Bava left his first indelible mark on horror cinema with this gothically stylized tale of witchcraft and revenge, loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s oft-adapted short story “Viy.” I...

Directed by Brunello Rondi • 1963 • Italy
Starring Daliah Lavi, Frank Wolff, Dario Dolci

For his second film as a director, famed screenwriter and Fellini collaborator Brunello Rondi (LA DOLCE VITA, 8½) created this shocking and deeply unsettling folk horror nightmare that would influence a wave...

Directed by Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov • 1967 • Soviet Union
Starring Leonid Kuravlyov, Natalya Varley, Vadim Zakharchenko

In nineteenth-century Ukraine, a seminary student (Leonid Kuravlyov) is forced to spend three nights with the corpse of a beautiful young witch (Natalya Varley...

Directed by Ian Coughlan • 1981 • Australia
Starring Joanne Samuel, Bunney Brooke, Lou Brown

Something like an Australian answer to ROSEMARY’S BABY, this satanic-panic shocker remains one of the most chilling—and criminally underseen—Ozploitation outings of the 1980s. When a Ouija board séance w...

Directed by Václav Vorlíček • 1972 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Petra Černocká, Jan Hrušínský, Jan Kraus

In this charming Czechoslovak fantasy, irrepressible teenage witch Saxana (Petra Černocká)—facing three hundred years of detention at her sorcery academy—casts a spell that transports her to the...

Directed by Benjamin Christensen • 1922 • Denmark

Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen's legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-o...

Directed by Faith Hubley • 1999 • United States

Faith Hubley’s abstract animation documents the persecution of women as witches throughout history.