Bell, Book and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television by Heather Greene (review)

As scholars of new religions should be abundantly aware, many of the movements they study arose under the direct influence of images and ideas promulgated through popular culture and mass media. Among the best known new religious movements that cropped up in Western countries during the twentieth century were those whose practitioners called themselves witches—Wiccans, Satanists, Luciferians, and the like. To better understand the socio-cultural milieu in which these groups arose, and the subsequent impact they had on Western society, we would do well to pay attention to the way in which witches and witchcraft have been depicted in popular culture.

In Bell, Book and Camera, Heather Greene—a writer and journalist who edits The Wild Hunt Pagan news website—delves into the depictions of witches and witchcraft in U.S. film and television. This is achieved through a chronological approach that brings the reader from the closing years of the nineteenth century up through 2016, at each point contextualizing the productions within the wider environment of the entertainment media industry. As part of this, Greene repeatedly makes reference to the Wiccan and LaVeyan Satanist movements and to the impact that they have exerted on various televisual and cinematic portrayals of witchcraft.

Chapter 1 deals with the period between 1896 and 1919, focusing on early silent films that incorporated witches into their narratives. In the second chapter, Greene discusses nineteen films made between 1919 and 1939, including two of the most important films in American cinematic history: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Chapter 3 takes a look at the period between 1939 and 1950, when nationalistic concerns had a major impact on American cinema and witches were increasingly depicted in a naturalistic, as opposed to fantasy, framework.

From there, the book examines the period between 1951 and 1967, when television began to grow in popularity and witches became central to widely viewed shows like Bewitched. Chapter 5 deals with the years 1968 to 1982, when the older censorship system was abolished, allowing horror cinema to make fresh, and often more explicit, use of witchcraft iconography. In the sixth chapter, Greene discusses the years between 1983 and 1999, when the Satanic Panic created a new impetus behind the notion of the threatening witch but in which more positive portrayals could also blossom, particularly those in The Craft, Charmed, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The penultimate chapter covers the years 2000 to 2016, in which, Greene notes, there has been an increasing focus on the idea of the witch as a victim.

Although it could have done with a firmer editorial hand to catch various copyediting issues, Bell, Book and Camera is eminently readable and nicely illustrated with black-and-white stills. The book's coverage is broad although there is certainly room for expansion. In most places it gives greater attention to film than television; a series like Charmed is accorded less than a page while some other influential television series, such as The X-Files (which uses witchcraft as a major plot theme in four episodes), are left unmentioned. These minor drawbacks notwithstanding, this is a work that will appeal to any scholar of Wicca or modern Satanism. Greene's book makes it very clear that we need more work in this vein; a similar volume looking at witches in European television and cinema would, for instance, be very welcome.