Based on notions of feminist ethics and magical feminism, we illustrate the initiation into witchcraft as a shift to a new morality for the teenage protagonists of the films The Witch (2017), by Robert Eggers, and Gretel & Hansel (2020), by Oz Perkins. These folk horrors subvert the character of the witch of the woods by giving her a coming-of-age background story, all the while keeping some key-elements from traditional fairy tales. We suggest that the leading girls undergo a moral transformation: in becoming witches, they cease their roles as caregivers, abandoning a care-oriented ethics that was imposed on them and embracing a new hedonistic, egotistical one.
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Costa et al. (2024) studied this question.
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