Witchcraft and the Uncanny Origins of Cinema

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of cinema as an art form and as a medium of communication offered new ways of transmitting old myths. The gothic figure of the witch offered a frisson of transgression that was ultimately contained on the big screen, especially in works considered to be unthreatening because of their playful nature. The power of transformation ascribed to witches was mirrored in the power of film itself, as demonstrated by cinema's origin story, the ‘lucky’ accident that took place as Méliès filmed on the Place de l’Opéra, in which men appeared to become women and a trolley turned into a hearse. This essay examines the gendered (and often transgendered) struggle for dominance in films depicting witches and magical transformation in the context of the Freudian uncanny in a number of early films, including several silent-era precursors to MGM's Wizard of Oz (Fleming 1939).