In the last lap toward year’s end, critics, journalists, and awards season pundits might find themselves in squabbles over the classification of Elizabeth Sankey’s startling new movie, Witches. Is it a documentary, or a “visual essay”? A film about horror films, or a horror film unto itself? An autobiography, or a series of mini-biographies? The simplest way to resolve disputes like these is to take Sankey’s work as a personalized chronicle of oppressive patriarchal fearmongering through centuries; it’s about her own experience with postpartum anxiety, which she relates to both the historical record and to popular culture. “Documentary” doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Sankey wouldn’t mind if viewers described it that way, of course. But Witches is a looser project than the term suggests, connecting the stories of women like Daksha Emson to movies in the range of The Witchfinder General and Black Sunday, and then connecting those to atrocities committed during England’s witch trials. The result, one part memoir, one part exercise in film criticism, and one part testimonial to the sad reality that little has changed for women in either popular culture or modern medicine, is wholly unique; Sankey lets cinema speak with her rather than for her, cutting together clips from witch movies and movies about women under duress while she narrates, pausing her speech to interview with women who struggled with their postpartum mental health as she did.
There’s an informal daring to the marriage between each of the subjects comprising the film’s scope. Witches plays almost casually; Sankey presents her arguments not so much as matters of fact but as matters of individual truth. Taking her movie as scholarly would be a mistake. Ultimately, it’s about sensations and sympathy.
Ahead of Witches’ premiere Nov. 22 on the streaming service MUBI, we chatted with Sankey about the self-described “mad thing” she has made from pieces of movie history, world history, and her own history.
In your narration, you talk about how you found out about the women murdered in the witch trials just a few months after first viewing The Wizard of Oz. That feels like a very foundational moment for you. It’s no wonder that there’s this connection that you make between popular culture and actual, real-life history. It feels like that’s the root of it for you.
Yeah, I think so. It was quite a palatable way, as well, to talk about that, and to talk about that connection that I had found, and also it’s interesting because in America, the witch trials are very different to the European witch trials. You have Salem, and that was obviously horrific, but that’s what is mostly depicted in Western cinema, whereas the European witch trials went on for a very long time, and at least 50,000 women were killed. So that itself is quite interesting, I think.
Wow. That’s a huge number.
And also in cinema, it just, there are so many things that are repeated again and again and again, these tropes that come back up, and you think, “Wow, yeah, this is something that is actually quite prescriptive in terms of how we believe, as a society, women should behave, how mothers should behave.” So yeah, it was all linked to The Wizard of Oz and the good witch and the bad witch, but God bless L. Frank Baum. He did not mean for that to be the case. He was trying to do something really positive, but oh well.
You don’t really have control over how someone receives or how culture receives your art. People just will take it and run with it whichever direction.
But Glinda was based on his mother-in-law - do you know about this?
I do not know!
She was this amazing proto sort of feminist, a suffragette, who was one of the first people to talk about the women in the witch trials, and say that they were just ordinary women. [Baum] loved her so much. So he based the character of Glinda on her. But at the same time, unwittingly, as I say, he created this thing of, “There’s a good woman and there’s a bad woman, and the bad woman is ugly, and the good woman is beautiful, and soft, and maternal.”
And he doesn’t really have the capacity to stand up and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re getting the wrong message!”
It’s a bit late now.
That’s very moving, even if the end result is the representation you get into in the film. In my head, I divided the film into two distinct, but intrinsically related, components: The component focused on popular culture, and the component focused on how the healthcare industry treats mothers. I don’t get the sense that one of those things has more influence on you, or is a higher priority for you, than the other. Are they one and the same?
It kind of all feeds in together. I think it’s funny as well, even with these illnesses, these types of illnesses, they are hormonal, but they’re also based on societal expectations. They come from trauma that you might have had, mental health illnesses that you might have had, whether they were diagnosed or undiagnosed—childhood trauma, your relationship to your own parents. All of these different things come into play. But then as well, I think for me, it was all exacerbated and heightened by the feeling that I was supposed to be a certain way as a mother, as a woman, and that if I didn’t conform to that, then there was something wrong with me; I wasn’t fit, I shouldn’t have been doing this.
So yeah, all of that stuff worked together in a sort of horrible ballet. It all links up, for me. You’re right, there’s not one specific thing that was more powerful, in terms of my illness.
I feel that dynamic at play in the selection of movies referenced in the visual essay. Some aren’t witch movies, or are not traditionally witch movies. It feels like the idea is to erase the boundary between films that are about witches, that represent and reflect those cultural perceptions about, and expectations of, women’s behavior, and films like The Babadook. That isn’t a witch film, but it is directly about those expectations. Is that intentional?
I think you’re right. The use of the archive reflects my own journey through working out what the film was, and what I wanted the film to be, and it starts off with that quite naive thing of how I felt, which was, “Maybe I would’ve been a witch! That seems quite appealing to me, so I’ll just watch loads of witch films.” Then, gradually, I could start to see links, as you say, between something like The Witch and The Babadook, because in both of those, you have women, mothers, who are mentally unstable, who are going through something, who are maybe not being the most compassionate figures that we expect mothers to be to their children, and you also have women living on the outskirts of society. It reached a point where all bets were off for me, and I thought, “If I can find something that is representative of my experience or the experience of the other women in the film, then I’m gonna go for it.”
That makes sense.
I remember there was one point where one of my producers said, “We have a lot of Girl, Interrupted.” [Laughs.] But what was so interesting for me as well was that you have films like The Snake Pit, which is from 1948, which is about a woman in a psychiatric ward, and it’s like nothing has changed! The depiction, actually, of psychiatric wards in cinema is very, very good. They do it really well. Psychiatric wards have always been the way that they are, and that, to me, felt like a very valuable thing to talk about, too, in this film.
But it’s not a super tight thesis or analysis, for me. It’s very much just, “That felt right.” This was a film made by a mad woman. Don’t be mistaken on that. I was still very much in recovery.
Well, but that makes sense. To me, this is a documentary, it’s a visual essay, but it’s still art. So the fact that there’s a little messiness to it is necessary. You’re not a social worker; you’re a documentarian!
Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t even necessarily call this a documentary. It’s really actually just me, and the other women in the film, and David Emson in the film, trying to convey what it feels like to have an experience like this, because we didn’t have anything like that when we were going through our illnesses, and it would’ve been helpful. So I wouldn’t even say that it’s a documentary, and I definitely wouldn’t say that it’s rigorous in terms of sticking to any sort of rules. To me it’s a weird, mad thing that I made.
But a weird mad thing that’s, disappointingly, timely and relevant. I was wondering what kind of conversation we would have, based on how [the U.S. ] election went; that aside, mental health treatment of new mothers, of women in general, [hasn’t] shifted much. The story hasn’t changed. At the same time, I don’t know how much pop culture representation has changed, either. Do you feel like there’s been meaningful change in the last few years in terms of either cultural or social perception?
It’s really hard to say. I watched Agatha All Along the other day, and I thought, “This is great, this is interesting.” But it’s still tying in this thing where a woman is a mother and the reason that she is evil is because of her child. I think we always have to find excuses for why women should be badly behaved. It’s very difficult, I think, for women to just say, “No, I’m just mad. I’m just mad, and I don’t want to engage with the society that has been set up around me, and I reject the patriarchal structure, and it doesn’t fit with me.”
I think the witch comes back up whenever we’re in peril. She becomes much more popular, and much more potent, as a sign of rebellion for women. But also I think what’s happening in your country is terrible for men, too. Patriarchy isn’t great for men, either.
Yuuup.
It does feel like there’s a regression, looking at America from the outside. But it’s so complex and complicated. It does feel like since the film has come out, the responses, at least from America, have been much more charged. On the one hand, I feel like it’s something that is helpful as a way of talking about the feelings that people are having, that men and women are having. But also I think it’s this depressing sense, as you say, that, “Oh, wow, nothing has changed.” We are still living in a very puritanical society. We are still living in a world where women’s bodies are controlled and there is a need, for some reason, there is an immense feeling that we must control women’s bodies, and that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
It’s common and correct to describe America as a country built on slavery, but it was built on patriarchal oppression and control over women’s bodies, and behavior, too. It’s baked into the American experience.
Yeah, and you don’t have the same protections. In the U.K., we have the Infanticide Act, which means that if a woman hurts her child after a year of giving birth, or it might even be two years now, she’s given more lenient sentencing and there’s a lot more sympathy. Whereas you have Lindsay Clancy, who killed her children in 2023 and is currently on trial for murder.
There was an amazing New Yorker piece about her husband, and it’s kind of like, “Well, we think that she might have had postpartum psychosis, but we just don’t know!” I was reading it and I was thinking to myself, “Oh, I cannot believe that you’re putting a woman on trial for murder after Andrea Yates in 2001!” I love America. I grew up wanting to be American, and watching American films. I wanted to live there. But I think that actually that puritanical, very white, very oppressive way of seeing the world and the way that we should all function within the world has fed back into policy, and has fed back into racism, and sexism, and all this stuff.
I live in tony New England, which is more liberal than other parts of the country, and it’s still like that; go to parts of New Hampshire and you’ll see Confederate flags hanging outside of people’s houses. It’s wild. But I have to hope that there’s a moment where those things start to fade and change. I look at movies like Witches, and think, “This could change people’s minds.” That’s a lot to put on a piece of art, so I’m curious if you feel like popular culture can wake people up to the realities of what these patriarchal policies and beliefs do to people and what they do to society?
Absolutely. I think that for me, just from a personal perspective, watching these witch films, I was taking them not in the context that they were supposed to be taken. I was watching films like The Witch and thinking, “God, I wanna be like The Bad Witch in that,” or The Witches of Eastwick, and thinking, “Yes, that’s the kind of mother I wanna be.” You know, we already have the ability to see past the intent sometimes of culture and to take from it what works for us and leave what doesn’t. But from what I can see with the film that has been so lovely, has been people sharing it, if it connects with them.
We always said we wanted it to be like a spell book people would share if it resonated with them, and it would spread like a kind of grassroots activism. Because that’s what I’m all about, and that’s what the group that I was in, Motherly Love, that support group, is about—people making community. I think especially when you feel so let down, maybe by the people in power, that reaching out in community can be such a salve, and can be so helpful, and that’s what I want the film to do. I want it to save lives.
The statistics in the U.K. and in the U.S. are absolutely horrific in terms of these illnesses, so the idea that this could be something that would be a resource for people is so helpful. And yeah, sure, I would love it if it changed people’s minds in terms of how they saw women in society and mothers in society, but I don’t know if it’s quite got the power to do that. There’s so much going on. But yeah, that’s what I really want the film to do.
