Season of the Witch
The Witch Who Was Guilty After All: On Season of the Witch(2011)
There is a particular kind of cultural artifact that arrives stillborn—films that vanish from the conversation almost as soon as they appear, leaving behind only a vague residue of Nicolas Cage and bad CGI. Season of the Witch is one of these. It made its money back, mostly overseas, was dismissed by every serious reviewer, and now exists primarily as a streaming algorithm's suggestion for insomniacs. To dwell on it might seem perverse. But the disposable films are often the most useful, precisely because nobody bothered to flatter them with thought. They reveal what the culture takes for granted.
What Season of the Witch takes for granted is, in the end, the entire ideological apparatus of the witch hunt.
The film opens with a gesture toward historical conscience. Three women are hanged and then drowned as witches on the orders of a corrupt priest, who returns that night to fish their bodies from the river for a ritual—only to be strung up from the bridge with his own rope when one of them wakes as a demon. The sequence wants us to know that the filmmakers are aware: yes, the witch trials were ugly business, yes, the Church was venal, yes, innocent women died. This is the entry fee for a medieval horror film made after the second wave of feminism made the witch a feminist icon. We pay it and move on. But the work this prologue performs is not historical reckoning—it is inoculation. By staging a brief, perfunctory acknowledgment of injustice—and, crucially, by having the executed woman return as something genuinely monstrous—the film clears space for the central narrative, in which a young woman accused of witchcraft turns out to actually be possessed by a demon, and the men who hunt her turn out, against all the genre's apparent skepticism, to have been correct.
This reversal is not incidental. It is the whole machine.
Anyone working in the tradition that reread the European witch hunts as a chapter in the violent founding of capitalism—rather than as a regrettable spasm of premodern superstition—will recognize what Season of the Witch is doing, because it is the same thing the witch hunts themselves did. The historical witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not eruptions of medieval credulity (they happened, notably, on the doorstep of modernity, alongside the rise of the scientific method and the enclosures of common land). They were instruments. They disciplined a peasantry resisting expropriation. They destroyed networks of female knowledge—midwifery, contraception, herbal medicine—that gave women a measure of autonomy over reproduction. They transformed the female body into what the capitalist order required: a machine for producing workers, owned by husband and state.
The film knows none of this consciously, but it reproduces the structure with eerie fidelity. Notice its setting: plague Europe, the demographic catastrophe that historians have linked to the wage gains of surviving peasants and the panic of elites confronted with labor scarcity. Notice its protagonists: Crusader knights, disillusioned, returning from holy war to a homeland in ruins. Notice the girl, played by Claire Foy with deliberate ambiguity—she could be victim, she could be threat, the film teases the question. And notice the resolution: she is the threat. The plague is her doing, or rather the demon's doing through her, and the only solution is to transport her body to a remote monastery and destroy her with a ritual contained in an ancient book.
What this narrative offers its audience is the relief of a closed circuit. The plague has a cause; the cause is a woman's body; the cause can be eliminated. Set this beside the historical record—in which the plague had no human cause but was nonetheless blamed on women, Jews, lepers, and the poor, with mass killings to follow—and the film begins to look less like a fantasy than like a wish. It is the witch hunt redeemed. It is the demonological worldview not refuted but vindicated, with the female body once again identified as the site through which evil enters the social body and from which it must be expelled.
One could argue this is just genre convention—horror films need monsters, and an actual demon makes for a better climax than ambiguity. But genre is never just genre. The choice to set this story in the historical period of the witch hunts, to invoke the iconography of the witch trial, to cast the accused as a soft-spoken young woman whose innocence we are invited to consider, and then to reveal that the inquisitors were correct after all—this is not a neutral decision. It is the staging of a counterhistory in which the executed women had it coming. It is, in its small way, a contribution to the long project of forgetting what was done and why.
The figure of the witch has been recovered, over the last several decades, as a symbol of feminist refusal: the healer, the midwife, the woman who refused enclosure, the wild woman the Church could not absorb. This recovery has its own pitfalls (the commodified Etsy witch is another problem for another essay), but it represents a real attempt to read the past against the grain of its victors. Season of the Witch is a small countermovement against this recovery. It returns the witch to her medieval function: the alibi for what is done to her. It says, in effect, but what if some of them really were witches?—a question that, however idly posed, reopens the door that took four centuries to close.
What makes the film finally so dispiriting is not that it is reactionary—plenty of films are reactionary, often more interestingly so—but that it is reactionary without conviction. It has no theology, no real interest in evil, no curiosity about the period it ransacks for set dressing. It uses the witch because the witch is available, a figure cheap enough that you can pick her up at any cultural pawnshop. The unpaid labor of centuries of dead women props up the third act. The bodies stacked in the historical record become atmosphere. And the audience leaves the theater, if anyone is still in the theater, having absorbed without resistance the oldest story the culture knows how to tell: that something has gone wrong, and a woman's body is the reason, and the men with the book and the sword will set it right.
It is worth remembering, as the credits roll, that this is not a story about the past.
There is a particular kind of cultural artifact that arrives stillborn—films that vanish from the conversation almost as soon as they appear, leaving behind only a vague residue of Nicolas Cage and bad CGI. Season of the Witch is one of these. It made its money back, mostly overseas, was dismissed by every serious reviewer, and now exists primarily as a streaming algorithm's suggestion for insomniacs. To dwell on it might seem perverse. But the disposable films are often the most useful, precisely because nobody bothered to flatter them with thought. They reveal what the culture takes for granted.
What Season of the Witch takes for granted is, in the end, the entire ideological apparatus of the witch hunt.
The film opens with a gesture toward historical conscience. Three women are hanged and then drowned as witches on the orders of a corrupt priest, who returns that night to fish their bodies from the river for a ritual—only to be strung up from the bridge with his own rope when one of them wakes as a demon. The sequence wants us to know that the filmmakers are aware: yes, the witch trials were ugly business, yes, the Church was venal, yes, innocent women died. This is the entry fee for a medieval horror film made after the second wave of feminism made the witch a feminist icon. We pay it and move on. But the work this prologue performs is not historical reckoning—it is inoculation. By staging a brief, perfunctory acknowledgment of injustice—and, crucially, by having the executed woman return as something genuinely monstrous—the film clears space for the central narrative, in which a young woman accused of witchcraft turns out to actually be possessed by a demon, and the men who hunt her turn out, against all the genre's apparent skepticism, to have been correct.
This reversal is not incidental. It is the whole machine.
Anyone working in the tradition that reread the European witch hunts as a chapter in the violent founding of capitalism—rather than as a regrettable spasm of premodern superstition—will recognize what Season of the Witch is doing, because it is the same thing the witch hunts themselves did. The historical witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not eruptions of medieval credulity (they happened, notably, on the doorstep of modernity, alongside the rise of the scientific method and the enclosures of common land). They were instruments. They disciplined a peasantry resisting expropriation. They destroyed networks of female knowledge—midwifery, contraception, herbal medicine—that gave women a measure of autonomy over reproduction. They transformed the female body into what the capitalist order required: a machine for producing workers, owned by husband and state.
The film knows none of this consciously, but it reproduces the structure with eerie fidelity. Notice its setting: plague Europe, the demographic catastrophe that historians have linked to the wage gains of surviving peasants and the panic of elites confronted with labor scarcity. Notice its protagonists: Crusader knights, disillusioned, returning from holy war to a homeland in ruins. Notice the girl, played by Claire Foy with deliberate ambiguity—she could be victim, she could be threat, the film teases the question. And notice the resolution: she is the threat. The plague is her doing, or rather the demon's doing through her, and the only solution is to transport her body to a remote monastery and destroy her with a ritual contained in an ancient book.
What this narrative offers its audience is the relief of a closed circuit. The plague has a cause; the cause is a woman's body; the cause can be eliminated. Set this beside the historical record—in which the plague had no human cause but was nonetheless blamed on women, Jews, lepers, and the poor, with mass killings to follow—and the film begins to look less like a fantasy than like a wish. It is the witch hunt redeemed. It is the demonological worldview not refuted but vindicated, with the female body once again identified as the site through which evil enters the social body and from which it must be expelled.
One could argue this is just genre convention—horror films need monsters, and an actual demon makes for a better climax than ambiguity. But genre is never just genre. The choice to set this story in the historical period of the witch hunts, to invoke the iconography of the witch trial, to cast the accused as a soft-spoken young woman whose innocence we are invited to consider, and then to reveal that the inquisitors were correct after all—this is not a neutral decision. It is the staging of a counterhistory in which the executed women had it coming. It is, in its small way, a contribution to the long project of forgetting what was done and why.
The figure of the witch has been recovered, over the last several decades, as a symbol of feminist refusal: the healer, the midwife, the woman who refused enclosure, the wild woman the Church could not absorb. This recovery has its own pitfalls (the commodified Etsy witch is another problem for another essay), but it represents a real attempt to read the past against the grain of its victors. Season of the Witch is a small countermovement against this recovery. It returns the witch to her medieval function: the alibi for what is done to her. It says, in effect, but what if some of them really were witches?—a question that, however idly posed, reopens the door that took four centuries to close.
What makes the film finally so dispiriting is not that it is reactionary—plenty of films are reactionary, often more interestingly so—but that it is reactionary without conviction. It has no theology, no real interest in evil, no curiosity about the period it ransacks for set dressing. It uses the witch because the witch is available, a figure cheap enough that you can pick her up at any cultural pawnshop. The unpaid labor of centuries of dead women props up the third act. The bodies stacked in the historical record become atmosphere. And the audience leaves the theater, if anyone is still in the theater, having absorbed without resistance the oldest story the culture knows how to tell: that something has gone wrong, and a woman's body is the reason, and the men with the book and the sword will set it right.
It is worth remembering, as the credits roll, that this is not a story about the past.
Mini Review: Nicolas Cage's Season of the Witch (2011) seems disposable, but forgotten films reveal what culture takes for granted. Beneath its cheap CGI lies the exact ideology of the historical witch hunts. Rather than confronting the violent scapegoating of real women, it uses plague-torn Europe to frame a woman's body as the potential root of societal ruin. It undoes feminist history to reaffirm an old reflex: when the world breaks, suspect a woman, and trust men with swords to fix it.