Lessons of the Fantastical: Fantasy Vs. Horror Witches (Black Maria & Macbeth)

Witches play a hybrid role in film and literature. They're somewhere in between horror and fantasy. Witches are generally fantasy characters but can play a role in any genre, they often appear in horror stories and sometimes in SciFi. Comparing and contrasting horror and fantasy witches can help us decide what type of characteristics to play with when creating our own witch characters. To get a sense of what witches are like, let's use the witches in Black Maria and in Macbeth as a base model to create our own witch characters.

In Black Maria, witches play the protagonist and the villain. Aunt Maria, the antagonist, has stereotypical characteristics of a witch. She is an old, magical, and powerful woman who is the matriarch of Cranbury. We can add and subtract from these few traits to suit whatever role we want our witches to play. Do you want your character to be a protagonist, villain, secondary character, or any other type of character? Say we want to make a witch character and we are using Aunt Maria as our base. Let's make her a protagonist instead of a villain. We would probably take away the fact that she is old and evil. The character we would have then is very close to the actual protagonist in Black Maria, Mig, a young girl who unknowingly wields incredibly powerful magic. In fantasy, witches are diverse, we can add almost anything we want as long as we stick to the character being female and magical. You can make witches based on elements that use different types of magic etcetera. Let's take Aunt Maria again and add on to her already existing characteristics. Say we want to go the other direction with aunt Maria's characteristics and make her even more evil and powerful, a monster instead of just a powerful woman. We could over exaggerate her cruel characteristics and make her ancient, but then we would be heading into the horror genre and away from fantasy.

In  Macbeth, the witches play oracles and arbiters. The three weird sisters are practically the first witches ever to be depicted in literature. Macbeth is considered a tragedy, but has many elements of gothic horror. We can’t for sure say the three weird sisters are evil but they do contribute to the demise of Macbeth and Banquo. They’re a good base for developing horror based witches because they are not really villains or protagonists. In horror, we can start by exaggerating the seemingly evil aspects of witches. Let's add age and cruelty to the three weird sisters. The sisters would be incredibly ancient and we could actually have them physically harm Banquo and Macbeth each time they met. We could give them primal features or ghostly characteristics. If we went the primal route, we could add teeth and claws like a predator. If we went the ghostly route, we could add ethereal bodies or the ability to appear and disappear wherever. The whole goal of the horror witch is to feed on our primal instincts to survive, (like in The Blair Witch Project), add anything you think would do the job. 

Remember witches are mainly fantasy characters but can be bridged into any genre. We just have to add or subtract the appropriate features depending on which genre we choose. Have fun creating!