Hollywood Can’t Agree on What a Witch Is. These 8 Movies Prove It.
High school spells, Puritan paranoia, brooding 2000s heartthrobs, and supernatural action all belong in the same coven inside Tubi’s Witch, Please collection.
Pop culture has never been able to agree on what a witch looks like. Sometimes they’re a teenager who discovers magic could solve approximately 87% of their high school problems. Sometimes they’re lurking somewhere beyond a Puritan farm and making an entire family's week considerably worse. Sometimes “witch” means supernatural experiment, action hero, or something paranormal investigators aren't entirely sure how to explain. And sometimes, weirdly enough, they’re Sebastian Stan.
Clearly, the spellbook has gone through revisions.
Every generation seems to take the familiar ingredients of magic, power, fear, desire, and curses and decide the rules could use a rewrite. Even the Owens family has been part of that evolution, mixing witchcraft with sisterhood, romance, and family history across generations, something we've been revisiting in our Practical Magic 2 witch watchlist. Tubi's Witch, Please collection stretches the spellbook even further, and these eight picks show just how creatively filmmakers have interpreted what being a witch can mean.
Teen Witch (1989)
What if witchcraft were the ultimate teenage wish fulfillment? Louise Miller isn't trying to summon an ancient demon. She would mostly like high school to stop being terrible.
When Robin Lively's awkward teenager discovers she's descended from witches in Teen Witch, magic becomes a shortcut to everything adolescence has convinced her she's missing: popularity, confidence, attention, and the boy she's been crushing on. Suddenly witchcraft isn't something terrifying hiding in the woods. It's practically the supernatural version of a makeover montage.
Teen Witch takes powers that older stories treated as dangerous and asks what an '80s teenager would actually do with them. The answer is, unsurprisingly, make her social life significantly more complicated. The camp is committed, the fashion knows exactly what decade it belongs to, and the whole thing proves being able to cast spells doesn't necessarily make surviving high school any easier.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996)
By the '90s, pop culture was increasingly ready to let witches stop terrifying everybody and start worrying about homework.
Melissa Joan Hart's Sabrina Sawyer discovers her magical abilities while navigating school, romance, family, and the fairly major adjustment of realizing normal teenage rules no longer entirely apply in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Magic is playful here. It's something to experiment with, make mistakes with, and occasionally use when the nonmagical solution sounds significantly less convenient.
That lighter approach helped make the teenage witch feel approachable rather than threatening. Instead of asking whether Sabrina should be feared, the movie lets you wonder what you would've done with magic at 16, and please be honest about how irresponsible the answer probably is.
The Covenant (2006)
The mid-2000s supernatural boom looked at centuries of witch imagery and asked a important question: but what if Chace Crawford was there?
Four young men descended from powerful New England families inherit supernatural abilities in The Covenant, with Steven Strait, Taylor Kitsch, Chace Crawford, and Toby Hemingway playing the magically gifted Sons of Ipswich. Then Sebastian Stan enters the equation, and the already-questionable relationship between teenagers and unlimited power gets considerably worse.
Putting witchcraft into the hands of young men changes the familiar dynamic immediately. Power becomes tied to inheritance, rivalry, temptation, and the extremely 2006 combination of supernatural mythology and brooding YA energy. Is it subtle? That's not really the assignment. Is watching several future stars dramatically weaponize ancestral magic against each other an excellent time capsule of its era? Duh.
The Witch (2015)
After decades of increasingly fun, romantic, and glamorous pop-culture witches, Robert Eggers went in basically the opposite direction.
The Witch drops Anya Taylor-Joy's Thomasin and her deeply religious family onto an isolated farm in 1630s New England, where misfortune, suspicion, and fear begin eating away at them from the inside. Instead of turning witchcraft into a collection of flashy powers, Eggers builds the horror around what these characters believe a witch represents and what that fear can make people do to one another.
The result is slow, unnerving, and considerably less interested in giving you a cute spellbook than making the woods outside your house seem suspicious. Taylor-Joy's breakout performance keeps Thomasin at the center as paranoia closes in around her, while one particular goat quietly works toward becoming a horror icon. We've gone even deeper into why The Witch remains so deliciously chilling, if Black Phillip hasn't already convinced you to press play.
The Love Witch (2016)
At first glance, The Love Witch looks like somebody discovered a perfectly preserved Technicolor movie from decades ago. That's entirely the point.
Writer-director Anna Biller surrounds Samantha Robinson's Elaine with saturated colors, elaborate costumes, vintage glamour, and all the potions and romantic rituals a committed love witch could need. Elaine is determined to find the kind of all-consuming romance she's imagined, but her spells have a habit of working in ways that make “true love” look increasingly dangerous.
Biller uses the visual fantasy of the glamorous screen witch to poke at desire, femininity, and the expectations wrapped around romance. The movie looks deliciously retro while being far stranger and sharper than the aesthetic initially lets on. Come for the eye candy; actually, scratch that. The visuals lure you in. Elaine's increasingly disastrous love life makes leaving much harder.
The Witch: Subversion (2018)
No cauldron. No broomstick. Very different problem.
South Korean thriller The Witch: Subversion follows Ja-yoon, a seemingly ordinary teenager whose appearance on a televised competition attracts people connected to a past she can't fully remember. What begins like a mystery gradually starts revealing something much bigger about who Ja-yoon is and what she's capable of.
Magic and folklore give way to science fiction, conspiracy, extraordinary abilities, and action, with Kim Da-mi anchoring the transformation as Ja-yoon becomes increasingly difficult to underestimate. It's an especially good pick for someone who hears “witch movie” and assumes they already know the formula. You do not know this formula.
And once you've seen what Ja-yoon can do, Tubi also has The Witch 2: The Other One ready to keep the mythology moving.
The Unbinding (2023)
After watching fictional witches change for decades, The Unbinding asks a slightly more uncomfortable question: what happens when the people onscreen believe the strange thing they're encountering might actually be real?
The documentary follows paranormal investigators Greg and Dana Newkirk after an unusual object discovered in the Catskills becomes connected to increasingly unsettling experiences and local folklore. Instead of actors interpreting witch mythology, the movie moves into paranormal investigation, belief, ritual, and the ways old stories can continue shaping how people understand something they can't easily explain.
From watching Hollywood reinvent witches again and again, suddenly you're sitting with people trying to decide what belongs to folklore and what they believe happened to them. Fictional spellbook closed. Things just got a little weirder.
Hansel & Gretel's Halloween (2026)
So what does a witch look like now? Short answer: we're still rewriting them.
Hansel & Gretel's Halloween takes one of the oldest witch stories in popular culture and sends it through a contemporary horror lens, proving that even after centuries of retellings, filmmakers aren't finished finding new ways into the woods. The familiar fairy-tale DNA gives you something recognizable to grab onto before the movie starts reshaping it for a modern spooky-season audience.
All in all, the witch has been a teenage fantasy, a high-school problem solver, inherited male power, historical nightmare, romantic obsession, action protagonist, and paranormal question mark, and they’re still changing.
The spellbook remains very much open.