The interest in witchcraft among teenage girls in the 1990s, was reflected in such shows and movies as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Craft. Now it seems to have carried over to a new generation of youths, reports The Guardian (Oct. 26).
“In the young-adult section of bookshops, shelves that recently groaned under the weight of tales of tormented vampires and lovelorn werewolves, are now stuffed with stories of witchcraft and magic, from Ruth Warburton’s much-praised Winter Trilogy to Jessica Spotswood’s Cahill Witch Chronicles,” writes Sarah Hughes. The interest is even evident among the younger age set; last month the most recent in Jill Murphy’s long-running Worst Witch series was published, while “among the predictions for this Christmas’s bestselling toys are the Bratz spinoff, House of Witchez.”
For adults, next year will mark the climax of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, centering on the relationship between a vampire and an American witch.
The trend is clearly once again present on television with the FX channel’s American Horror Story featuring a tale of voodoo queens and teenage witches this season, while Lifetime is showing The Witches of East End, adapted from a novel by Melissa de la Cruz and featuring a family of spellcasters led by Julia Ormond. Vampire Diaries spinoff The Originals (on the Syfy channel) has a central storyline about witchcraft and in Universal’s Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane deals with feuding covens in present-day America.