#witchcraft

#witchcraft

At age 12 I finally watched the film and it felt like it was made for me. I recognised and appreciated, unlike its critics, the hodgepodge. It is not so much a chick flick with magic as a genre chimera: romance, gothic melodrama, small-town satire, ghost story and feminist parable. I grew up in Hong Kong during the 1990s, a city defined by its complex history with traditions shaped by diverse communities and displaced refugees like my Beijing-born father.

A book about witches casts a spell, and arguments about whether blue-green algae should be called blue-green bacteria, in this week's pick from the Nature archive.

Wicked seems to have cast a spell of attraction on audiences, from the 1995 bestselling novel to the Tony-nominated Broadway musical to the wildly popular movie adaptation, which opened its first installment as one of last year's biggest blockbusters. The second part, Wicked: For Good is widely expected to work similar magic when it opens this weekend. But what do actual self-identified witches think of Wicked?

After a tragic loss, college dropout Emily (Zola Grimmer) is desperate for some distance in , the sophomore feature from 22-year-old writer-director Avalon Fast. While her father (Michael Tan) is patient and supportive, the comfort of returning home only seems to make Emily regress into a volatile depression. On a lark of sorts, he suggests that she apply to work as a counselor at a summer camp deep in the Canadian wilderness.

In October, we costume up for Halloween, once a sacred day, Samhain, celebrated by the ancient Celts to mark the end of summer and the harvest season. The boundary between the living and the dead was thought to grow thin at this time. Celebrants then dressed in costumes as a disguise to confuse the spirits of the dead, who were said to return to the living. Later, the Catholic Church absorbed some of the ideas of the pagan ritual, transforming it into All Saints' Day to honor its saints.

She taught me from a very young age that life is a party and no matter what happens, we have to have fun and move forward, and so I think this book was inspired by that.

The evolution of witch depictions mirrors societal shifts, reflecting changing anxieties and aspirations about gender and women's power across time.