It’s October 20th, the height of spooky season, and while Emily has us covered on the horror front with her 10 Weeks of Spooktober series, it’s important that we also acknowledge some of our less frightening faves. While witches certainly hold a place in the horror genre, a lot of this season’s lighter fare focuses on witches, and it only seems appropriate that I cover one of my all-time faves: Practical Magic. This weekend, I had the opportunity to revisit the 1998 classic on the big screen for the first time in many moons, and I’m pleased to report that this film holds up in all the right ways.
Why, then, is Practical Magic not a Halloween staple? Why are we not pulling this out every year the same way we pull out Hocus Pocus and The Craft? I don’t know, but I’m prepared to change that.
First thing’s first: Practical Magic has a critical consensus of just 21% on Rotten Tomatoes, and although I was barely alive in 1998, it seems to have been widely panned upon its release. However, the film’s audience score is at a respectable 73%, creating a disparity which can only mean one thing: THE CRITICS WERE WRONG.
Directed by Griffin Dunne and based on the book by Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic stars Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as Sally and Gillian Owens, two sisters descended from a long line of witches with cursed ancestry, romantically speaking. The film also stars Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing as Aunts Jet and Frances respectively, and even features a miniature Evan Rachel Wood as one of Sally’s daughters. So, yeah — this cast is stacked.
I want to focus on Bullock and Kidman, because they are a huge part of what makes this film such a joy to watch. Within a decade of this film’s release, both actresses would receive Best Actress at the Oscars (Bullock for The Blind Side and Kidman for The Hours), and watching Practical Magic, you can see their talent on full display. These women are known powerhouses, and together their chemistry is incendiary. In no world do Kidman and Bullock look like they’re related, but they create such a believable sisterhood through glances and touch alone that you could watch this movie on mute and still know exactly how much they love each other.
Plus — and I’m only going to say this once — Bullock and Kidman both look incredible in this film. Our society has reached a point, two decades out, where every single outfit in Practical Magic looks like it was ripped from the pages of an Urban Outfitters catalogue. Nicole Kidman has the exact same hairstyle she now sports in Big Little Lies, and Sandra Bullock’s messy pigtail braids are Pinterest as fuck. Oversized sweaters, velvet minidresses, MULTIPLE PAIRS OF TINY DARK SUNGLASSES? I could go on.
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Aunts Jet and Frances are also rocking outfits worthy of any Brooklyn bar on a Friday night in October, and Weist and Channing are delightful as this pair of older sisters who have fully embraced the witch lifestyle, the kind where you have a gigantic botanical room in your house, drink any random bottle of alcohol you might find on your porch, and eat chocolate cake for breakfast on the reg. AKA: my future lifestyle.
Aside from the performances and the fashion, another thing I really like about this movie is the way it centers on women. Yes, there is a love story here, but the film would work fine without it, because what this movie is really about is how this family of women relates across generations, and how ultimately women are at their most powerful when they can harness the strength they’re born with. Sally (Bullock) tries to deny her heritage and lead a “normal life” because she blames witchcraft for the tragedy she has endured, but by the end of the film she comes to embrace what makes her special, and even helps the small-minded people who’ve been judging her to find magic in themselves as well. As Aunt Jet says, “There’s a little witch in all of us.”
Do I sound corny? Maybe it’s because I just watched Practical Magic. I will admit that this film is quite saccharine, but like, who cares? Have you seen Hocus Pocus? When we decide which movies to rewatch during the holidays, a nuanced script is not usually on the list of requirements.
I can’t help but think that this movie gets less attention than other witchy films of the 90s because of the way it presents witchcraft not as something inherently bad, but as something beautiful and aspirational. The movie doesn’t try to say that witches can do no wrong or that practicing magic is never dangerous — but, much like in the practice of real-life witchcraft or Wicca, negative magic has negative consequences while positive magic enriches and inspires. Historically, witchcraft is directly tied to womanhood, and much of witchy pop culture casts the witch as the bad guy (or bad girl, as it were). Here, the witches are our protagonists, and their magic is a force for good. Could this be why Practical Magic is rarely talked about in the same way as other equally ridiculous Halloween movies?
In the years since Practical Magic, we’ve had a lot more pro-witch material, from later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to both iterations of Sabrina. Soon, we’ll have even more, as in August HBO Max announced their development of a new dramatic series: Rules of Magic, adapted from Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic prequel of the same name. The show will take place in the 1960s and center around Aunts Jet and Frances in their youth. Are you stoked? Because I’m stoked. And I’m hoping that this show’s existence will force more people to revisit Practical Magic so that it can take its proper seat at the table of Halloween canon.
