Description: "Witches and witchcraft are potent metaphors for feminine power, with a history that predates the advent of cinema. They represent a particularly fraught, contested kind of gendered power, and have long inspired women filmmakers to explore themes of race, class, trauma, motherhood, grief, and identity. This book examines the relationship between women, witchcraft, and filmmaking, exploring types of storytelling and the central themes in these movies. Such films span the globe and have starred prominent figures like Madonna, Bette Midler, Bjèork, and Nicole Kidman, as well as lesser-known women behind the scenes. Some of these filmmakers have premiered their works at major film festivals, while others have produced content for television and video releases. While notable in their diversity, these movies share one crucial thing: they were all created by women in an industry broadly dominated by men."--
Brief description: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an award-winning Australian film critic, author and academic who has written eight books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with an emphasis on gender politics. She is a research fellow at RMIT University and an adjunct professor at Deakin University, both in Melbourne, Australia.
Review Quotes: "Untold stories are bittersweet propositions. They appeal to us as exciting, illuminating ventures, but they carry with them the weight of injustice, in having been denied the light for so long. If The Cinema Coven is a story long overdue to be told (spoiler: it is), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas makes the wait worthwhile. It's a compelling and epic history, delivered with deep knowledge, affection and passion by perhaps the only writer who could've done it justice. In many ways it feels like the book she was born to write, and we're all the richer for it."--Phil Nobile Jr., editor-in-chief, FANGORIA Magazine and executive producer, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror