HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen

Why does the witch look the way she does?

From pointed hats and bubbling cauldrons to teenage witches, wicked queens, seductive sorceresses and women who refuse to behave, HEXPOSITION explores how witchcraft has been represented across film and television — and the history, folklore and real-world beliefs hiding behind what we see on screen.

Hosted by Millie Hardy-Ashton, a lifelong fantasy obsessive, practising witch and researcher, each episode takes a familiar piece of witchy pop culture and looks a little closer. Where did the stereotype come from? What does it borrow from real witchcraft? What did filmmakers change? And what can the witch on screen tell us about the culture that created her?

Expect film and television history, folklore, paganism, witchcraft, feminism, fandom and plenty of pop-culture rabbit holes — from The Wizard of Oz and Bewitched to The Craft, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Harry Potter, Wicked and beyond.

And keep an ear out. Every episode leaves something hiding in plain sight…

Episode 1 - You Say Witch Like It's a Bad Thing

Welcome to HEXPOSITION — where witchcraft meets the screen.

In our first episode, we begin with the witch herself: the figure who has been feared, persecuted, romanticised, sexualised, sanitised and reinvented for generations.

From folklore and historical witch trials to pointed hats, bubbling cauldrons and the witches of modern film and television, we explore where our image of the witch actually came from — and why she continues to change with us.

Hosted by Millie Hardy-Ashton, a lifelong fantasy obsessive and practising witch, HEXPOSITION looks beyond what we see on screen to uncover the history, symbolism and real-world beliefs hiding underneath.

Because sometimes, the most interesting part of the story is the thing hiding in plain sight.

🎙️ HEXPOSITION — Episode One: You Say Witch Like It's a Bad Thing

🎵 Theme music: “Huldufolk (Hidden Folk)” by Jamie Sims.

🐾 A Familiar Footsteps Production.

Episode 2 - Making a Pig's Dinner of the witch

Before the pointed hat, the broomstick and the bubbling cauldron, there was Circe.

In Episode Two of HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen, Millie Hardy-Ashton travels back almost three thousand years to Homer’s Odyssey to meet one of Western literature’s foundational magical women — and asks how generations of storytellers and filmmakers have transformed her into the witch we recognise today.

From Silvana Mangano’s seductive Circe in Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (1954), through Bernadette Peters in Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Odyssey (1997), to Samantha Morton’s unsettling interpretation in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026), we explore how Circe has evolved from goddess and enchantress to screen witch.

Along the way, there’s a rather wonderful Samantha Morton/Fantastic Beasts connection, a trip to ancient Greece for Fact, Fiction or Folklore?, and a Hidden Hex buried beneath three thousand years of stories about dangerous magical women.

Why do we remember Circe for turning men into pigs? When did a goddess become a witch? And perhaps most importantly...what happens when a powerful woman doesn’t need permission?

⚠️ Spoiler warning: This episode contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026).

🎙️ Created and presented by Millie Hardy-Ashton
🎵 Theme: Huldufolk (Hidden Folk) by Jamie Sims
🐈 A Familiar Footsteps Production

#HEXPOSITION #Circe #TheOdyssey #Witches #FilmPodcast

Episode 3 - When Witches Make their mark

What if the smallest mark on your body could be used as proof that you were a witch?

In Episode Three of HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen, we delve into the disturbing history of the witch’s mark and Devil’s mark — and the texts, beliefs and persecutions that helped turn ordinary bodies into supposed evidence of witchcraft.

From the Malleus Maleficarum and historical witch-hunting to Benjamin Christensen’s extraordinary Häxan and the visual language of films such as The Witch, we explore how ideas about identifying the witch became embedded in cultural imagination — and how their traces can still be found on screen today.

What was historical reality? What became folklore? And what has film and television inherited from centuries-old attempts to make the supposedly invisible witch visible?

And, as always, there’s a Hidden Hex waiting to be uncovered… 👀

🎙️ HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen
Episode Three: When Witches Make Their Mark

🎵 Theme: “Huldufolk (Hidden Folk)” by Jamie Sims
🐾 A Familiar Footsteps Production.

#HEXPOSITION #WitchesOnScreen #WitchHistory #Witchcraft #Haxan

Episode 4 - What's the Point?

Ask someone to draw a witch and there’s a good chance one thing will appear before almost anything else: the pointed hat.

But why?

In Episode Four of HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen, we’re putting one of the most recognisable pieces of witch iconography under the microscope. From the complicated theories surrounding its historical origins to the moment the pointed hat became visual shorthand for witch in popular culture, we’re asking how a piece of clothing became inseparable from the witch herself.

Then we head to Oz, where the Wicked Witch helped cement the silhouette on screen — and into Wicked, where Elphaba’s hat becomes something much more personal: an object intended to humiliate her that she deliberately claims as her own.

So, is there really a historical witch hiding underneath that hat?

✨ Fact? Fiction? Or Folklore? ✨

And, as always, there’s a Hidden Hex waiting somewhere in the episode… 👀

🎙️ Episode Four: What’s the Point?
🎧 HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen

🎵 Theme: “Huldufolk (Hidden Folk)” by Jamie Sims
🐾 A Familiar Footsteps Production

Love and light x

#HEXPOSITION #WitchesOnScreen #Witchcraft #WitchHistory #Wicked

Episode 5 - It's not easy being green

Why are witches green?

It seems completely natural to us now. Draw a witch, add a pointed hat, perhaps a broomstick — and there’s a very good chance you’ll reach for the green. But witches weren’t always green, so where did that association come from?

In Episode Five of HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen, we follow the colour green through cinema history, from Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West and the spectacle of Technicolor to Disney’s extraordinary visual language of villainy and magic. We explore how generations of filmmakers taught audiences to read colour, why poisonous and supernatural greens became so effective on screen, and how that visual shorthand continues in everything from Disney animation to the green light of Avada Kedavra in Harry Potter.

Along the way, we’re talking colour theory, historical pigments, poison, envy, illness, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Wish, Wicked and, of course, Elphaba — the witch who turned green skin from a marker of wickedness into something audiences could identify with.

So did The Wizard of Oz really make witches green? And why has that idea proved almost impossible to shake?

✨ Fact? Fiction? Or Folklore? ✨

Plus, there’s another Hidden Hex hiding in plain sight… 👀

🎙️ Episode Five: It’s Not Easy Being Green
🎧 HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen

🎵 Theme: “Huldufolk (Hidden Folk)” by Jamie Sims
🐾 A Familiar Footsteps Production

🎬 Audio excerpt: Jaws (1975), “Main Title (Theme from Jaws)”, composed by John Williams. Copyright belongs to the applicable rights holders. Included for commentary and critical analysis.

Love and light x

#HEXPOSITION #WitchesOnScreen #Disney #HarryPotter #Witchcraft

Episode 6 - There's no place like home

Where does a witch live?

Deep in the woods, perhaps, in a crooked cottage surrounded by herbs and strange objects. Maybe it has chicken legs. Maybe it’s made of gingerbread. Or perhaps it’s an ordinary house on an ordinary street — until three witches move back in.

In Episode Six of HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen, we’re stepping across the threshold and exploring one of the most enduring parts of witch iconography: the witch’s home.

From Baba Yaga’s hut and the cottage of Hansel and Gretel to the homes imagined for witches on screen, we explore why witches are so often placed on the edges of communities, deep within forests and inside spaces that seem to reflect the women who inhabit them.

We’ll visit the Sanderson sisters’ home in Hocus Pocus, explore the mysterious witch’s cottage in Brave, and look at how cinema and television have transformed the witch’s house into a visual shorthand of its own. Because sometimes the home is simply where the witch lives — and sometimes the house itself tells us that we have entered her world.

So how much of the familiar witch’s cottage comes from history? How much comes from folklore? And how much have generations of storytellers built for her?

✨ It’s time for Fact, Fiction or Folklore. ✨

And somewhere inside this particular witch’s house, there’s another Hidden Hex waiting to be discovered… 👀

🎙️ Episode Six: There’s No Place Like Home
🎧 HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen

🎵 Theme: “Huldufolk (Hidden Folk)” by Jamie Sims
🐾 A Familiar Footsteps Production

🎬 Audio excerpt: Brave (2012), © Disney/Pixar and applicable rights holders. Included for commentary and critical analysis.

Love and light x

#HEXPOSITION #WitchesOnScreen #HocusPocus #Brave #Witchcraft #Witchcore

Episode 7 - Seeing stars

Five points. Five lines. One symbol that can tell an audience witchcraft before a single spell has been cast.

But has the pentagram always belonged to witches?

In Episode Seven of HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen, we’re tracing the surprisingly complicated history of one of the most recognisable symbols associated with witchcraft — from its ancient uses and changing meanings to modern Pagan practice, Satanic imagery and the way film and television have turned five simple lines into instant supernatural shorthand.

We’ll look at how the pentagram appears across popular culture, why turning it upside down can completely change what audiences think they’re seeing, and how horror in particular has helped blur the boundaries between witchcraft, Paganism, occultism and Satanism.

As a practising witch who wears and has pentagrams tattooed on her body, I’ll also talk about what the symbol means within my own practice — and what it’s like carrying a symbol that other people sometimes think they already understand.

Because the pentagram has spent thousands of years gathering meanings. Witchcraft is only one chapter of its story.

✨ It’s time for Fact, Fiction or Folklore. ✨

And, of course, there’s another Hidden Hex hiding somewhere amongst the stars… 👀

🎙️ Episode Seven: Seeing Stars
🎧 HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen

🌙 New episodes every Witchy Wednesday!

🎵 Theme: “Huldufolk (Hidden Folk)” by Jamie Sims
🐾 A Familiar Footsteps Production

Love and light x

#HEXPOSITION #WitchesOnScreen #WitchyWednesday #Pentagram #Witchcraft

Episode 8 - Better the devil you know

What does the Devil have to do with witches?

For centuries, the witch and the Devil have been tangled together in the Western imagination. Pacts signed in blood, midnight meetings, forbidden power and women supposedly surrendering themselves to Satan became some of the most enduring accusations surrounding witchcraft.

But where did that connection actually come from?

In Episode Eight of HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen, we’re following the Devil through the history of witchcraft — from Christian ideas about heresy and demonic magic to witch-trial testimony, the supposed witches’ sabbath and the belief that a witch’s power must ultimately come from Satan.

Then we turn to the screen, where the Devil has remained remarkably difficult for the witch to shake. From the seductive promise of power to outright demonic horror, we explore how film and television continue to draw on centuries-old ideas about what happens when a witch makes a deal with the Devil.

And importantly, we separate witchcraft, Paganism and Satanism — traditions and practices that popular culture has repeatedly pushed together despite them not being interchangeable.

So did historical witches really worship the Devil? Where did the idea of the Satanic witch come from? And why does cinema keep bringing them back together?

✨ It’s time for Fact, Fiction or Folklore. ✨

And somewhere in the darkness, another Hidden Hex is waiting… 👀

🎙️ Episode Eight: Better the Devil You Know
🎧 HEXPOSITION: Witches on Screen

🌙 New episodes every Witchy Wednesday!

🎵 Theme: “Huldufolk (Hidden Folk)” by Jamie Sims
🐾 A Familiar Footsteps Production

Love and light x

#Supernatural #WitchesOnScreen #WitchesofEastwick #Witchcraft #TheDevil