About Familiar Footsteps Productions

Stories leave footprints. Some of them feel strangely familiar.

Familiar Footsteps Productions is an independent creative production company founded by writer, researcher, educator and storyteller Millie Hardy-Ashton, bringing together folklore, film, history, witchcraft and the stories we inherit, reinvent and pass on.

Born from a lifelong fascination with storytelling and the strange places where fact, fiction and folklore meet, Familiar Footsteps Productions creates work that looks a little more closely at the tales we think we already know. From witches and fairy tales to folklore, fantasy and popular culture, its productions explore how stories change as they travel through history — and what those changes reveal about us.

Its first original production is HEXPOSITION, a podcast dedicated to the history and representation of witches on screen. Drawing upon Hardy-Ashton’s academic research into witchcraft, folklore and screen culture, the series travels between historical belief and popular imagination, exploring how figures such as Circe, the Wicked Witch and the witches of the European trials have been transformed by film and television.

The name Familiar Footsteps also has a much more personal origin.

At the heart of the company are three feline familiars: Oscar, Tonks and Rufio. Oscar, a black cat with his distinctive white bib, was Millie’s familiar and remains at the centre of the Familiar Footsteps identity. Tonks and Rufio — affectionately Toto and Fifi — continue the tradition as familiars-in-training. Their presence, alongside the sound of purrs and Oscar’s bell, forms part of the company's creative identity: a small reminder that the things we love leave traces behind them.

Familiar Footsteps Productions is interested in those traces.

The footprint left by folklore on cinema.
The footprint left by history on the stories we tell.
The footprint left by generations of storytellers on one another.
And the familiar footsteps of the people, animals and stories that walk beside us.

With curiosity, scholarship and just a little bit of magic, Familiar Footsteps Productions tells stories about where our stories came from, what they became, and why they still follow us today.