Magic, unclean forces - these beliefs persist among primitive peoples all over the world. Witches were blamed for natural disasters, cattle fever, miscarriage and infertility. They were believed to cast charms and make love potions. Old medicine women, young women rejecting advances of their suitors or those overtly showing their sexuality were all considered to be witches. Collective hysteria resulted in witch hunts and trials: secular and Inquisition courts tortured hundreds of thousands of innocent women. In Europe, the apogee of witchhunts falls within the Reformation period, with last stakes burning in the eighteenth century. Today, the rhetoric and the way of thinking about women as devil-possessed beings returns in statements delivered by politicians and church hierarchs. Men continue to usurp the right to make decisions concerning the female body. 2017 marks the 530th anniversary of the publication of the Hammer of Witches, a treatise on expelling the devil from women by way of torture. It is worth watching the lot of witch characters in all film genres, from silent cinema to Indonesian horror films, as they remind us of the bitter consequences of hatred and faith in witchcraft. 

Tomasz Kolankiewicz – film programmer working for television and various film festivals. His aim is to give audiences the broadest possible picture of cinematography: from the classics to the most recent film productions across different genres. Author of several dozen reviews of Swedish and American silent films, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fritz Lang, Vittorio de Sica, David Lynch as well as retrospectives of little known film currents such as Blaxploitation or British horror films by Hammer Productions. He runs a section devoted to forgotten Polish genre films at the Gdynia Film Festival.