O'Donoghue, D.J. (2024) A Genealogy of Witchcraft and Sorcery in British Film and Television. Doctoral thesis, University of West London.

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Abstract

This thesis is a response to the proliferation of figurations of witchcraft and sorcery in British film and television. It employs a genealogical approach to history – indebted to the concept of genealogy developed by Michel Foucault – to situate cinema and television as performing an integral role in the construction and mediation of popular ideas around the historiography of witchcraft and sorcery since the emergence of screen media as a primary mode of cultural-historical processing in the twentieth century. Throughout this thesis, a critical inter-disciplinary approach to history and culture – as co-constitutive parts of the politics of memory – is employed to negotiate the linkages between screen media and the historiography of witchcraft and sorcery in Britain. I situate this mode of historical meaning making as palimpsestic, arguing that historiography is an intertextual process wherein a heterogenous array of signifiers mediate our ceaselessly dynamic relationship to the past. The synthesis of genealogical analysis with film theory upon which the thesis depends is situated within a growing field of screen studies which is beginning to address the previous lack of critical attention given to specific cultural, social, and historical contexts in what has come to be defined as the folk horror genre.

Building upon previous work in the field of occult and folk horror, this extensive survey – which considers a corpus of 54 core film/television works and a further 52 contextual film/television works – situates on-screen representations of witchcraft and sorcery in Britain in relation to the historiographical sources from which they draw, either directly or indirectly. Throughout this thesis, I highlight how witchcraft practices, witchcraft persecutions and the folklore derived from them differ greatly from region to region and insist that detailed genealogical analysis is required to locate the specificities of witchcraft beliefs within their unique and dynamic cultural histories. This thesis demonstrates that historical ideas around witchcraft and sorcery have been popularised in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through cinema and television; and in turn, that on-screen depictions of witchcraft and sorcery have not only conditioned the collective historical understanding of Britain’s occult past but have contributed to the formation of new related beliefs, practices, and folklore.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identifier:	10.36828/thesis/13411
Subjects:	Film and television
Date Deposited:	02 Apr 2025
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/13411

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