Bewitchingly fetching: Three of the wiliest, wildest witches you could ever meet

There is nothing like a juicy old-fashioned wicked witch to really spice things up. And by ‘juicy old-fashioned wicked’, I mean the type of individual powered exclusively by the glee that comes with committing nefarious misdeeds. Like the psychotic Bellatrix Lestrange from the Harry Potter series, for example, whose devotion to that other committed evil-doer, Lord Voldemort, is unparalleled. Or Shakespeare’s trio of witches in Macbeth, cackling around a bubbling cauldron plotting their next bout of fun. Let us revisit some of fiction’s most infamous witches – the unjustly maligned, the unapologetically evil, and the unabashedly wicked.

Elphaba

Elphaba from Wicked is largely misunderstood and has little interest in spreading mayhem just for the sake of it. Her ‘wicked’ misnomer is just that: a misnomer, nothing more than false advertising. She is discriminated against due to her unfortunate green appearance and driven to make some difficult choices that the people around her are too blind or stupid to understand. She is studious, hard-working, and driven to hold Dorothy hostage purely to extract her poor late sister’s shoes. If you are interested in pure wickedness, Elphaba gets zero marks, although she does manage to rather gloriously thwart her peers by belting into song and flying off into the sunset. What she lacks in wickedness, she makes up for in vocal range.

The Grand High Witch

Fresh out of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, the Grand High Witch despises children the way you or I would a rat scurrying across the kitchen floor. Owing to her naturally bald state with talons in place of fingers and toes, she could just show her face and scare them to death. Instead, she opts for the finest wigs, beautiful shoes and spotless gloves. She hosts meetings in five-star ballrooms so that she and her fellow witches can plot in comfort. Masking her lust for the mass murder beneath her beatific face, she lures children in with the promise of sweets. Once she has her prey, she unleashes the most inventive of punishments, such as inserting them into a painting forever or removing their thumbs. When tired of this, she introduces the idea of a middleman by spiking sweets with a special potion that will turn everyone into rats, to be destroyed at a later date by pest control. Unlike Voldemort, the Grand High Witch puts a bit more effort into disposing of her enemies than a simple two-second Avada Kedavra.

Winifred Sanderson

Much like Roald Dahl’s Grand High Witch, Winifred from Hocus Pocus nurses a flaming hatred for all children and yearns to destroy them all in one fell swoop. Unlike the Grand High Witch, however, she does not have a crew of compliant witches at her behest, willing to attend the meetings she books for them. Instead, she has two dim-witted sisters whom she loves dearly but who are nowhere near as wily as she. Where the Grand High Witch lures her children in with promises of sweets, Winifred seduces her prey with a rousing rendition of I’ll Put A Spell On You. It would have worked, too, if it hadn’t been for the thing that defeats all Scooby Doo villains: those meddling kids.

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