movie covens

Films about covens: groups of witches, warlocks and occultists who work together. Some are teenagers at a high school, some are a ballet school in Germany, and some are the people next door.

A group of friends is the easiest coven to join, and the first one most people meet. In The Craft, Sarah Bailey arrives at a Catholic high school in Los Angeles and is invited to join three outcasts known as witches, and they cast spells on their enemies. Four friends in The Covenant are young warlocks of one coven, and a stranger with the same powers comes to town to destroy it. The Owens sisters in Practical Magic are the latest in a long line of witches, in a town that has gossiped about them for generations.

Other covens belong to a place instead of a friend group. In the 1977 Suspiria, Suzy Bannion travels to Germany to study ballet at an academy where a student has just been found dead, and the school turns out to have been a witches' coven. Rose Elliot in Inferno decides the New York apartment building she lives in is an ancient coven for Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness. In Coven, a Spanish Inquisition judge arrives in a Basque village in 1609 to burn witches, and the five young women he arrests are tortured for the details of a Sabbat. Dani and Christian in Midsommar join friends at a midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village, where the insular villagers invite their guests to take part. In November, a whole pagan village in Estonia lives by magic: the villagers hand their souls over to thieving kratts, creatures made of wood and metal, and share the winter with werewolves and spirits.

The hardest coven to spot is the one next door. In Rosemary's Baby, Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband are befriended by the eccentric couple next door, Roman and Minnie Castevet. Rosemary gets pregnant, her friends are cut off from her, and a well-planned conspiracy closes in around her. A family in The Brotherhood of Satan is trapped in a desert town by a cult of senior citizens who recruit the town's children to worship Satan. Two couples on an RV trip in Race with the Devil watch a Satanic ritual sacrifice, and the local sheriff finds no evidence. Start with The Craft for teenagers and spells, or Inferno for a nightmare.