Before the 20th century, there is little historical record of a link between Halloween and witchcraft. The relatively recent association appears to be American:
It is no surprise, perhaps, that part of the answer lies with the rise of modern marketing and branding. How does one dress up as a witch for Halloween, as many thousands will be doing this 31 October? Basically you stick a black pointy hat on your head. Depictions of witches with pointy hats began to appear in children’s books in eighteenth-century England, probably inspired by earlier black steeple hats worn in stereotypic depictions of seventeenth-century Puritans. By the end of the nineteenth century the pointy-hatted witch had become a widespread image in print. It was at this moment that Salem, Massachusetts, comes into the picture. It was there that a jeweller named Daniel Low began to produce souvenir spoons depicting a witch with a pointy hat and broom. Their success kick-started the transformation of Salem into the marketing creation ‘Witch City’, and the pointy-hatted witch was replicated on numerous ‘Witch City’ products.
At the same time as this witch image was proliferating in marketing and the mass media, the nature of American Halloween custom was changing. With its roots in Irish mischief night, American youths had traditionally marked Halloween by performing such malicious acts as greasing railway tracks, smashing windows, and overturning outdoor toilets. But from the 1950s onwards the sanitised American trick-or-treat and costume bonanza we know today was beginning to spread. The remarketing of Witch City into Halloween City by local entrepreneurs from the 1980s onwards was a significant element in this transformation. “It’s America’s biggest Halloween party and you’re invited!” one promotional site proclaims today. The now inseparable link between witchcraft and Halloween was forged.
Culminating in this amazing awful scene in The Worst Witch (which you can watch in full here):
Martin Schneider shivers at the classic Halloween hathos:
Tim Curry is always inescapably Tim Curry, and in this context that’s a positive boon—he may be the only element in this brief clip that’s even halfway up to snuff. Never have I seen so many superfluous and chintzy video effects deployed in such a short span of time—innumerable green-screen effects, several completely crazy swirl transitions, who knows what the hell else. It’s truly a phantasmagoria of 80s cheese.
(Image: “Hallowe’en precautions” postcard, c. 1910, via NYPL Digital Gallery)
The Dish 