WITCHES: In conversation with Elizabeth Sankey
Many little girls like to play witches. Casting spells across the playground, sticks and broken branches become wands, capes fashioned from strewn bed sheets.
In the opening of Elizabeth Sankey’s 2024 film essay Witches, she reflects on that childhood fascination. “I wanted to be a good witch,” she says – unable, then, to understand why any woman would choose to be bad.
In stories and films, witches are marked out by their differences: the classic green skin, a mane of unruly hair, bodies refusing to behave. The good witch is soft, beautiful and obedient. The bad is everything outside these parameters. The Wizard of Oz (1939) fixed this image early in Sankey’s consciousness. There’s Glinda, with her white magic, sweet temperament and traditional beauty, and then there’s Wicked Witch, there to be feared. “Only bad witches are ugly,” fall the words from Glinda’s rosebud lips. Punishment, then, is for the body to be destroyed, melted away into a puddle.
But the consequences for witches extend outside these stories. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people, the majority of them women, were executed for witchcraft across Europe. The critic Malcolm Gaskill observes that witchcraft was traditionally linked with women due to the fact that they were considered 'the weaker vessel' and therefore ‘more susceptible to diabolic temptation.’ The wicked witch was supposed to scare us, but she also served as a warning. Behave and be beautiful, or we will destroy you. Women have been taught this lesson for centuries.
So when, in 2020, Sankey gives birth to her own child and begins to experience postpartum psychosis, feeling outcast, evil, insane, the witches from her childhood felt closer than ever.
Across its 90-minute run time, Witches moves between Sankey’s anxiety and depression after the birth of her son, montages of witches in popular culture, and the voices of women she met on the ward. The witches function as an allegory for madness, for the persecution of women who don’t adhere. By her own account, their bony fingers wrapped around Sankey’s shoulder and drew her into psychosis.
In the UK, suicide is the leading cause of death for women in the first year after childbirth. The 2025 MBRRACE-UK report found that deaths linked to mental health, including suicide and substance use, were the leading cause of late maternal death in the UK. Of the 643 women who died in this period, nearly half (46%) had known mental health problems, with 155 deaths directly attributed to psychiatric causes.
Postpartum psychosis may seem like a distant, unlikely boogeyman for pregnant mothers (“I never expected it would happen to me” Sankey pronounces). During her third trimester, she and her husband had absentmindedly thrown away a leaflet about postpartum depression. With no known family history of mental illness, there seemed to be no warning signs. “You’ll be fine, it won’t happen to you” he had reassured her – and Sankey had wholeheartedly agreed.
Madness was something she had only ever understood through cinema. In Witches, it returns in montages of her reference points – Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Girl, Interrupted (1999), the locked wards of The Snake Pit (1948), the unravelling of Possession (1981). She jokes that these portrayals are surprisingly accurate, even if no one on the ward was quite as rambunctious as Angelina Jolie.
When you go mad, Sankey explains, “you realise how paper-thin everything is. This world I’d been relying on – actually nothing can protect you from the worst thing in life. You feel betrayed.” She didn’t sleep for 10 days. She saw devils in her son’s eyes, figures where there were none; food looked like flesh.
More unsettlingly, a common point of reference was the fate of Girl, Interrupted’s Daisy Randone, who takes her own life. “That’s all you talked about in there,” Sankey says. “How am I going to kill myself?” Anything that could be used for harm was taken away: robe cords, razors, even cutlery. One woman on the ward made an elaborate plan to escape and kill herself, which she recounted to the others as they sat together. Afterwards, they said to one another, “God, that’s all a bit dramatic.”
Although no one did commit during Sankey’s time on the ward, there is a history of women who have. In 2000, Dr Daksha Emson, a psychiatrist, took her own life alongside her three-month-old daughter, Freya, during a period of postpartum psychosis. Daksha’s husband, David, appears in Witches. “I’d seen other interviews with David where there was real discomfort around talking about what Daksha did,” Sankey says. “Before this illness I would have been the same.” After experiencing psychosis herself, Sankey felt she was able to understand what she’d been feeling, and that made it easier to talk to him.
An independent inquiry later found that Dr Daksha Emson had been failed by the NHS. Emson had lived for years with bipolar disorder but kept it hidden, afraid that disclosure would destroy the career she had built. The stigma around her illness, the panel concluded, “haunted her work, life and treatment”.
Sankey says speaking to David was one of the most difficult parts of making the film. “It was heartbreaking – he’ll never get over it – but I think I was able to make him feel comfortable,” she says. He continues to tell their story because he believes it might prevent others from being lost in the same way. For Sankey, Emson’s legacy is that she entered psychiatry to understand her own mind and to help others – and that, out of this tragedy, came the creation of mother-and-baby units. “So the reason I’m here is because of Daksha.”
Dr Trudi Seneviratne, a consultant psychiatrist and one of the UK’s leading specialists in perinatal mental health, also appears in Witches. For Sankey, the fact that even someone so senior and experienced struggled with shame and access to care felt telling. If a woman whose entire career is dedicated to maternal mental health can still find herself isolated, she adds, “that kind of says it all.”
One of the most persistent fears shared by the women in the film is the possibility of having their children taken away. Sankey remembers arriving at A&E for the first time and asking whether social services would remove her baby. “And the midwife just laughed,” she says. “She was like, No, of course not. We’re in Hackney.’”
Sankey realised she wasn’t actually in Salem.
“And that was really liberating, because I suddenly realised that wasn’t something I needed to be scared of.”
The original connection to witches as figures, Sankey reveals, came when she was in the ward with another mother who also appears in the film, Jude, when she teased: “If this happened a few hundred years ago, we would have been hanged as witches.” Watching Witches, it is easy to imagine Sankey wandering off the set of a cheerful domestic fantasy and into something closer to a horror film.
The whole experience had felt like a nightmare, very dark, very evil and completely removed from any sort of reality – she could imagine confessing to witchcraft if she were to be accused. The women on the ward recognised themselves in historical accounts, in figures like Mary Scrutton, who described seeing devils and hearing voices urging her to harm her child. Those women were executed. Critic Anne Bradstreet suggests that in early modern trials, if a magistrate were lucky, a suspected witch would use the devil’s voice to damn herself, confessing with such force and detail as to be effectively ‘condemned out of her own mouth.’ Now, the symptoms read differently: psychosis, postpartum breakdown, something medical rather than supernatural.
Watching Witches, it’s easy to see how thin that line is, how quickly the domestic can tip into terror. Marion Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Studies at Exeter, writes that the most frightening idea of witches is their mundanity, that the devil lives in domestic spaces.
‘Witch’ isn’t heard as an accusation so commonly nowadays, but that does not mean women and mothers are not vilified. As Sankey chants the names of the women condemned, it's impossible to not consider how paper-thin the security of one hundred years of progress really is. The world was left reeling after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, a massive shock to the security women felt in their own bodies. In the subsequent two years, at least 412 women were charged with pregnancy-related crimes, with 31 of these being related to pregnancy loss, including miscarriages and still births.
History is not a straight line towards progress – in fact, this is a dangerous assumption that leaves people vulnerable from further threat. Time moves forward, but history is caught in constant repetition.
The montages of Sankey’s Witches are a testament to these constant echoes in stories, culture, beliefs. Are we any less affected by the terrifying lack of control Rosemary lives through in Polanski’s 1968 film, impregnated by forces both familiar and entirely out of her control?
Perhaps the dizzying panic of the pregnant Rosemary echoes the disastrous anxieties of Linda in If I had Legs I’d Kick You (2025). Or the painful dissatisfaction of new mother Grace in Die My Love (2025). Certainly, we seem to be more interested than ever in the figure of the overwhelmed mother, empathising in her exhaustion and mistakes.
What does Sankey want people to take from her film? Not fear of motherhood or babies or madness.
Sankey says the main thing it made her feel was that women have always felt this. Reading testimonies from the 15th and 16th centuries, she realised how far back it goes – the shame, the guilt. “You have to be a good wife, a good mother, a good friend, a good sister, a good daughter, a good woman. And I think that’s incredibly detrimental to women.”
We can learn from the little girls playing witches. They are free from these constraints. They can be more honest, not yet fearful of being cast into the shadow of the bad witch for failing to meet these expectations.
“When I look at the little girls my son is friends with, I see that they are not worrying about whether or not they’re good. They’re just putting eight hair clips in their hair for no reason, wearing princess dresses because they want to, not thinking, is this too girly? And I think that’s what I would want women to take from it – can we just stop engaging with that pressure to be good or perfect? Because it’s pointless, it’s toxic and it is potentially life-threatening.”