Why We Still Need Practical Magic
Some films stay lodged in female memory in ways that have very little to do with whether they were critically acclaimed, structurally perfect, or even particularly successful when they first appeared. Women keep them alive because of the feeling they create - a feeling tied to a room, a season, a version of ourselves, or a type of longing we do not often see reflected back at us. Practical Magic has belonged to that category for nearly three decades. Women have continued watching it through breakups, lonely apartments, stressful autumns, friendships, divorces, kitchen wine nights, and those periods of life when reality has become so aggressively practical that anything mystical feels like oxygen.
Belladonna of Sadness: A Witchy Film Worth Watching
Some films you watch, and some films feel like they are doing something to you while you sit there. Belladonna of Sadness falls into that second category. It is not casual, it is not background noise, and it is definitely not something you forget. It feels more like an experience than a storyline.
The film follows Jeanne, but this is not really about plot as much as it is about transformation. She begins soft, devoted, and open, and then something in her life shifts in a way that cannot be undone. What the film does differently is that it does not leave her in that space of loss. Instead, it shows what begins to grow from it, and that growth is not clean or easy to watch. It is intense, emotional, and at times overwhelming in a way that feels very real.
The Yellow Wallpaper and the Inner Room of the Mystic
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is often read as a psychological story about isolation and mental health. But beneath the surface lies something deeper. In this reflection, we examine the story through the lens of mysticism and the female condition, exploring how the narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper becomes a symbolic journey into intuition, perception, and the struggle for self expression. What begins as confinement slowly transforms into a confrontation with the hidden patterns that shape reality.