Editorials

Pentagrams, Crows, and ‘Satan’s School for Girls’

November 10th, 2023 | By Victoria Jaye

In folklore, when witches appear in stories, it’s usually during a time of upheaval. So it comes as no surprise that witch-related cinema also emerges during times of increased female autonomy. It was during one such period that Christopher Leitch’s Satan’s School for Girls was released. As entertaining as it was misguided, Satan’s School for Girls still offers viewers a valuable time capsule of witches in modern media. Women weren’t always choosing a more traditional wife/homemaker path by 2000, so a finger was pointed at a perceived enemy of the social order: witchcraft, the rumored pathway to Satan. Satanism and witchcraft (which aren’t the same thing) are then cast as the terrifying “darkness” that threatens these values.

The film opens with a girl being hunted by a strange, ghost-like shadow with a knife. When her death is ruled a suicide, her sister, Beth (Shannen Doherty), decides nobody is investigating deeply enough. After talking to an old school friend who is pecked to death by an evil crow – a death that’s somehow ruled as a heart attack – Beth poses as Karen, the new girl at her sister’s former college, to get to the truth. 

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Beth/Karen is befriended by Alison (Julie Benz) and Paige (Taraji P. Henson) but keeps having strange run-ins with five goth girls. A group called the Five sends Beth a mysterious card at the funeral — one of the goth girls was also her sister’s roommate. Beth meets (and dates) Mark, another student who works in the records office. We soon discover that Beth is magical herself, with strong intuition and control over fire and electricity. Eventually, Karen begins to understand that she was wrong – the Five are the girls she’s befriended. 

This is a powerful group of women who find success and money wherever they go because they sold their souls to Satan. They also murdered everyone Beth loved because she was destined to join them. Beth pretends to join the Five, then burns them with her light powers (not kidding) before doing the same to the headmistress, who was also in on the murders. In the end, Karen moves on with her life, marrying and having a baby – until one day, a murder of crows shows up in her backyard, and the film fades to black.

Horror has always been a valuable folkloric gauge for what scares people during specific periods. By 2000, the world’s perception of witchcraft had changed again. Y2K’s fears about the end of the world had only just ended, but that didn’t mean that questions about Christianity or its secrets had disappeared from movies (Jaye 2023). People had started to come around to the idea of witches being more of a belief system than a path to evil; The Craft and Charmed continued to be very popular for several years. That didn’t mean that evil witches didn’t exist – as both forms of media showed the public – but that witches often fought evil instead of spreading it in the world.

However, the symbolism used in the movie is not doing the occult community any favors. There’s a weird, dead-looking tree, a pentagram, even 666, oh my! This is a complete misunderstanding of all these symbols – especially the pentagram, which is often used as protection by actual witches. Instead, it became a symbol of perceived evil in the public eye. We also have crows everywhere, tying into the never-ending Spirit Halloween idea of witchy imagery.

The fear of witches and their Satanic activities also bled into academia during this period, the place America sent their children to prepare for the future. The worry for every parent is that college is not a safe environment for growing minds and bodies, but now a new fear has been unlocked: Satanists! Mark and the headmistress being Satanists themselves reinforces that institutions are no longer safe. The film even goes a step further, suggesting that society itself is aligned with Satanism itself because its evil has infiltrated America to its core.

Karen represents Christianity as being the only way to destroy witches and their connection to Satan that threatens modern-day America. Think about it: women were freer than ever, and movies started questioning this freedom. Films like Rupert Wainwright’s Stigmata overtly asked if women’s expression through makeup, clothes, and sexual freedom was responsible for tanking our moral society (Jaye 2023). 

These questions evolved into outright paranoia. The Satanists are EVERYWHERE, their hands in all our pies, which is such a threat to family values! One can see this in the scene at the end with Karen kissing her husband goodbye – a baby in her arms and no magic in sight until she sees a murder of crows in her backyard. Sadly, there is no resolution in Satan’s School for Girls. We do not know if the scary crows got her or not. Instead, we are left to assume Karen’s fight against the evil Satanists resulted directly in her happy life as a mother and a wife. 

The witches themselves fare no better onscreen. Five girls are chosen from every generation, and they all become massively successful in their lives as they reject the Trinity and are awarded with anything their heart desires. This, to me, is saying two things. First, that security in America as a woman is a matter of selling one’s soul. Second, that all women are subject to sexist degradation. To secure a future for oneself free of men, women must turn to yet another man figure in Satan. This implies that success as a woman is impossible otherwise – odd for a time when women reached higher than ever to break the glass ceiling. Why else turn to Satan if things were so equal? They wouldn’t need to if the playing field were truly even.

These women are portrayed as being morally bankrupt; they murder anyone who gets in their way or doesn’t do what they want – despite the fact that real Satanists don’t believe in harming others. They also orchestrate the murder of everyone Beth ever loved because she was destined to join them. We often see this in occult-centered movies: the path to power is through a rejection of love in all its forms — only lust remains. Women who don’t wish to bow to the sexist patriarchy are labeled as money-grubbing, soulless, unfeeling bitches that shapeshift themselves to fool unsuspecting men.

Witches, then, occupy an odd liminal space in American media. They disrupt the social order imposed by men, causing destruction and mayhem. But they are also beautiful and good, empowering women to believe they are equal to men and, in many cases of occult media, more powerful. Witches are a continuous moral commentary with society at large; their identities shift based on the time that witches are depicted and how free women are perceived. To avoid stepping backward, we must return to movies like Satan’s School for Girls that explain previous stances on witches and feminism so that we might move forward away from sexist attitudes. 

References 

Charmed, Constance M. Burge (creator), Spelling Television, 1998-2006. 
The Craft, dir. Andrew Fleming. 1996. 
Jaye, Victoria. 2023. “Remnants of Christian Y2K Fears”, Hear Us Scream, Editorial.  
Stigmata, dir. Rupert Wainwright. 1999. 
Tucker, Elizabeth. 2007. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses.