The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

272 Witches of Eastwick, The
The longer the witches are influenced by Van Horne,
the easier evil becomes. Alexandra wills a barking dog to
death. She no longer feels any sexual desire; nor do some
of the witches’ lovers. They appear victims of the aiguillette,
or the knot: a device used by witches to draw illicit
lovers together, cause impotence in men and barrenness
in women, and foment general discontent. Once started
in a community, Alexandra notes, witchcraft eventually
runs on its own, out of anyone’s control.
When Van Horne marries Jenny Gabriel, Felicia and
Clyde’s daughter, the women take revenge. Like a medieval
sorcerer, Jane flies to the Van Horne mansion, shrinks
herself, and collects pieces of Jenny (tissues with lipstick
stains, hair, used dental floss, hairs left in the tub after
shaving her legs) so that the women can make a charm.
The wax figurine is given a female shape, adorned with
Jenny’s hair, and stabbed with tacks. Incantations are recited,
and the women ask that Jenny die of cancer. The
witches are later struck with some guilt and attempt to
undo the spell, but Jenny dies, anyway. Van Horne, for
all his sexual encounters and rhetoric on the importance
of women, takes Jenny’s brother, Chris, as his lover and
disappears.
In the film version of The Witches of Eastwick, directed
by George Miller, the women—played by Cher as Alexandra,
Susan Sarandon as Jane, and Michelle Pfeiffer as
Sukie—are not witches but merely bored women before
Darryl Van Horne, played by Jack Nicholson, arrives
in Eastwick. He introduces them to magic and orgies,
which the women enjoy immensely until their witchy
dabbling culminates in Felicia Gabriel’s murder. Before
her death, Felicia vomits enormous quantities of cherry
seeds, which Van Horne and the women were spitting out
of their mouths at a party. The more they eat, the more
seeds she excretes.
Jenny Gabriel is not part of the movie plot at all, and
this time the wax figurine is of Van Horne himself as the
women try to purge the Devil from their lives. He has
impregnated all three, and they wish him gone before the
babies are born. They succeed, and he leaves with horrifying
special effects.
One interesting note about the filming of the movie:
The producers originally planned to shoot the outdoor
scenes in Rhode Island, as in the novel, but local protest
by practicing witches and others forced them to move the
location to Cohasset, Massachusetts. The protests were
led by Laurie Cabot, prominent Salem witch and cochair
of the Witches League of Public Awareness. The league
objected to the book for portraying what they said were
inaccurate stereotypes about witches; modern practitioners
of WITCHCRAFT as a religion (Wicca) do not worship
the Devil.