In our run-up to Halloween, we’re taking a look at movies and TV shows that are creepy, scary and ghoulish, and today, it’s the turn of movie witches. But which witchy film is scariest? You decide!

For me, the scariest witch ever has got to be the witch in The Wizard of Oz. She haunted my childhood dreams and I lived in mortal fear of anyone with a basket attached to their push bike for years. I was genuinely relieved when the house fell on her and killed her!

So let’s take a look at the possible candidates for Which Witch is Scariest and which top six witch movies we recommend you rent out to spell fear and or a good laugh this weekend…

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: This sequel to Blair Witch 1 is a bit pants to be honest, albeit pretty scary in places, but if you rent the DVD, watch the extra features! Anyway, in the movie the central character is Jeff Donavan, who was never ‘a good boy’. He was always bad and was always fascinated in the story of the Blair Witch, just like victim Heather Donahue of Blair Witch 1. After the success of the movie, Jeff opens up a Blair Witch tour of Black Hills for his way to cash in on the movie hoopla. But when four people take the tour and decide to rest at Rustin Parr’s house – Rustin was the person who murdered seven children under the Blair Witch’s command – the four lose five hours of their memories. But after they return to find Jeff, while trying to understand the bizarre symbols on their bodies, all five people will finally know that some fiction isn’t really fiction and that when they left the Black Hills, they left with something… or someone.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch: This sequel to the uber-successful Halloween films has a plot that is entirely unrelated to the earlier movies. In this horror story, a large Halloween mask making company has plans to kill millions of American children with deadly masks. It starts out with an apparent murder-suicide in a hospital emergency room which leads to an investigation by the on-call doctor. He reveals a plot by an insane toymaker to kill as many people as possible during Halloween through an ancient Celtic ritual involving a stolen boulder from Stonehenge and Halloween masks. I know it’s not strictly a witch, or even a group of witches, but it takes its basic plot structure from witch-like doings, so I’m including it!

The Witches of Eastwick: In this film, Alex, Jane, and Suki are three bored New England women left to live without their husbands; it’s a comedy with a dark edge that’s based on a novel by John Updike. On Thursdays, the three friends meet up to chug back martinis, learn Chinese aphrodisiac cooking and lament the scarcity of eligible men. As they sit around, they fantasise about, and describe their idea of, the ideal man. Arriving in town the following day is Satan, disguised as mysterious stranger Darrell Van Horn, who’s played by Jack Nicholson. One by one, Van Horne seduces each of the women and strange things begin to happen. When the town matriarch Felicia publicly denounces Van Horne, she gets a nasty compound fracture. When she forces her editor husband to publish a story about Van Horne’s sexual antics, Darrell gets his revenge with revoltingly large amounts of cherries. The women now see that they may be in danger and begin to plot their escape… good stuff but not really scary.

The Craft: This 1996 story is modern witchcraft at its finest; corny and predictable it is, but it’s worth a watch! Sarah Bailey, a sixteen year old troubled teenager with a painful past and a history of suicidal tendencies and hallucinations, moves to L.A. with her father and stepmother to start a new life and is enrolled into a Catholic school. It’s at school that she comes into contact with three unlikely friends, Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle, all of whom are socially outcast with various problems in their lives that they wish they could fix. Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle dabble in occult practices, and when they notice Sarah has the powers of a natural witch, they talk her into joining their coven. When Sarah joins, they soon realise that with a fourth witch in the coven they can begin to cast spells they couldn’t before, and begin to amend all the things wrong in their lives… but like everything else in life. things come with a price.

The Devils: This movie is well dated – it was made in 1971 – but is a real grip you by the short and curlies horror, so it’s not to be missed this Halloween! The plot centres around Cardinal Richelieu and his power-hungry entourage who seek to take control of seventeenth-century France, but need to destroy Father Grandier – the priest who runs the fortified town that prevents them from exerting total control. So they want to destroy him by setting him up as a warlock in control of a devil-possessed nunnery, the mother superior of which is sexually obsessed with him. A mad witch-hunter is brought in to gather evidence against the priest, ready for the big trial. It’s a real OTT movie that’s highly sexual, graphically violent and a cult favorite. Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed star, and be warned, it’s not for the squeamish!

Hocus Pocus: No Halloween would be complete without watching Hocus Pocus! Granted, it’s not remotely scary, but it is really good watching and there are some creepy bits in it… In the year 1693, sisters, Winifred, Mary and Sarah were executed for being witches. They captured and sucked the life out of children and just before their execution, Winifred issued a curse; when a virgin lights the black flame candle on Halloween light, in their house, they will return … 1993, 300 years later, Max decides to light the candle in order to scare his irritating sister Dani and his wannabe girlfriend Alison. Now, the three Witches are back ready for a night of fun, magic and horror in the now modern area of Salem. Excellent stuff!

Keep checking back for more Halloween fun stuff this week!