20 best film witches of all time
Serafina Pekkala (The Golden Compass)
In a world where children and accompanied by shape-shifting daemons and everyone is seemingly obsessed with magical gold dust, witches seem practically mundane. Don’t let that fool you, though, for Serafina Pekkala and her sisters are well worth the attention.
Serafina (played by Eva Green in the film) first appears in The Golden Compass, which is admittedly a better novel than it is a movie. In both versions, she is a witch queen hailing from her world’s version of Finland. Luckily, her kind is relatively impervious to cold. They also have daemons (familiar-like animals), like everyone else. However, these witches are not limited by the short distance requirements that restrain others.
Serafina and the other witches can also fly around on cloud pine. They take great meaning from this ability. Serafina herself says that “A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves”.
All witches in this world are also incredibly long-lived. Serafina believes that she’s somewhere around three hundred years old, while the oldest woman in her clan is nearly a thousand. That lifespan has its advantages, but its drawbacks, too. Witches are necessarily remote from most humans, given that the short human lifespan seems like little more than the blink of an eye from a witch’s perspective.
Nevertheless, Serafina risks great emotional pain when she has a child with another character, Farder Coram. Male children are regular old humans, while female children inherit the abilities and lifespans of their mothers. Pekkala’s and Coram’s child is a boy, though he later died of disease.