magic

Salem: A Witch Show That Is Actually Quite Scary

With all these TV shows about witches (last season’s American Horror Story: Coven, Lifetime’s Witches of East End, True Blood, Supernatural), is it possible that WGN’s Salem might be the scariest of the bunch? Basically, all you need to know before watching the second episode this Sunday (aside from what channel WGN occupies on your cable) is that there’s a witch in town and everyone’s trying to find him and/or her. But we know it’s a her, and she and her clan of magical women are doing their best to mess with Salem and its slew of paranoid citizens. In the creepiest ways they can. For example:

Here is how witches give and/or get an abortion.
You rub weird stuff on the face and pregnant belly, awful visions arrive, a bunch of cockroaches appear, and poof! You’re not pregnant anymore.

This poor, poor frog.
The witch is keeping (incubating?) a frog in her enemy’s gut and takes it out every once in a while …

… to suck her witches’ mark? Is that what that is?

A possessed girl has to identify the witch who cursed her …
So they put her on a leash and have her scary-walk around the town before biting off her own finger (eek) and pointing at “the witch.” (It’s not the witch, but that doesn’t really matter.)

Shane West’s wig.
It’s like Shane West went and borrowed the Antonio Banderas wig from the set of Saturday Night Live’s “The How Do You Say? Ah Yes, Show.” Beard’s a good look, but could we have done without the horror of this hairpiece?

Salem: A Witch Show That Is Actually Quite Scary