Why Do We Love Witches Like Esther Finch From ‘Dead Boy Detectives’?

Credit: Netflix

There was just something about the witch Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon) when she strolled onto the screen with her epic black cane and fabulous vocal fry. She just looked cool, literally described by one of the leads as “a sexy witch who smokes a lot. But in a cool way.”

Esther is a witch who steals children, and she is evil for it, but she also just comes off as the kind of person you want to party with. “Hi, I’m Esther,” she says nonchalantly, releasing a puff of smoke from her cigarette as she introduces herself to one of our leads. She is indifferent and confident all at once, and the viewer cannot help but revel in her awfulness.

Esther is a camp villain that I consider to be an instant classic. And while I do love her entire vibe, it’s worth reflecting on why we love villainous witches like Esther Finch and the not-so-great history behind that obsession.

Something Witchy

Esther is not the first fabulously evil witch out there. I always think of the sea witch Ursula (Pat Carroll) from The Little Mermaid (1989), the main antagonist of the movie, who convinces our lead, Ariel (Jodi Benson), to give up her voice for the chance to walk on land. She is 100% evil, and yet when she sings her musical number Poor Unfortunate Souls, upselling the naive princess on how she’s actually “good,” viewers like me cannot help but be won over by her confidence (at least a little bit).

Maybe your mind goes to the original Hocus Pocus (1993), where the villainous Sanderson sisters — who are also trying to steal children — say fabulous lines that I still repeat to this day. Perhaps you are a fan of The Witch (Krysten Ritter:) in Nightbooks (2021) or the dozens of other adaptations of Hansel & Gretel.

Esther is introduced in the show quite early. She comes across our dead boys Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) — the ghost protagonists of the series — on their first case of the pilot. They are tracking down a missing girl and learn that she is being held captive by our witch Esther, who feeds little children to her snake as part of a cruel bargain to remain eternally young and beautiful. “I’m done stealing children under the cloak of night,” she laments in one scene on the ‘unfairness’ of her position. “I wanna take them in broad daylight whenever I want. Is that too much?”

The boys stop her from feeding the child to her snake, and this angers Esther so much that she whips up an elaborate method of killing our leads. “A revenge starter kit,” she says gleefully to the owner of a magical antique store, setting the stage for a season of dark shenanigans.

Yet her awfulness is not just celebrated but deconstructed. We learn that she had an abusive husband who cheated on her. And so she prayed to Lilith, the Goddess of witches, to give her immortality. This deal, however, did not give Esther eternal beauty, and her vanity (not her past) leads her to hurt tons of other women (and girls) in the process.

Esther ultimately suffers as a result of this selfishness. Lilith is convinced by the magic user Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) to take back her immortality, pleading to Lilith: “You’re supposed to be the Goddess of wronged women, right? This witch, she took your gift, and then she killed hundreds of little girls to stay young! Who gets justice for them?”

And Lilith listens. She comes to Esther’s house and drags her to hell.

We see this sense of cosmic justice in a lot of media when it comes to our fabulous witches. Ursula may sing one of the best songs in the Disney Canon, but she is still speared by the bow of a ship. The witches in Hocus Pocus explode. The witch in Hansel & Gretel is burned alive in an oven.

This sense of punishment is partially a holdover from the moralism of the Hays Code and Television Code (and arguably Christianity more broadly), which required that media never reward villainous behavior. That message still lingers today, decades after both codes were repealed. When awful people are the villains in a narrative, viewers generally expect them to receive some kind of comeuppance.

That’s probably a fine standard if your villain’s motivations satisfy contemporary notions of unethicalness. I’m not losing sleep over Ursla, the slave trafficker, or Esther, the child murderer, getting an unhappy ending.

Yet, it bears emphasizing why certain archetypes are often villainous. A lot of these fabulous witches are coded as evil because of our history. I have talked about it before, but our demonization of witches is the result of the deadly moral panics in Europe and the Americas. Witches were purposefully associated with Satan and became societal folk devils. It’s those purges that are why we now so often associate witchcraft with evil today. As I write in The Problematic Christian Propaganda in Disney’s ‘Hocus Pocus’:

“From the 14th to 17th century, it’s estimated that somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 “witches” were killed (though some older estimates place this far higher), and overwhelmingly these victims were women. Some theorize that these purges were because witchcraft competed with Christianity’s role in explaining the world. Others claim that it was a way for the Catholic Church to compete with its emerging protestant competitors (i.e., we kill your witches better than the other guy).

There are many competing theories, but regardless of the overall justification, assuming a singular one even exists at all, Christian officials took advantage of gender inequities to kill tens of thousands or possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. It’s important to note that these practices have still not technically died. Thanks to imperialism, Christianity was spread all over the world, and witch hunts have been reported in places as far-ranging as Papua New Guinea and Sub-Sahara Africa.”

In other words, we associate witches with evil for a reason.

A witchy conclusion

Maybe that’s why I can’t help but love Esther and Ursula and the thousands of fabulous witches out there on the silver screen and page. They are awful as much because of what they represent as for their evil deeds.

The Dead Boy Detectives plays with this expectation as Lilith is the Goddess of wronged women. The narrative is much more about helping other women (and punishing those who wrong them) than it is a demonization of witches specifically. The character who ultimately defeats Esther, Crystal Palace, is a powerful magic in her own right, and that is a beautiful message to end on.

It’s not evil for women to practice magic — it’s how they wield it.