Movie Review: Drawing Down the Moon (1997)

A fairly obscure movie that features a realistic and positive portrayal of the Wiccan religion, and a solitary practitioner of it, is Drawing Down the Moon made by Steve Patterson in his hometown of Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Coming out on direct-to-video the year after the far better known (and far less accurate) The Craft, it is one of the movies that fell into the VHS to DVD transitional period of the mid-to-late ’90s where a number of films with very niche appeal were pretty much inaccessible to much of their target audience until people were able to start finding them again on eBay. Wonderfully acted by Karina Krepp, the story features as its main protagonist Gwynyth McBride, a Wiccan woman who comes to a small, economically depressed town and sets to work to do something about the serious drug, crime, and homelessness problem the community has become mired within. Aside from McBride’s cringe-y “white savior”-style meeting at the beginning of the film with the secondary protagonist who provides the film’s narration, and who very tolerantly and indulgently lets McBride perform magical healing rituals on her, (even while allowing for the possibility that McBride might be a Satanist, well…probably not, but she might be a little loony), the movie is for the most part well-written and well-shot. There are a few other moments of naive ’90s liberalism here and there that haven’t time-traveled too well, but the pacing is anything but slow, and Drawing Down the Moon succeeds by being genuinely entertaining, and more of an action movie and character piece than any real attempt at political diatribe. With its thoroughly humanized characters (the romance of the local Christian minister being my favorite subplot), and particularly with how surprisingly action-packed (and well-choreographed) it managed to be with such a small budget, it really deserves to better known. Many Sunbury locals volunteered as extras, or helped to feed the cast and crew, and the local Elks Lodge offered up their building for the main set. The movie’s one “name” actor, Star Trek’s Walter Koenig, is delightful as the eccentric local crime boss who comes into conflict with McBride over the real estate of the shelter. In 1997, Wicca was becoming a visible religion, completely distinguishable from the sensationalized horror movies of the 1970s, or the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, and this unusual little film is a pleasant celebration and remembrance of that brief period where religious Witchcraft was beginning to be recognized as a positive force in the lives of its sincere adherents, before it was effectively forced underground again due to the rapid balkanization of philosophically unmoored “Neo-paganism”. Drawing Down the Moon is a very unique movie, perhaps the sole movie of its kind, normalizing a Wiccan protagonist as she follows her own idiosyncratic path in life, and exactly the kind of thing that with minimal caveats can be shared, along with popcorn, with non-Wiccan family and friends.