Raised by Witches: How Practical Magic Became An Emotional Blueprint

I don’t remember the first time I watched Practical Magic. I just know it found me. Like a spell that had already been cast, waiting for the right moment to rise.

I was probably too young, probably confused about why I was crying during the Stevie Nicks’ montage, probably pretending I didn’t want to live in a Victorian house surrounded by women who drink midnight margaritas and keep herbs in apothecary jars.
But somewhere in all of it: the charm, the grief, the magic, the mess, I realised I wasn’t just watching a movie. I was being shown a blueprint.

Let’s start with the house. That kitchen, those curved windows and creaking floors and long wooden tables where confessions taste like honey and grief brews beside the kettle. I wanted to live there; not just physically, but emotionally. A place where being strange wasn’t something to be fixed. Where women cried and cursed and danced and made space for each other.

I wasn’t just obsessed with the aunts, I wanted to be raised by them. Franny and Jet didn’t just offer wisdom. They offered permission to feel everything, to be eccentric and to be mournful and magical in the same breath. They showed me that you could grieve out loud and still laugh an hour later; that love, loss, and lemon verbena could live side by side.

Practical Magic is a deeply queer film, even if it doesn’t call itself that. It’s a story about women loving too hard, hurting too deeply, and refusing to shrink to make others comfortable. It’s about generational curses, both magical and emotional. It’s about sisters who screw up and stay.

When I was a young boy trying to make myself smaller in a town that didn’t say the word gay, this film whispered: feel everything anyway. Sally’s grief. Gillian’s chaos. The longing. The loneliness. The mess. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t repressed.
It was all out there. This film didn’t tell me to be perfect. It told me to be honest.

You don’t have to be queer to love Practical Magic, but I think being queer makes it hit different. Because we know what it’s like to be the town secret. To carry a love that others think is cursed. To want to be saved and still save yourself. To long for chosen family, ritual, and a place to set all your softness down without apology.

That’s what this movie offers. Not a romance, but a reckoning. Not a climax, but a coven. And every time I watch it—yearly, religiously—I remember that I was never too sensitive. Never too dramatic. Never too much. I was just learning how to hold magic in a body that hadn’t been told it was allowed to.

I’m older now. The grief is real. The magic is metaphorical. The kitchen is rented. But I still cry during the Stevie Nicks’ montage. I still watch this film every year. And I still light candles when I don’t know what else to do.

Because Practical Magic wasn’t just about witches. It was about survival. It was about feeling everything too much and managing to keep loving anyway. It was about making a home inside yourself, even if the world calls you strange for it.

And it taught me; quietly, powerfully; that if you’re going to be haunted, you might as well be haunted together.