The Scarlet Witch is a horror villain.
When Doctor Strange visits Wanda at her cherry blossom orchard of exile, he’s expecting an Avenger. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, mysterious multiversal demons are on the hunt for America Chavez, a teenager with the power to travel between universes. Strange seeks the help of a powerful ally. What he finds instead is the film’s villain: the Scarlet Witch. Wanda will go on to chase him and America Chavez through the multiverse like a demonic entity, and will kill mercilessly like a slasher villain’s worst nightmare. This fiery wrath makes her virtually unstoppable. It’s quite a heel turn for a superhero who once dog-walked Thanos. Marvel, thankfully, had a proper horror director to bring the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) most terrifying villain center-fold. (Beware, spoilers ahead.)
Multiverse of Madness is a homecoming for Sam Raimi. While not his first comic book rodeo, it’s his first for the MCU. Raimi has A LOT of ground to cover with Wanda, whose arc is spread across multiple movies and one limited series on Disney+. This might be Benedict Cumberbatch’s movie, but Elizabeth Olsen is Raimi’s muse. She’s the focus of his wicked camera angles, gets the coldest lines and gnarliest kills, and is given the most harrowing scenes in the film. He understands that Wanda’s journey is a horror story, one of tragedy and profound loss. Raimi takes her sprawling, complicated tapestry and brings it all home.
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When we first meet her in Avengers: Age of Ultron, she’s neither Avenger nor Scarlet Witch. She’s Wanda Maximoff, a budding yet powerful telekinetic. She’s also an orphan, the foundation of many a superhero origin story. In Wanda’s case, it’s her villain upbringing. She and her twin brother Pietro lost their parents in a bombing, a tragic event that puts them on the opposing side of Earth’s mightiest heroes. They volunteered as test subjects for an Infinity Stone experiment that gave them their powers. This also gives them the chance to avenge their parents. Wanda is a supernatural force to be reckoned with because her telepathic abilities mean she can’t be traditionally fought with fists or hammers or shields.
Wanda succeeds in tearing the Avengers apart. She plays mind games with them, one by one casting visions of their worst fears. Iron Man has a premonition of the endgame; Thor witnesses the destruction of his homeworld by his hand; Black Widow confronts a repressed memory; Captain America relives his biggest regret. Wanda and Pietro eventually align with the Avengers when the psychotic AI robot Ultron uproots Wanda’s home country of Sokovia in his plan to destroy humanity. In the end, it’s her worst fear that comes true. Pietro dies, and Wanda is left as the sole survivor of her family.
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Following the destruction of Sokovia, she finds a companion and eventual life partner in Vision, a synthetic being brought to life by the Mind Stone (the same Infinity Stone that gave Wanda her powers). They’re intertwined in this sense. The Avengers compound is the first home she and Vision ever shared, an odd meet-cute story befitting an odd couple. But their runaway romance is short-lived when a genocidal mad Titan named Thanos comes knocking for the gem on Vision’s forehead.
Infinity War asks Wanda to do the impossible: kill Vision to prevent Thanos from obtaining the last Infinity Stone in his plot to eradicate half the universe. She does the unthinkable. Thanos, however, rewinds time using the Time Stone and plucks the gem from Vision, killing him again. In one reality, she’s responsible for killing the love of her life. In another reality, she’s helpless to stop it. Wanda is the only Avenger who loses twice in the conflict. The heroes succeed in bringing back half the universe in Endgame. But they can’t bring back Vision.
Wanda may have been able to take on Thanos one on one, but she cannot face a world without Vision. After four movies, the lonely Sokovian orphan has lost half of her world: “It’s just like this wave washing over me again and again. It knocks me down and when I try to stand up, it just comes for me again.”
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Wanda’s powers evolve in each stage of her grief. WandaVision is the final step. Her overlapping trauma unleashes a hex in which she can remake existence as she wants it to be. Her new (albeit fractured) reality takes the form of a sitcom where Vision never died and she gave birth to twins, Billy and Tommy. A shot at happiness, finally—her loss and lonesome sublimated into a wish-fulfillment of a family. The brutal twist is that none of what takes place in the hex is real. The residents of Westview are real, their minds and bodies held hostage to Wanda’s reach as showrunner. It’s a prelude for Multiverse of Madness, where the lives of others become secondary to her happy ending.
In the aftermath of WandaVision, she’s once again alone, and has exiled herself to a cabin in the woods with a taste of what could’ve been. She’s the final girl of the saga who’s had it up to here with being the final girl. How many times can the universe take things from you until you want them back? Frankly, this universe isn’t enough for her anymore.
By the time we revisit Wanda in Multiverse of Madness, we meet someone who has given in to her despair: “Every night, the same dream. And every morning, the same nightmare.” The Hex was a cocoon. What emerges doesn’t need a broomstick or cauldron or ruby slippers—though she does arrive in a puff of smoke early on. This time she’ll stop at nothing to find a new reality where the suffering is just a bad dream. America Chavez is the key. (A general witch rule of thumb; witches often need a human sacrifice for their misdeeds.)
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“If you knew there was a universe where you were happy, wouldn’t you want to go there?” Wanda tries to convince Doctor Strange. When he reminds her that her children aren’t real but were created using magic, Wanda says, “That’s what every mother does.” The Scarlet Witch will use dark magic to get her kids back. In doing so, she becomes a full-fledged haunting, a poltergeist. She slams doors shut, moves objects by sheer will, and gets inside people’s heads.
In her possession (or the thing that possesses her) is the Darkhold—Marvel’s book of the damned. As the Darkhold enables Wanda to dispense with the illusions of being a hero, it allows director Sam Raimi to cut loose. You can practically feel his giddiness once things start to get spooky. (One can see why he was brought on board.) Marvel movies casually reference Star Wars, Aliens, and Back to the Future. Raimi, then, introduces a whole horror curriculum to the MCU.
If the Necronomicon brought hell on Ash Williams, then the pages of the Darkhold bring the horrors of the multiverse upon Doctor Strange and America Chavez. Wanda is able to summon Lovecraftian monsters from the void like demon dogs or flying monkeys at her disposal. More importantly, the Darkhold gives her the ability to “dreamwalk”, or possess versions of herself in any universe to do her bidding. Through Raimi’s fiendish style, dreamwalking becomes the MCU version of demonic possession.
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Multiverse of Madness is a slick inversion of The Evil Dead. If an unseen entity chased a helpless woman through the woods, here it’s the vengeful Scarlet Witch chasing Doctor Strange through the gauntlet of the multiverse. Raimi mimics the relentlessness of Evil Dead II’s cabin run, Wanda charging through narrow corridors and busting down doors like she’s after Bruce Campbell’s soul.
And yet, Raimi isn’t shamelessly riffing on his own horror legacy. The fun of Multiverse of Madness is how Raimi takes Wanda’s tragic backstory and threads it into the Stephen King adaptation he always wanted to do. With Elizabeth Olsen, he’s found his Sissy Spacek. He paints the Scarlet Witch as Carrie, another story of a wunderkind telekinetic going through her own bloody awakening. Raimi frames her villain turn as if this was always coming.
Wanda had long been the anomaly of the Avengers—the one to be feared and controlled. “You locked me in my room,” Wanda had said to Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War. “I did it to protect you,” he reasoned back, and it bears a striking similarity to Carrie White’s own paranoid mother who locked her in a closet to repent. Wanda was still learning what she’s capable of. Instead of aiding her self-discovery, the Avengers put her in a straitjacket. At this stage, Wanda is done with other people deciding what’s best for her. She is Carrie humiliated on her prom night. She will not stop until her rage has been expended.
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Scarlet Witch may be a telekinetic unleashed, but her terror is very much slasher villain-inspired. She’s trying to kill a teenager throughout the movie, after all. She’s also prone to her own set of jump scares. When Strange momentarily confines Wanda to the mirror dimension, she escapes through reflective surfaces, the bones of her corporeal form contorting and reconstituting. Like Freddy Krueger pushing the barrier of the dream world into the physical world (or like Samara from The Ring on overdrive), the Scarlet Witch becomes a walking nightmare.
What she had previously done to the Avengers in Age of Ultron, she takes to the next level in Multiverse of Madness. Crash-landing into a new universe, Doctor Strange meets the Illuminati – the superhero protectors of Earth-838. That hardly makes it a sanctuary for Strange and America Chavez as the Illuminati instead are served up as fodder for Scarlet Witch. The creativity of the slaughter ought to make Freddy Krueger smile.
Black Bolt is quickly introduced as someone who can vanquish foes with his voice. He’s dispatched in the same manner as Wanda seals his mouth shut, and his horrified scream blows out the back of his skull. She proceeds to make string cheese out of Mr. Fantastic’s stretchy form, saws Captain Carter in half like a twisted magician’s act, and squashes the all-powerful Captain Marvel.
Professor X is no match for Scarlet Witch’s fiery wrath, either. The professor tries to break Wanda out of the Darkhold’s spell in her subconscious. Instead, Scarlet Witch snaps his neck like a toothpick. The Illuminati also have Ultron bots guarding the compound, signposts for how far Wanda Maximoff has come. She tears the refurbished Ultrons apart just as easily as the Illuminati.
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Going into the final stretch, Doctor Strange cannot fight Scarlet Witch through traditional means and spells. Like Nancy Thompson entering the dream world, Strange has to play by Scarlet Witch’s rules and use the Darkhold to stand a chance against her.
In the end, the only person who can stop the Scarlet Witch is Wanda herself. America Chavez gives Wanda what she wants, opening a portal to her sons. Except they don’t see their mother, they see a monster, and Wanda sees her reflection in the broken mirror, finally. Just as Carrie immolated herself in the fire, Wanda turns her throne atop a mountain of madness into a self-tomb.
Nothing ever really ends in the MCU so this may or may not be the end for the Scarlet Witch. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is nonetheless a fitting bookend to Wanda Maximoff’s story, her sympathetic arc and origins brought full circle. She gets to be more than a supporting character, and the MCU gets to do more than flex its own comic book lore. In Sam Raimi’s diabolical hands, the Scarlet Witch gets to be a Kandarian demon, a slasher villain with an inspired kill count, while donning the bloody gown of a Stephen King novel—and straight-up own as a villain.
