The supernatural is big these days. The Harry Potter film franchise has just concluded, Twilight is still on the crazed minds of teenage girls (and a handful of older women), while the ever-popular True Blood series of books and TV shows is satisfying. the adult purveyors of magical and superhuman persuasion.

Vampires, wizards, witches, werewolves – they’ve completely saturated movies and books in recent years, sparking the mainstream’s desire for the fantastic.

However, those who would like some classic supernatural fun have plenty of options. An excellent choice, especially if you like witches and power prophecies, is William Shakespeare’s famous warning drama Macbeth. It has creepy spells, bubbling cauldrons, haunting ghosts, creepy hallucinations, and a group of mysterious women with beards to boot. What could not be loved?

The opening of the play is the real cincher. It’s a dark and stormy night, always a good sign for some eccentric things, not unlike another good classic Edgar Allan Poe supernatural choice, Edgar Allan Poe’s equally violent and creepy poem, The Raven, about a grieving man standing encounters an otherworldly and connoisseur raven with a vocabulary of just one. word. Talking birds? Chilling.

Back to Macbeth summary. An eerie fog hangs over the night-shrouded plains of Scotland, where three witches, or strange sisters, as the play calls them, are planning something mysterious to do with Macbeth, speaking in rhymes and using wacky words like “hurly-burly.” , “newt’s eye” and “frog toe”.

In fact, it is the Macbeth quotes that really fuel the supernatural fun, spawning the famous couplet “Double, double work and trouble / Burning fire and cauldron bubble.” Coincidentally, that was the name of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s Halloween movie. Equally creepy.

Later in the play, when Macbeth encounters these lovely ladies after an epically violent battle in which Macbeth kicked Major, they trap him in a strange prophecy. They call him the future King of Scotland, only to awaken his selfish and ambitious tendencies, and then they vanish into thin air as all good and bad witches do. The seed has been planted, and so Macbeth begins on his bloodthirsty path to the Scottish throne.

It is important to note, however, that the witches do little in terms of action to assist Macbeth in this supposed prophecy, leading readers to assume that what is at stake here are not supernatural forces of fate, but rather supernatural elements that they take advantage of it. man’s egos in a sports game. Macbeth himself comes up with the whole plan to murder everyone in my path, with a little encouragement from Lady Macbeth, of course.

Harry Potter fans can see some common ground between Macbeth and Lord Voldemort, where a single prophecy about a childish adversary puts the dark wizard on a years-long path of supernatural destruction, only to end up losing the big picture and getting Avada Kedavra- ed. until death in the end.

Such commonalities, though few, are driven by supernatural elements and are efforts by both Shakespeare and JK Rowling, who comment on the dangers of ambition and power being in the wrong hands. It’s the classic theme of good versus evil, amplified by creepy women who speak in rhymes and say enigmatic things like “fair is bad and bad is fair.” But that is usually the goal of most supernatural and fantastic literature: to reflect and comment on what brings out the worst or the best in humanity. Macbeth is certainly positioned as a warning about the uncontrollable ego, ambition, and evil within man and how we can conquer it. And it only takes a few nosy witches to show us.