Walt Disney Animation Studios has painted HEXED, its Thanksgiving release, in bright colors and coming-of-age wonder, but former psychic medium and Christian author Jenn Nizza is not charmed.
“[It] makes me think of Satan masquerading as an angel of light — and that’s really disturbing,” Nizza told CBN News.
Walt Disney Animation Studios’ official page for HEXED describes Billie, voiced by Hailee Steinfeld, as an impulsive and unconventional teenage girl who discovers secret magical abilities. Those powers pull her out of suburbia and into Hexe, a vast realm of witches, where she and her cautious mother, Alice, voiced by Rashida Jones, uncover family mysteries that could change the witches’ world.
The animated movie, directed by Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand, opens in theaters Nov. 25 and has not yet received a rating. Its official teaser offers a breezy invitation: “Welcome to Hexe, the world of witches.”
“It’s so important to disregard the aesthetic, because it’s the same evil and it’s the same author of these practices: the devil,” Nizza said. She argued that wrapping witchcraft in color, spectacle and a sympathetic coming-of-age story does not make it spiritually safe.
Related: Ex-Psychic Warns Against Being ‘Led Astray’ By Occult Elements
Nizza saw an uncomfortable echo of her own childhood in Billie’s hunger for identity and purpose. The character’s vulnerability, she said, leaves her open to the promise of power through witchcraft: “That is exactly how it started for me when those demonic doors were opened … at age 12 [or] 13.”
According to Nizza’s earlier account of her conversion, she practiced as a psychic medium, taught divination and once believed she was helping people find comfort and answers. After crying out to Christ and later attending church, she searched Scripture for what the Bible says about mediums and discovered Deuteronomy 18’s direct warning against divination, sorcery, spells and consulting the dead.
Scripture leaves plenty of room for imagination, but it draws a hard line at divination and sorcery. Entertainment crosses that line when it turns occult power into a glittering shortcut to wisdom, identity or control.
Movieguide® founder and chairman Dr. Ted Baehr offered a similar warning in a 2022 interview with The Christian Post about another Hollywood project centered on witchcraft. Baehr spoke from personal experience, explaining that he explored paganism before four Christian women helped point him to Jesus.
“Having grown up in the entertainment industry, with parents who were stars (my father starred in 62 movies), I engaged in all aspects of paganism, until four women who had come to know Jesus Christ at the New York Madison Square Garden Billy Graham Crusade in the 1950s helped me to know Jesus Christ in the 1970s,” Baehr said.
“All the false religions and occult practices failed ultimately to deliver because the Adversary promises but never really delivers. In contrast, Jesus Christ always delivers on his great promises, such as His promise to give each of us a more abundant life and freedom,” Baehr said.
Families have not seen the complete story of HEXED yet, so a trailer cannot settle every question about its final message or content. Still, the preview gives parents time before opening day to explain why spiritual power can look lovely on screen while pointing somewhere Scripture tells believers not to go.
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