At bare minimum, these villainous characters are painted as cold and unloving. In the 1950 Disney adaption of Cinderella, the vicious Lady Tremaine forces her stepdaughter into back-breaking labour, and encourages her biological children to shun their stepsister. The 1961 film The Parent Trap features two twins, unknowingly separated when their parents divorced; they join forces to overthrow their father’s horrible new fiancée, and reunite their family. And in the comedy-horror Wicked Stepmother, which first showed in 1989, the character played by Bette Davis is not only a stepmother, but also a literal and figurative witch.
