Witch Craze Links: Film

Film

• Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Fact and Fiction: Historical inaccuracies in the play/film, plus good essay ideas.
• The Burning Times. A woefully historically-inaccurate historical film by the National Film Board of Canada. According to Jack Kapicka, "The film itself plays grisly havoc with history right from the start. It places Trier, a centre of much witch burning, in France, when it is a German town on the banks of Moselle River - shop signs clearly visible in the film are in German. The narration then says that a stone Christian cross in the market square was erected in 1132 (historians place it in 958) as the 'symbol of a new religious cult that was sweeping across Europe, 'which ignores the Christian presence in the town dating back to martyrs in 286, and its first bishop, St.Agritius, who died in 333."
• The Devils. Directed by Ken Russell in 1971, this is an excellent rendition of Huxley's The Devils of Loudun.
• Practical Magic. A very silly movie about modern witches. I include this here because of a hanging scene which takes place in colonial New England.
• Witchcraft Through the Ages. Also known as Häxan, this silent movie is from 1922 Sweden. Depicts the medieval view of witches, and shows how these delusions were in the minds of mentally-unbalanced women and sex-crazed clergy.
• Maid of Salem. A 1937 film on witches in Salem.
• Rediscovering America: The Salem Witch Trials. A one-hour documentary film for grade school students about the Salem witch trials.
• Les Sorcières de Salem. The French translation of Arthur Miller's The Crucible by Jean-Paul Sartre. Originally titled The Witches of Salem.
• Three Sovereigns For Sarah. "A fine made-for-television production starring Vanessa Redgrave as a woman accused of being a witch" during the Salem witch trials.
• Witch City. "A cautionary tale about the consequences of manipulating historical facts for present-day gains." Talks about the commercialization of witch trials in Salem.