One of the darkest phases of American history was the witch hysterias of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It is nearly impossible for us, living in our modern world, to understand that to the settlers of colonial New England, bewitchment was a very real and terrifying prospect. That a person can live according to God’s law and still be beset with bad luck and a hard life was difficult to for them to understand. Other forces must be at work - Satanic forces with ill designs on Godly people. We, with the distance of hindsight and the clarity of science, look upon those times as being infested with ignorance, fanaticism, paranoia, and ambition. We look upon the stories told and testimonies given as fanciful – ridiculously so. We see the accused witches as victims of their neighbors’ own fears and jealousies. We see the witch hysterias also as cautionary tales - warnings to us from antiquity to guard against abandoning reason in favor of supernatural answers. However, that one nagging, uncomfortable question always remains in the back of our minds; “What if?”
What if the tales and testimonials were true? What if the settlers of the time actually experienced a terrifying reality that we have somehow lost the ability to see? What if the witch hysterias were, in fact, justified? These questions were explored in an astounding Horror film from 2015. That film was Robert Eggers’ THE WITCH.
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