How historically accurate is this film and does this movie make you sympathize with witch hunts?
>man I used to think witch hunts were bad but now that I saw this fictional movie I realize they were justified all along.
I think witch hunts are one of the few things that have zero defenders left in the present day because they were so retarded. They don't have the excuse of 'it was a different time' either, because people actually didn't believe as strongly in evil spells and witches prior to the witch hunting craze.
There were some nice touches in the movie alluding to actually European witch 'mythology' as it were. The flight ointment made from the fat of a baby and the book in which people sign their souls over to the devil for example.
Thomasin was qt.
It was all bullshit. The Puritans were highly letigious and sued one another and accused each other of being witches all the time. Their society was communal so all disputes were settled in public in front of a court. There were feuds between neighbors and between the separate communities of Salem Town and Salem Village (over which side to build the church or some dumb shit like that) so they started flinging deadly accusations at each other. Hysteria, intimidation, and theatrics took over in what is now a well-documented psychological situation, resulting in complete chaos, panic, and mayhem.
One particularly rich family of Salem Town (the name escapes me atm) quarreled with everyone to try to get their way so often that over the course of 50 years or so they brought almost 200 accusations of witchcraft against others in the community, just to have them hauled into court and humbled. It was all bullshit and like 2% of the people accused ever were punished... because normally it wasn't done in a full-fledged hysteria.
People treat each other like shit, and we're so horrible that we laugh at how horrible the dumb people of the past were, with the same contempt that people in the future will have for us. There is absolutely no justification for the witch hunts of the past, and even then they fucking knew it.
I've seen some stuff about how some Bishop in France under Louis XIV or XV ended up capturing a "witch" and wrote Rome for advice on what to do, the reply was essentially "witchcraft isn't real dumbass, let her go." I'll see if I can dig it up. (France, interestingly has a very low level of executions for Witchcraft)
On the other hand there were the Torsåker witch trials in central Sweden where they basically beheaded half the women in the parish because:
>The priest had two boys stand at the door of the church to identify the witches by an invisible mark on their forehead as they went in. On one occasion, one of these boys pointed at the wife of the priest himself, Britta Rufina; people gasped but she (as she told her grandson who wrote down the story) then slapped the boy, and he quickly apologized when he saw who he had pointed at, and said he had been blinded by the sun. This could very well have been true, as he would not have dared to point at the wife of a priest if he had recognised her.
>Hornæus was a priest with a terrifying reputation; the witnesses of the witch trial were mostly children, as the main accusations of the witches was that they had abducted children on the sabbath of Satan, and Hornaeus had several methods to get them to give the testimony he wanted. He whipped them, he bathed children in the ice cold water of a hole in the ice in the lakes in winter, he put them in an oven, showed them fuel and pretended that he would light the fire in the oven and boil them. His grandson, Jöns Hornæus, who wrote down the story in 1735 after it was dictated by his grandmother, Laurentius Hornæus' wife Britta Rufina, was quoted as saying: "I remember some of these witnesses, who by these methods were in lack of health for the rest of their lives". He adds that children were still, sixty years afterwards, afraid to go near the house where his grandfather lived.
Apparently afterwards most of the accusers turned up with their throats cut.
>>1406207
>How historically accurate is this film
In what sense? There is no reliable evidence of any sort for satanic powers or witches.
>>1406318
>France, interestingly has a very low level of executions for Witchcraft
No surprise there, because burning witches was more of a protestant thing. The Catholic church mostly murdered people for political reasons, not because of superstition.
Nobody gave a shit about witches. It was all just hysteria and people exploiting hysteria to murder others that they didn't like. The official stance of the Church was that witchcraft didn't exist and witches were either nonexistent or just LARPing idiots.
>>1406335
uuuuuuuuh the Spanglish Inquisition was a Catholic affair and tens if not hundreds of thousands were put to death. witchcraft was one of the maine heresies they investigated. the Inquisition is when they invented the "three degrees" of torture and learned to extract false confessions. it was an absolute murderous Catholic shitshow of the highest order.
While I wouldn't call it historically accurate I think it did a really good job of putting you in that mindset of witchcraft being a legitimate thing one worried about.
If they had gone for realism and made it just a baseless witch hunt all that the audience would get out of it was "haha those silly savages" but by making witchcraft real in the context of the movie it gave a neat glimpse into the sort of fear you'd have of a witch tormenting you and your family.
They also got lots of little details done right, the guy obviously did his research even if he did take a few liberties.
>>1406358
>tens if not hundreds of thousands were put to death
>witchcraft was one of the main heresies they investigated.
Literally what. Who the fuck told you that. Read Kamen.
>>1406340
>Nobody gave a shit about witches.
The fact that William Perkins' treatise on Witchcraft was so widely read in England disagrees with you.
People overblow the actual legal persecution of witches (in England in particular the law was pretty diligent about not giving into hysteria too much) but there was a very wide belief in them during the 16th century.
>>1406340
People absolutely believed in witches. Did certain individuals and authorities cynically use witchcraft charges to settle personal or ideological scores? Yes. But people, especially common people, certainly did believe and were often quite terrified of the supernatural and witches in particular.
>>1406440
Women bore the brunt of the trials because they were viewed as more lustful and weaker-minded than men, which made them more susceptible to demonic influence. Quite a few men ended up before the courts too, though. Some accusations were more common for one gender than the other.
For example, men tended to get slapped with werewolf charges more often than did women.
>>1406340
Henri Boguet, the Chief Justice of Saint-Claude, declared around the year 1590 that 'there are witches by the thousand everywhere' and likened their ability to reproduce to that of garden worms, or vermin, infecting many districts with their odious presence. In 1613, Pierre de Lancre, who had burnt about 80 people for witchcraft in the French-Spanish border region, expressed the view that the progress of witchcraft in that area was now unstoppable, and that the sect of witches had infiltrated itself into the Basque population at large, while some years earlier, in 1580, Jean Bodin, one of the most formidable intellects of his day, had declared that sorcerers were driven by a veritable 'demon-mania' to run after devils and to do their bidding. Such crimes, he believed, which were both atrocious and widespread, needed to be energetically met with the most grievous of punishments.
>>1406515
Jean Bodin was fucking crazy even by witch hunter standards.
All of the setting, the costuming, the props, etc was very accurate, lot of research went into developing that part of the film.
As far as story goes, well--the subtitle is 'A New England Folk Tale'. It's not about witch hunts; it's about witches.
Men should pay reparations.
I've always found the entire affair of the witch- and werewolf- hysteria in 16th century Europe to be fascinating. It's odd, because it's as though people particularly believed in such superstitious things before these took place. I always assumed it was a combination of religious unrest in the 16th century and the general worsening of affairs during that century, with famines, plagues, and endless wars contributing to people seeking out any scapegoats.
>>1406617
Renaissance high magic rested firmly on the quasi-mystical philosophy of Neoplatonism,Influential, too, were the so-called Hermetic writings,believed to be the works of an Egyptian sage contemporary with Moses, named Hermes Trismegistus.
>>1406358
Nope.
Aye we all know witch craft is made up fantasies, but those nobles in 17th century france did preform a black sabbath as well the hungarian jews who performed pass over with christian children blood
>>1406358
>Inquisition meme
Wow, they killed about 3,000 traitorous Jews and Muslims over the course of 700 years with due process, educated peasants, threw out torture based confessions, and refused to believe in witchcraft
So ebil
>>1406617
It's interesting to note that the majority of witch hunts in Europe happen on the borders between Catholic and Protestant controlled areas. Even the Pendle witches in England were most probably secret Catholics than anything else.
>>1406617
Don't forget the vampire panics in the Balkans at the time
It's so weird
Right when modern science was entering the world everyone suddenly turned paranoid and superstitious after 1000 years of "/x/ doesn't real (Except Jesus), faggots"
>>1406617
Werewolves (as they were perceived during this era) are my favorite. So fucking brutally evil.
I want a special wolf-belt from the Devil.
>>1406644
Don't forget to note how Catholic authorities condoned dropping peasants from airplanes as a humane form of execution--kind of like the compassionate Inquisition
Didn't a bunch of witch hunters also get executed for doing witchery/scamming people in England?
>>1406689
Don't know about that but in the Balkans there were men who claimed to be "half vampire" and would take money from frightened villagers before using their "second sight" to locate invisible vampires before making a spectacle of wresting with their cloaks, being praised for "slaying" the vampire, and fleeing with everyone's money
>>1406711
Jesus christ slavs are unbelievably retarded
>>1406718#
As though the shit Kramer, Spenger, Hopkins etc pulled out of their arses is any better?
>If she doesn't cry when you torture her, she's using magic to resist the pain and therefore a witch
>If she does cry when you torture her, she's using magic to get you to let her go and therefore a witch
>>1406730
That's pretty stupid but believing a literal mime just fought an invisible vampire in front of you is on a different level entirely.
>>1406718
Fuck off
I suppose killing cats en masse is smart then?
>>1406734
How much of that is a actual show though? Did they REALLY think he was fighting a vampire?
People in 500 years will be saying "those 21st century people were so stupid, they though this boy was a wizard, drove a flying car and shot spells out of a stick, because a literal actor pretended!"
>>1406758
It would have had to have been a pretty damn impressive performance for people to actually pay the guy.
>>1406763
How so? People give money for shitty performances all the time. Hell, people give other people ,only for a show that consists of them sitting on a chair or standing really still.
>>1406786
Wow, fucked up the English on this post but you get the message. People TODAY get into fist fights over the best location for their floating Yoda """"show"""" because it makes big money.
An actual actor putting on a actual show? People would most probably have thrown a few coins at him at least.
>>1406440
So what? You all had your widocracy, we can at least put you in check with witch hunts.
>>1406207
Thomasin had a great ass, I'm not surprised the kid wanted to fuck her.
>>1406763
Not really. Keep in mind two things about the past:
1) Entertainers were generally of a higher caliber. Not that no one can act now, but acting is an exceptionally rare skill now. We can get easy access to incredibly high levels of performance now through TV and internet. The only way to see a performance back then was to actually see it. This meant there was a market that could support a lot of lower level talent, rather then a small group of highly specialized talent.
2) There really wasn't all that much to do in old days. This really is a piece of the past that a lot of people miss. I was reading Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, and even before the party could command speaking fees, Hitler was making his living publicly speaking. And it's very clear he's not doing this by speaking to the choir. A lot of people are just seeing him for entertainment. People used to pay people to shitpost IRL.
>>1406358
The Spanish Inquisition - which isn't called 'Spanish' Inquisition out of random, but to distinguish it from the Roman Inquisition of the Catholic Church - was a political device of the Spanish Crown.
