It wears its sources on its sleeve like Titus Andronicus, but it's an effective film nonethelesss. Blatantly influenced by Trump's immigration policy, border wall, and rampant sexism, the film envisions an alternate reality where a fictitious 11th amendment banning witchcraft has been in effect since 1789 (the actual eleventh amendment limits the pursuance of legal cases across state lines--important but not especially dramatic), and in which the ability to do magic is a genetically inherited trait. I was reminded a bit of Naomi Wallace's The Power because in this film, only women can be witches (of the 20 people executed in Salem for witchcraft in 1692, 14 were women/girls and six were men), which emphasizes the misogyny of the scenario. It gives off vibes of The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hiding Place, and made all the more resonant by the current genocide of Palestinians by Israel. The fact that they are being executed for traits with which they were born is also suggestive of LGBTQ+ persecution. Early in the film a high school girl mentions hoping that when Prop 6 (a bill imprisoning anyone who has witches in their bloodline for which sickening propaganda is shown talking about how the bill would say lives because of a case where the daughter of a convicted which killed people in a car accident, and the bill would have kept her aoff the road) passes, people with red hair will be shipped off to concentration camps.
I can't recall a film that was unabashedly supernatural horror in which the U.S. government were the villians and the supernatural characters were heroes. Night Breed is one of the few films that even has a similar feeling, though David Cronenberg's character is certainly not a government agent. The film might be scarier if it were because it certainly made this film scarier.
Elizabeth Mitchell, who played the Snow Queen on Once Upon a Time (a principal character in the first half of Season 4) is a widow hiding witches in in small corridors beyond the main walls of a large country house in rural southern California with her teenage daughter and small twin boys. The film is made scarier because even in a place like California, there is no outcry against the strict government enforcement of the 11th Amendment, which involves setting women on fire alive (which, of course, never happened in the American colonies and was typical of European exsceutions of alleged witches), and those who aren'tbigoted against witched have to pretend that they are much like conductors on the Underground Railroad..
The analogies may seem heavy-handed, but the rentlesslessness of the film and its updating of witch testing techniques (high school girls who have markings suggestive of witches have to take sink tests--they are gven apparatuses to breathe underwater, but it still proves fatal for some) have an intensity.
I did think the ending could have been better, and the fact that it's, while not idenitcal, but blatantly lifted from a certain film discussed by the character, does feel like a bit of a cop-out. Overall, though, it's an effective film that probably ought to be shown in high schools despite its R rating, mostly for showing charred flesh, which is of strong visceral importance, particularly since we may or maty not be seeing the spirits of the victims of these heinous (but legal) exectutions.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10160974/reference/
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