Voodoo Vibes

Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 08/05/2008 Run time: 124 minutes Rating: Pg13

The Salem witch hunts are given a new and nasty perspective when a vengeful teenage girl uses superstition and repression to her advantage, creating a killing machine that becomes a force unto itself. Pulsating with seductive energy, this provocative drama is as visually arresting as it is intellectually engrossing. Arthur Miller based his classic 1953 play on the actual Salem witch trials of 1692, creating what has since become a durable fixture of school drama courses. It may look like a historical drama, but Miller also meant the work as a parable for the misery created by the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings of the 1950s. This searing version of his drama delves into matters of conscience with concise accuracy and emotional honesty. Three passionate cheers for Miller, director Nicholas Hytner, and costars Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. --Rochelle O'Gorman

Unsolved History is history the way it was! Through detailed examination of archaeological and forensic evidence, existing photographs, authentic artifacts, and carefully selected interviews from eyewitnesses and experts - events are reconstructed and historical questions are finally answered. When a strange epidemic swept through the Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, doctors were dumbstruck. Symptoms like repeated convulsions and the constant uttering of strange, alien phrases seemed to point to only one answer - witchcraft. What followed was one of the most notorious and darkest years in early American history. More than 100 people were imprisoned and 37 were killed because of their purported involvement with witchcraft. Investigators examine the 17th century groundswell of anti-witch sentiment from a scientific viewpoint, testing some of the theories that have been proposed over the years. Researchers test whether mass psychosis triggered by moldy bread could have been responsible for the hysteria, or whether an outbreak of encephalitis - an inflammation of the brain that often causes fever and delusions - could have been the culprit. Historians point to severe stress among the populace caused by the repressive Puritan way of life, while others suggest a more mundane cause: The witch trials may have been an attempt to seize land from the wealthy accused. Finally, experts examine some of the "tests" and "interrogation methods" used to extract confessions from the accused, revealing the ineffectiveness of these methods and - more importantly - what their savagery says about the ability of the human body to withstand undue stress.

In 1692 Puritan Samuel Sewall sent twenty people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts represent a low point of American history, made famous in works by Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges), and Arthur Miller. The trials might have doomed Sewall to infamy except for a courageous act of contrition now commemorated in a mural that hangs beneath the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House picturing Sewall's public repentance. He was the only Salem witch judge to make amends. But, remarkably, the judge's story didn't end there. Once he realized his error, Sewall turned his attention to other pressing social issues. Struck by the injustice of the New England slave trade, a commerce in which his own relatives and neighbors were engaged, he authored "The Selling of Joseph," America's first antislavery tract. While his peers viewed Native Americans as savages, Sewall advocated for their essential rights and encouraged their education, even paying for several Indian youths to attend Harvard College. Finally, at a time when women were universally considered inferior to men, Sewall published an essay affirming the fundamental equality of the sexes. The text of that essay, composed at the deathbed of his daughter Hannah, is republished here for the first time. In Salem Witch Judge, acclaimed biographer Eve LaPlante, Sewall's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, draws on family lore, her ancestor's personal diaries, and archival documents to open a window onto life in colonial America, painting a portrait of a man traditionally vilified, but who was in fact an innovator and forefather who came to represent the best of the American spirit.

The Salem witch hunt has entered our vocabulary as the very essence of injustice. Judge Samuel Sewall presided at these trials, passing harsh judgment on the condemned. But five years later, he publicly recanted his guilty verdicts and begged for forgiveness. This extraordinary act was a turning point not only for Sewall but also for America's nascent values and mores. In Judge Sewall's Apology, Richard Francis draws on the judge's own diaries, which enables us to see the early colonists not as grim ideologues, but as flesh-and-blood idealists, striving for a new society while coming to terms with the desires and imperfections of ordinary life. Through this unsung hero of the American conscience -- a Puritan, an antislavery agitator, a defender of Native American rights, and a Utopian theorist -- we are granted a fresh perspective on a familiar drama.

May it please yr Honble Court, we the Grand inquest now setting for the County of Fairefeild, being made sensable, not only by Common fame (but by testamonies duly billed to us) that the widow Mary Staple, Mary Harvey ye wife of Josiah Harvey & Hannah Harvey the daughter of the saide Josiah, all of Fairefeild, remain under the susspition of useing witchecraft, which is abomanable both in ye sight of God & man and ought to be witnessed against. we doe therefore (in complyance to our duty, the discharge of our oathes and that trust reposed in us) presente the above mentioned pssons to the Honble Court of Assistants now setting in Fairefeild, that they may be taken in to Custody & proceeded against according to their demerits.Download The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut Now!