Eight Movies About New England Witches You Should Watch

Although the Puritan era witch trials ended centuries ago, the fear of and fascination with witches still lingers in New England. Witchcraft doesn't die. It just bides its time and waits. 

Here is a short list of films, primarily horror movies, that deal with New England witches of several varieties. Watch them for entertainment or as cautionary tales. You'll never know what you might see out in the woods or what that mysterious neighbor is really up to. And don't forget: a witch hunt is always scarier than a witch.


Horror Hotel (aka City of the Dead) (1960)
College student Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) has an interest in the history of New England witchcraft. At the urging of her advisor (Christopher Lee) she decides to visit Whitewood, Massachusetts, where  a witch named Elizabeth Selwyn was burned at the stake in 1692. Whitewood is a perpetually foggy and slightly surreal village filled with eccentric inhabitants but Nan settles in at the Raven's Inn to pursue her research. She soon discovers evidence that that Elizabeth Selwyn may not be dead. What else do you expect when your adviser is Christopher Lee?

I feel compelled to point out that witches in New England were executed by hanging, not by burning. That's just a minor quibble about an overall great horror movie, though. Horror Hotel starts out pretty mild but becomes surprisingly scary and has a shocking plot twist about halfway through. The black and white cinematography is atmospheric and creepy. Don't watch this one alone at night.

Dunwich Horror (1970)
I think I was ten or eleven years old when I first read H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Dunwich Horror." I was so scared I had to stop reading halfway through (although I finished it the next day). This 1970 film version isn't particularly scary but is still a lot of fun. Once again we have a college student getting into trouble, but this time it's all-American sweetheart Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner, a student at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. After a lecture by her professor Nancy is returning a copy of The Necronomicon to the library when she's approached by Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), a dreamy young occultist from rural Dunwich who just wants a peak inside the forbidden book. Her professor interrupts but Nancy ends up giving Wilbur a ride home. Faster than you can say "Yog-Sothoth!" she's drugged, hypnotized, and the focus of a demonic sex ritual...

This is definitely a product of it's time, with a psychedelic monster in the attic and hallucinations involving sinister pagan hippies. Nancy's ritualistic rape still feels shocking, though, particularly in this #MeToo moment and is the one serious note in what is otherwise campy Lovecraftian fun.

Crowhaven Farm (1970)
Maggie (Hope Lange) inherits an old farm in Essex County, Massachusetts after a relative dies in a bizarre accident. She and her husband Ben (Paul Burke) decide to leave New York City and relocate to the farm, hoping it will rekindle their failing marriage. After she learns a coven of witches was executed there in the 1600s, Maggie begins having visions of angry Puritans and to feel a strange sense of deja vu. Things get really weird when Maggie and Ben take in an orphaned adolescent girl who becomes sexually fixated on Ben. Will Maggie learn the  secret of Crowhaven Farm in time to save her marriage - and her life?

Crowhaven Farm was made for television and is fondly remembered by people who saw it when they were kids. I've only seen it as an adult. I thought it was kind of funny that the producers tried to pass off mountainous Southern California as Massachusetts and that the characters talk about Lowell like it's a huge metropolis. On the other hand, the orphaned girl is creepy in a few different ways and the movie does have a nice shocking ending.

The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978)
Another made for TV production, this two-part miniseries was based on Tom Tryon's bestselling 1973 novel Harvest Home. As in Crowhaven Farm, a couple leaves the big city for the country hoping to find a peaceful life. But the Connecticut village of Cornwall Coombe is more than your average rural farm community. It's also home to a pagan fertility cult ruled over by the Widow Fortune (Bette Davis), and she takes her religious duties very seriously. Every seven years the villagers choose a new man to preside as Corn King over the Harvest Home celebration. But why won't anyone tell the newcomers what happens at the festival?

I was debating if I should include this one on the list. On one hand, the villagers of Cornwall Coombe aren't Satan-worshipping spellcasters like some of the witches on this list. On the other hand, Tom Tryon was obviously inspired by the writings of anthropologist James Frazer and poet Robert Graves, two writers whose work also inspired the modern witch-cult of Wicca. And the Widow Fortune's interest in herbalism would resonate with a lot of Instagram witches today. Think of this one as the American version of The Wicker Man.

Hocus Pocus (1993)
Once again Puritan-era witches return from the dead, but this time they're played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy. Oh, and the movie's a comedy from Disney! But despite the comedic overtones the plot is still rather dark. Three executed witches who are accidentally resurrected by a teenage boy trying to impress his crush devise a plan to suck the souls out of all the children in Salem on Halloween to gain eternal life. Not the lightest of comedies!

 

This was a modest hit when it was released in theaters but gained a huge following in subsequent when it aired on cable and as a VHS and DVD rental. Hocus Pocus still brings in millions of viewers when it airs on cable, particularly around Halloween. I guess those witches do have some magic after all! One bonus attraction for New Englanders: many of the outdoor scenes were shot in Salem and Marblehead, giving the movie some authentic Massachusetts flavor.

The Crucible (1996)
All the movies I've mentioned so far have been horror movies, but The Crucible isn't. Based on Arthur Miller's classic 1953 play, this drama points out what the other movies don't: there weren't really any witches in Salem, just innocent people persecuted because of ignorance and hatred. Although The Crucible isn't 100% historically accurate it drives home its point with strong performances from Daniel Day-Lewis as John Proctor and Winona Ryder as his accuser Abigail Williams.

Although The Crucible was praised by critics and nominated for multiple awards it didn't take in much money at the box office. I guess viewers would rather be scared by fictional witches than be reminded about the dark side of this country's past.

The Lords of Salem (2012)
When Salem radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie) plays a record from an unknown band called the Lords of Salem she has an eerie vision of witches worshiping Satan. Her co-workers at the radio station brush it off as just a hallucination, but Heidi's not so sure, particularly when other strange things start to occur. Heidi's downstairs neighbors give her an ominous Tarot reading. A local historian interrogates Heidi about the Lords of Salem's music, which is oddly familiar to him. And most importantly, a hideous naked witch keeps materializing in Heidi's apartment...

 

The Lords of Salem was directed by horror-rocker Rob Zombie and I think it's probably the best movie he's made. It's beautiful to watch, with innovative costumes, sets and special effects. Although it is another variation on the "dead witches won't stay dead" theme it filled me with an impending sense of dread, making it one of the more effective movies on this list. Rob Zombie is also from my hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and he ably captures the New England gloom with scenes shot on location in Salem.

The Witch (2015)
Another film made a New England native, Robert Eggers's The Witch made a big arthouse splash when it opened and also made a goat named Black Phillip a pop culture phenomenon. Much like Crowhaven Farm and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, it too focuses on a family whose plans to leave their old home and start anew are thwarted by witches, but this time the family in question is kicked out of a 17th century Puritan settlement and moves deep into the New England wilderness. Eggers worked hard to make the film feel like a window into the past, going so far as to incorporate snippets from 17th century documents into the script as dialogue. I think audiences expecting a traditional horror film were puzzled but The Witch is now considered a classic in the folk horror genre. 

Well, that wraps up my list. If you have any other suggestions please leave them in the comments. I'm always looking for good movies about witches.

Ominous Lore About the Whippoorwill

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I'm so lonesome I could cry

Hank Williams Sr., "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (1949)

I've never heard a lonesome whipporwill, or any whippoorwills at all. I've been a city person all my life and whippoorwills don't like the city. These nocturnal bird prefer to live in the woods, where they nest on the ground during the day. They are quite hard to see due to the camouflaging effect of their feathers.

Whippoorwills are active at dawn and dusk, and on nights when the moon is full. They fly around catching insects (yum!) and making their distinctive cry. If you listen closely it might sound like "Whip poor Will," which is how the bird got its English name.

Whippoorwills are mentioned in quite a few songs, but for people who read this blog they might be most familiar from H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Dunwich Horror", which is set in rural central Massachusetts. According to Dunwich folklore, when a person nears death the birds come to steal their soul:

Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times...

Dunwich's resident evil wizard Old Whateley sees the whippoorwills as an omen of his own approaching doom:

Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had almost come.

When Old Whateley is finally on his deathbed, the local doctor witnesses some folklore in action:

He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not far off... The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural—too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.

Lovecraft often incorporated authentic folklore into his stories, and it seems that he first learned that whippoorwills are omens of death from his friend Edith Miniter, who lived in Wilbraham, Massachusets. Miniter told Lovecraft that people in her town said the birds appeared when someone was close to death and would try to steal the person's soul as it fled their body. She didn't say exactly what they do it they catch it. Whippoorwills do eat moths and other small things that fly, so maybe a human soul is just another snack to them?

Miniter didn't make up this piece of lore. For example, Clifton Johnson heard it from his informants in western Massachusetts when he was writing his book What They Say in New England (1896), decades before Lovecraft and Miniter ever met.

Gertrude Decrow related similar beliefs in her 1892 article "Folk-Lore from Maine" (The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 5, no. 19). Decrow was told that if a whippoorwill sings under a window or near a door for several nights it is sign someone in the house will die. For example, once a whippoorwill sang repeatedly at the back door of a family's house. The family's son died soon after, and his corpse was carried in through the same back door where the bird sang. According to Decrow seeing a partridge on the doorstep in the morning is also an omen of death, so the whippoorwill is not the only spooky bird around.

Going even further back, the Reverend Samuel Peters wrote in his General History of Connecticut (1781) that the whippoorwill is also called the pope:

It is also called the pope, by reason of its darting with great swiftness, from the clouds almost to the ground and bawling out Pope! which alarms young people and the fanatics very much, especially as they know it to be an ominous bird.

Peters claims people were wrong to fear the bird, since it could also predict storms, which was helpful.

All this whippoorwill folklore might be older than even the first English settlers. According to a video on their website, the Mohegan tribe believed that the makiawisug, the magical little people of the forest, could transform into whippoorwills to travel through the woods. Not particularly ominous, but still you don't want to mess with the makiawisug.

Anthropologist William Simmons notes that the Mohegan word for whippoorwill also meant small boy, and suggests that perhaps both whippoorwills and small boys were associated with the liminal realm between life and death. Why would children be associated with death? The death rate for young children was quite high in traditional Mohegan culture. In one Mohegan burying ground that Simmons excavated 35% of the skeletons were of children under nine years of age. (Cautantowwit's House. An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay, 1970)

That's a lot of mystery, gloom and doom for one small bird. To end this post on a lighter note, I will mention that the Penobscot of northern New England attributed a different meaning to the whippoorwill. They heard its cry not as "Whip poor Will" but instead as "li puli", which means to ejaculate semen. I suppose your fear or joy at hearing a whippoorwill depends on what mood you're in.

Celebrate H.P. Lovecraft's 125th Birthday This August

Cancel that clambake and skip the trip to the beach. This August you need to celebrate the 125th birthday of Howard Phillips Lovecraft!

H.P. Lovecraft, for those who don't know, was one of America's most influential fantasy and horror writers. Born into a wealthy Providence family on August 20, 1890, Lovecraft should have led a life of privilege and ease. Things didn't quite work out that way. His life is almost was almost as strange as his fiction.

After his father died in an insane asylum, little Howard and his mother went to live with her father in his Providence mansion. As a boy he was spoiled by his aunts and grandfather, but his mother told him he was too ugly to be seen in public and let him believe until he was three that he was a girl. Unsurprisingly, his mother also later died in an insane asylum and Lovecraft himself suffered from unspecified nervous and mental disorders throughout his early years.

H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft was quite intelligent. He never finished high school due to those nervous disorders but did read widely in his grandfather's extensive library. (It even included an original copy of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, which makes me jealous!) When his grandfather lost his money and died Lovecraft and his two aunts fell into poverty. Due to his many neuroses and his belief that he was of a superior social class Lovecraft never found full-time work. Instead, he dabbled in amateur journalism and wrote an estimated 100,000 letters. That's right - one hundred thousand letters. And they were long! At one point he sent one aunt a forty page letter every week.

Because he wrote so many letters, we know that he was quite racist. In his letters he railed against blacks, Jews, Mexicans, the Irish, French-Canadians, Asians, Italians, and even people from Finland. In short, he said didn't like anyone except white people of Anglo-Saxon descent. He also expressed strong homophobic opinions in some letters. On the other hand, he briefly married an Eastern European Jewish woman, and was good friends with several gay writers, including the poet Samuel Loveman, who served as his muse for several years. These actions seem to contradict all vitriol he included in his letters, and even the racism in those decreased as he grew older. He died in 1937 at the age of 47.

Lovecraft was a big tangle of neurotic contradictions, but in spite of this - or maybe because of this - he posthumously became the 20th century's most influential horror writer. He moved horror fiction away from the standard Gothic tropes of witches, ghosts and old castles into a new direction featuring extra-dimensional alien gods, hidden lost races, and secret tomes of blasphemous horror. He also liberally sprinkled New England history and folklore into his stories. If you've never read any of his fiction, "The Dunwich Horror," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and "Dreams In the Witch House" are good places to start and have a strong New England flavor.

The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

There are two big celebrations happening this August to mark Lovecraft's 125th birthday. For you cineastes, the Brattle Theater in Cambridge is holding an H.P. Lovecraft film festival from August 20 to August 24. They are showing a nice assortment of movies. Some are based closely on Lovecraft's writings, like the recently filmed but retro-spooky black and white films Call of Cthulhu (2005) and The Whisperer in Darkness (2011), which try to capture what a Lovecraft movie would look like if it were filmed during his lifetime.

The Crimson Cult (1968)

Other films update his stories and put them in a more contemporary setting. The Dunwich Horror (1970) takes Lovecraft into the Age of Aquarius, with Dean Stockwell as a dreamboat wizard aiming to destroy the world and Sandra Dee under attack by psychedelic hippies, while The Crimson Cult (1968) sets "Dreams In the Witch House" in swinging England, with Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele as a body-painted witch, and a brawny guy in a leather jockstrap. The New England flavor is gone, but these movies are so groovy it doesn't matter!

From Beyond (1986)

From Beyond (1986) gives Lovecraft the 1980s schlock treatment. When a group of scientists stimulate their pineal glands, they suddenly see the invisible extra-dimensional monsters that constantly surround us. Uh-oh! The monsters can see them as well. Rubbery special effects, leopard print lingerie, and lots of slime ensue.

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Other films are inspired by Lovecraft but aren't based on a specific story. Hellboy (2004) makes Lovecraftian monsters and sorcery into an action blockbuster. John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1994) features a book so terrifying it drives its readers insane - and maybe worse. Lovecraft's work is quite popular overseas; in the Japanese film Marebito (2004), a lonely man exploring tunnels below the Tokyo subway system encounters a mysterious woman with strange appetites.

I'm sure that diehard fans will be flocking to Providence for NecronomiCon, a convention about all things Lovecraftian happening August 20 - 23. The convention features a wide variety of activities. If you're feeling brainy, you can listen to panelists discuss topics like "The Undying Leaders’: Ultraterrestrial Demonologies, Cthulhoid Conspiracies and the Rise of Lovecraftian Parapolitics." And when your brain tires out, there are games, an art show, the Eldritch Ball, and readings from horror authors. A good spooky time for everyone!

The Moodus Noises: Part I

Quite a few years ago I was reading The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories published by Penguin. I was reading pulpy stories of tentacled terrors, but since it was a Penguin edition they had footnotes so I could feel intellectual. I was having my cake and eating it too.

In "The Dunwich Horror," Lovecraft's tale of central Massachusetts wizardry and invisible monsters, the people of Dunwich are troubled by strange rumbling sounds that come from a hill in their village. The footnote indicates Lovecraft incorporated these noises into his story after reading about similar noises in Moodus, Connecticut. But while Lovecraft's story was fiction, the Moodus noises were real.

Dean Stockwell in the 1970 film of The Dunwich Horror. Is he blocking out the Moodus noises?

That's how I personally first learned about the Moodus noises, but people have been hearing them for centuries. Moodus, which is a small village in the town of East Haddam, was originally called Machimoodus, which means "Place of Noises" or "Place of Evil Noises" in the Algonquin language. The noises were recorded by early Puritan settlers, and continue even today. The Hartford Courant reported that the noises were heard as recently as March, 2011.

The noises are centered around Mount Tom, where the Salmon and Moodus Rivers come together. They sound like cannon shots or explosions, and when they happened in 2011 emergency responders rushed into action, looking for a fire or explosion. There was nothing to find. The noises had come from deep inside the earth.

Here's how a July 1891 Boston Globe article describes them. The noises had been heard in Moodus just a few days earlier:

They are heard intermittently. Sometimes the mountain is silent for 25 or 30 years, then suddenly the strangest sounds break forth, a deep sepulchral, voluminous sound, like the moaning of an imprisoned monster, that seems to boom in subterranean caverns of the earth, and is heard distinctly 10 or 12 miles away.

The noises begin with a seemingly far away low rumbling note that speedily swells in volume and intensity, and culminates in a vast rolling sound, like the muttering of distant thunder, and the ground trembles as if with the throe of an earthquake.

Another Boston Globe article from March 1940 gives a similar description:

Virtually every householder in Moodus rushed to the cellar last night just before midnight to see whether his furnace had blown up, and finding it hadn't called neighbors on the telephone. Thus it was learned that the famous Moodus Noises had returned after about four years.

... Moodus has been shaken at irregular intervals by strange subterranean concussions. The sounds are reported to emanate from the mouth of a great cave, high on a hillside in view of virtually every house in town. No one apparently has ever been at the mouth of the cave when the noises issued forth, however.

"You can always distinguish these noises from blasting; the concussion is so much greater," one resident said today.

They sound scary and kind of awesome, so I can understand why Lovecraft put them into one of his stories. The Algonquians who originally lived in Moodus thought they were awesome and scary too, and therefore ascribed them to their god Hobomok, who was also awesome and scary. The Indians who actually lived on Mount Tom were specialists in interpreting the voice of Hobomok and were consulted as oracles by other local tribes.

When the Puritans showed up in the 1670s they asked the Indians about the strange booming sounds. They responded that they were the voice of Hobomok, and that he was unhappy because the English had come to Connecticut. (He probably was.)

Of course, the Puritans had their own interpretation. They didn't believe in Hobomok and thought the Indians were actually worshiping the Devil. Stephen Hosmer, Haddam's first minister, wrote the following to a friend in August of 1729:

I have been informed that in this place before the English settlements, there were great numbers of Indian inhabitants, and that it was a place of extraordinary Indian Powwows, or in short, that it was a place where the Indians drove a prodigious trade at worshipping the devil. ... Now whether there be anything diabolical in these things (the noises), I know not; but this I know, that God Almighty is to be seen and trembled at, in what has been often heard among us.

Once the Devil gets invoked you know things are going to get weird. Next week I'll post some of the crazy Colonial era legends about the noises, which involve witches, alchemists, and underground battle caves. Stay tuned!

Update: the second part of this post is now up!