O God! O Jesus Christ! 7 Puritan Horror Movies for Thanksgiving
Buckle up your shoes and hat! We're double-fisting flintlock pistols and (possibly) eating people
In case you’re looking for last-minute entertainment for the holiday, I’ve compiled a cornucopia of horror films that center around Puritans. A surprising amount are classics, demonstrating how deeply fascinating the Puritan psyche is, and how well-suited for the horror genre. Paranoia, groupthink, self-doubt, superstition — what better atmosphere for fear?
At the end, I’ve also compiled some Puritan-themed music videos, in case you’re in need of something shorter for your mental health breaks from family dinner.
1. A Field in England (2013)
Dir. Ben Wheatley
4/5
This one comes first — while not particularly Puritan in theme, it is a stoner movie, and this is Thanksgiving.
During the English Civil War, a trio of deserters eat the wrong mushrooms and, tripping out, are pressed into the service of O’Neill, a brigand on the hunt for treasure in the field. As O’Neill force-feeds them more drugs and orders them through Sisyphean labors, the audience is made to wonder: is this real? A hallucination? Hell?
The screenplay (Amy Jump) is deft, and calls to mind Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The early modern language flows organically, often whimsically. Hints of anxious masculinity, latent homosexuality, and wartime cannibalism come through in Freudian slips and entendres.
The dialogue is counterbalanced by long, Kurosawan scenes of windswept grass and trees, apocalyptic symbols in the sky. The deserters move across extreme wide shots like ants, their progress seemingly inconsequential. Human rituals of dignity are constantly lampooned: at times, the actors freeze in awkward, Rembrandt-like tableaux for long enough that they begin to twitch. There’s no respite, not even when time stops, and no explanation for their predicament. “I think I’ve worked out what God is punishing us for,” announces one of them, excitedly. “Everything!”
2. Solomon Kane (2009)
Dir. M. J. Bassett, starring James Purefoy
Incomprehensible/5
Solomon Kane was originally created by Robert E. Howard as a Puritan antihero, a “gaunt,” “philosophical,” and “somber” alternative to Conan. This movie envisions him as a quippy, unkempt leather himbo with sickass cross tattoos on his shredded back. Look how they massacred my boy! Just kidding. Solomon Kane gets infinity stars.
While set in 1600s England, the film has no idea what England actually is. Ditto on Christianity. And why should it? James Purefoy walked so Henry Cavill could run, doing his own stunts and studying Solomon Kane’s fighting style from the books. (Studying Robert E. Howard books! For swordplay accuracy!) He double-fists flintlock pistols and shoots two guys on horseback at the same time!
Providence has placed us on Earth at the same time as this movie!
Watch it!
3. The Crucible (1996)
Dir. Nicholas Hynter, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder
3/5
The Crucible is due for a remake; the 1996 movie is well-done, but its overall look is pretty generic. Besides a few inventive moments (for example, the dizzying crane shots as the girls “see” spirits in the courtroom rafters) the cinematography never seems to match the forbidding proceedings. The sense of sexual danger is also largely removed: the interactions between John Proctor and Abigail feel kind of tame, and the adults of the community don’t come across nearly as creepy as they do in the play.
But, quibbles aside, The Crucible is still The Crucible. The creeping sense of disaster that one feels with every little interaction, every little word that inadvertently draws the communal noose tighter, is unequaled. There’s the leading questions (“Who came to you with the Devil, Tituba? Two? Three? Four?”), the way that authorities subtly signal to the girls what actions are desirable (pats on shoulders, sympathetic glances), and the extent to which parents explicitly suggest the targets’ names to their daughters. Karron Graves as Mary Warren, a girl involved in the panic who recants and tries (futilely) to testify against her friends, is a standout.
4. The Witch (2015)
Dir. Robert Eggers, starring Anya Taylor-Joy
4/5
The Witch is dour and painstaking in its attention to detail, with pretty much every frame begging you to admire its costumes and the actors’ unique faces. Each image and line of dialogue is extremely calculated: sometimes ponderous, usually brilliant. Scenes of threadbare Puritan families recall the staid compositions of Dutch painters; they’re broken violently by pitch-black, firelit scenes in which the Witch appears. Early modern people sometimes dreamt communally of witches, and The Witch feels like experiencing such a dream: a terrifying id-world filled with gore and violation. If you had given modern cameras to a Jacobean tragedian, one of the great domestic-bloodbath writers like John Webster or Thomas Kyd, the result would possibly look something like The Witch. It also has the hottest, most beguiling Satan ever put to film. Love it or hate it, it’s required viewing.
5. Witchfinder General (1968)
Dir. Michael Reeves, starring Vincent Price, sometimes known as The Conqueror Worm
3/5
Full movie on Youtube! I enjoy Witchfinder General because of all its flaws. It makes one long for the day when, contra Robert Eggers, historical film crews just decided “fuck it” and went truly kindergarten-arts-and-crafts onsite. Neon ostrich feathers straight from the kid’s section, glued on hats. Visible cardboard inserts holding up the male hero’s doublet. In some ironic ways, the low-budget exploitation look sometimes feels more historically honest than The Witch: in the former, at least, landscapes are allowed to be sunny, faces needn’t always be craggy, and a variety of colors are permitted in the costumes.
Vincent Price portrays the very real Matthew Hopkins as he brings his dubiously-credentialed services as a witchfinder to east England, rounding up innocents for trial and execution. Certain sequences, like an condemned witch being lowered on a ladder toward her pyre, are ridiculous. But there’s a fair degree of accuracy to the torture. The methods shown onscreen are extremely basic, as they were in real life: sleep deprivation, poking victims with needles. While we don’t see the much of the trials themselves, it’s made clear by the film that this phenomenon of “witches” vs. “witch hunters” has been essentially created by the legal system and exploited by hack investigators for profit. This squares with history; a large part of Hopkins’ authority came from the fact that he had studied law, and he eventually wrote a legal handbook for the prosecution of witches.
The most compelling thing about Witchfinder is Vincent Price’s quiet, dandyish performance as Hopkins. If witch hunts were a legally- and bureaucratically-produced nightmare, then Hopkins comes across a bureaucrat par excellence: mentally checked-out, loathed by his coworkers, not really good at anything but absorbing communal dislike and performing necessary protocols. You suspect he hates his job, perhaps views himself as a temporarily embarrassed Great Man — a statesman or poet in another life. He goes on solitary rides to think, shuffles his pure-white gloves fastidiously. The happiest we see him is when he bounces his hand on the mattress at an inn and proclaims it “adequate.” Relatable stuff, honestly.
6. The Wicker Man (1973)
Dir. Robin Hardy, starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee
5/5
Sergeant Howie, the protagonist of The Wicker Man, is a lower-case puritan. He’s some variety of Anglican, believing in a stern God and the imposition of that God’s laws on society. As he investigates the disappearance of a child in the free-loving, pagan enclave of Summerisle, he’s thrown into a crisis — not a crisis of his own faith, but about the fact that it’s rejected, grinningly, by everyone around him.
The Wicker Man reenacts the ancient war between Christianity’s lower-case puritans and the popular festive cultures around them, which often involved vestiges of pagan celebrations. Howie’s outbursts in the film — cringing at maypoles, ripping down decorations, futilely invoking Biblical law in front of the indifferent villagers — recall the real-life interactions between activist Puritans and their “idolatrous” neighbors during the 17th century. It’s compelling to compare The Wicker Man to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, especially the plotline in which Howie, like the “kind of Puritan” Malvolio, is tricked into inverting himself and playing the role of clown.
While The Wicker Man takes place in the spring, its aesthetic — sweaters, tweed, elbow patches, animal masks — grant it an honorary place in the Fall Horror Canon. Very perfect for Thanksgiving.
7. Fanny Lye Deliver’d (2019) (Honorable Mention)
Dir. Thomas Clay, starring Maxine Peake (released in the US as The Delivered)
1/5
I watched this one in an attempt to add a lesser-known film to the list, and had high hopes given its premise (English Civil War horror home invasion) and glowing reviews. It’s available on Tubi, if you’re curious, and concerns a Puritan family forced to harbor a young couple on the lam for their radical views about sex and God.
Fanny Lye is obviously angling for the cerebral prestige of The Witch and the clash-of-wills religious drama of The Wicker Man. But it also has that chintzy aesthetic of a 90s/early-aughts historical epic, like The Patriot or Cold Mountain, complete with an intrusive, overblown orchestral score that never seems to match the mood, and unending streams of fog into which horses can majestically ride off.
There are some positives: Maxine Peake is deft as Fanny Lye, a repressed but warm and witty helpmeet treated as a child by her husband John, played with a steely eye by Charles Dance. Costumes (Michael O’Connor) are phenomenally researched and constructed, down to Dance’s enormous woolen buttons and the cutwork band on Peake’s coif. Otherwise, the film sinks under the weight of its bad script and directing. It’s verbose and has no subtext, to the point of parody: the kind of film that shows you an establishing shot of a sunrise, then adds voiceover narration stating “The sun was rising.” Plot threads, such as the fugitives’ cult and weird amulet, go nowhere.
It’s a shame, as underground religious communities — such as the Waldensians, Familists, and the Diggers — are a fascinating part of early modern history that’s largely unplumbed in popular media. This one just took a big swing and missed.
Extra Stuffing! (Music Videos)
“Can’t Deny My Love”
Brandan Flowers, dir. Robert Schober
In this music video, Flowers and Schober adapt the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story “Young Goodman Brown,” in which a Puritan man from Salem grows suspicious that his fellow villagers are secretly involved in devil-worship. In Hawthorne’s original story, Brown’s realization swells to vast, Lovecraftian dimensions; eventually he pictures the entire community — “men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern” — as an undifferentiated menace, a dark “cloud” moving over the woods. His mind cracks as he comes to suspect that he may be the only “good Christian” left, and that his neighbors’ piety might be a mere facade for bloodlust.
Flowers, true to his brand, adapts the setting to the Western desert. But the concept still works, since a core theme of Hawthorne’s story is American frontierism: specifically, the moments in history when settler communities, having displaced their “heathen” enemies, inevitably turn their paranoia and guilt inwards. What’s most interesting in the music video is seeing Hawthorne’s ornate verbiage — and there’s lots of it — condensed succinctly into enigmatic glances, minute changes of expression.
“Labor”
Paris Paloma, dir. Adam Othman
Definitely taking inspiration from The Witch, Othman and Paloma imagine the song as the mental monologue of a beleaguered housewife as she faces her doublet-clad, Jamestown-extra-looking husband, having served him a spread of rustic roasts and biscuits.
“Labor” went viral on Tiktok earlier this year, as part of a trend in which women enacted dramatizations of historical sexism and persecution. This video makes the smarter, less-obvious choice to opt for stillness and intimacy — long cuts, telling eye shifts — instead of fist-shaking. In a nod to Genesis, the frustrated Paloma finally bites into a pomegranate, spilling red gore down her shirtfront. For a moment, her husband seems pleasantly surprised to have seen this side of her. It’s a more creative statement about what humankind has lost to patriarchy — mutual unguardedness, companionship — than any of the “we are the daughters of witches” Tiktoks that it spawned.
Loved this