Controversy Surrounding The Blair Witch Project
There is much controversy surrounding the legend of the Blair Witch. This is all brought on by the latest movie and book called The Blair Witch Project. Is this interesting movie and book real? Is the legend real? That is what we all are wondering. Through careful reading of the book and careful examination of the movie a conclusion is ready to be made.
The movie is a documentary. Three student filmmakers in search of the truth of the Blair Witch make it. These three students head into the Black Hills of Maryland in search of the sites of supposed occurrences and in search of the Blair witch herself. The story goes that they went into the woods and were never seen again. That is until a year later when their amateur film footage was discovered.
Heather Donahue headed them up. She was a senior trying to write a thesis paper. She was majoring in journalism and she wanted something spectacular. Her idea was to go into the woods for a few days and then come out with some incredible footage. She got incredible footage but she didn’t come out. She was interested in the Blair Witch because of stories that her Grandfather had told her.
Joshua Leonard assisted her. He was also a filmmaker who had graduated from Montgomery Community College. Michael Williams was also assisting the two of them. He was the youngest in the group. Joshua brought him in because he had access to filming equipment. He joined the trip because he figured “he could learn something from Josh and the experience” (pg. 87)
The three of them set out to Burkittsville, the present day site of the former town of Blair. Blair was abandoned in November of nineteen hundred and seventy six. They began by interviewing many people in the town to find out what the town’s consensus on the legend was. They were actually sent to a few people who they were told could give them information on some occurrences. These people however turned up to be kind of crazy so what they said were not taken too seriously.
The legend of the Blair Witch as they found it goes about as follows.
Many young girls were in the woods trying to conjure spirits. Tituba was trying to teach them how to do so (Blumberg). Witchcraft was punishable by death, and these young girls were trying to avoid being caught(miller). They were falsely accusing many people so they would not be accused of witchcraft(miller). Several innocent people died during this time
The movie Three Sovereigns for Sarah was about the Salem Witch Trials and what happen during it. The Salem Witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecution of people who were accused of witchcraft. I'm going to be talking about the religion, superstition, the victims, the afflicted girls, and some of the executions. The trials were not right what so ever but was a very important part of history.
While most people are familiar with the notorious Salem Witch Trials in 1692, many people are unaware that similar events were taking place in other parts of New England in the very same year. The book, Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692, takes readers through an intriguing narrative of a young girl with claims of being bewitched. Although I was concerned at first about the book being in a narrative style, the author was very concise and used actual evidence from the trial to tell an accurate and interesting story.
Cotton Mather, in his The Wonders of the Invisible World, preserved for posterity a very dark period in Puritanical American society through his account of the Salem witch trials in 1692. His description is immediately recognizable as being of the same viewpoint as those who were swept up in the hysteria of the moment. Mather viewed Salem as a battleground between the devil and the Puritans. "The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those which were once the devil's territories. . . . The devil thus irritated, immediately tried all sorts of methods to overturn this poor plantation" (Mather 421). Here Mather is alluding to the Native Americans as being a people associated with the devil rather than with their God, a common point of view held towards all savage people. Mather saw the witches of Salem as being "his [the devil's] incarnate legions" sent to Salem "to persecute us. . ." (Mather 421). The Salem witch trials have become a part of American mythology which has been passed down to each succeeding generation for over 300 years after the village of Salem sent its last witch to the gallows. However, it is the witch trials relevance to modern society more than any other factor that has contributed to its legendary place in American history and mythology. The witch trials that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, are the precursor to the modern trials where adults are accused of crimes including ritualistic sexual molestation of children. These types of ritualized abuse are commonly linked to Satanic cults. Modern beliefs in Satanists mirror similar beliefs held of colonial witches.
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”, Exodus 22:18. In 1692 , in Salem Massachusetts , the Puritans believed everything in the bible, they also believed in witches and that witches should not be able to live.There were at least 3 causes for the Salem witch trial hysteria. There are: age, gender, and marital status , lying girls, and a divided town.
story takes place in Salem in 1692, during the Salem witch trials. The story starts
In the Town of Salem Massachusetts, 1692, a group of adolescents are caught dancing in the forest. Among the adolescents in The Crucible, Abigail Williams and Mary Warren. The girls are horrified that they have been caught dancing, a sinful act, therefore they devise a story to evade punishment: they claim to have been bewitched. The first person who they accuse of witchcraft is a the black maid, Tituba. This results in her jail sentence as well as fearful suspicion throughout the town.
When one evokes The Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the image that comes to most peoples minds are that of witches with pointed hats riding broomsticks. This is not helped by the current town of Salem, Massachusetts, which profits from the hundreds of thousands of tourists a year by mythologizing the trials and those who were participants. While there have been countless books, papers, essays, and dissertations done on this subject, there never seems to be a shortage in curiosity from historians on these events. Thus, we have Bernard Rosenthal's book, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, another entry in the historiographical landscape of the Salem Witch Trials. This book, however, is different from most that precede it in that it does not focus on one single aspect, character, or event; rather Rosenthal tells the story of Salem in 1692 as a narrative, piecing together information principally from primary documents, while commenting on others ideas and assessments. By doing so, the audience sees that there is much more to the individual stories within the trials, and chips away at the mythology that has pervaded the subject since its happening. Instead of a typical thesis, Rosenthal writes the book as he sees the events fold out through the primary documents, so the book becomes more of an account of what happened according to primary sources in 1692 rather than a retelling under a new light.
In the modern day it’s hard to believe there’s even still ‘’witch hunts’’ as you can say where a group of people are stereotyped as something without them doing the actual stereotypical thing. We live in a world where blacks are getting shot for no reason when they were just walking down the street unarmed and not harming anyone. Blacks and Latinos are always looked down upon in any shape or form. They could be driving a nice car they get pulled over for suspicion of a stolen car, they can get pulled over in an old broken car and they will get pulled over for suspicion of ‘’criminal activity’’. But if it’s a white person the cops will NOT bat a single eye at them despite being in the same situations as the black. And you know what the problem
One of the games was for them to crack a raw egg into a glass of water and see what shape it made in the glass. One night Ann saw the shape of a coffin from the egg trick, that's where it all started. Soon after that happened, Ann Putman, Abigail Williams, and Betty Parris started acting weirdly. They started babbling, convulsing, or simply staring blankly. Once they were identified as victims of witchcraft, they were asked to point out their tormentors.
A group of young girls in Salem, Massachusetts told the people of their town they were possessed by the devil and accused several women from their town of possessing them. The ringleader of the girls was Abigail Williams the niece of Samuel Paris the town’s priest. Abigail and her cousin Elizabeth Paris started having irrational fits and violent outburst. Since the girls kept having these violent outbursts Samuel Paris called for doctor William Griggs. Griggs examined the girls and diagnosed them with being bewitched. Soon there was a whole group of girls acting as if they were possessed as well, including; Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott and Mary Warren. This group of girls kept up this horrible act all because Tituba Paris’ slave saw them doing
During the early winter of 1692 two young girls became inexplicably ill and started having fits of convulsion, screaming, and hallucinations. Unable to find any medical reason for their condition the village doctor declared that there must be supernatural forces of witchcraft at work. This began an outbreak of hysteria that would result in the arrest of over one hundred-fifty people and execution of twenty women and men. The madness continued for over four months.
In the year 1692, the small farming village of Salem, Massachusetts saw a social phenomenon that would propel the village into the history books: the calamity that was witchcraft. The witch trials were initiated whenever three young girls, Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, and Ann Putnam were caught performing fortune telling rituals in the woods, trying to gather information on what type of man would be best for them. Soon thereafter, the girls began experiencing hysterical fits, prompting Betty Parris’s father, Reverend Samuel Parris, to call in the authorities to confirm the cause of the girls’ symptoms. ...
...ches and witchcraft have been passed down through generations to generations. From way back to the 1200’s to today in the present times, that is how long witches have been around. As of the history of witches and witchcraft, stories were used to keep the history alive inside the stories written in ancient mythology to Walt Disney’s movies. Check your family history. What and who were they. Were they witch hunters or were they a witch? There’s more to the story of Halloween or All Hallows Eve than meets the eye. What story or legend will come next?
Schanzer, Rosalyn. Witches!: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2011. Print.