The Crucible (1996)
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
A Salem resident attempts to frame her ex-lover's wife for being a witch in the middle of the 1692 witchcraft trials.
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What critics compared The Crucible to
Rather than either recapitulating the political finger-wagging that usually accompanies depictions of religious hysteria (best exemplified in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) or simply exploiting witchcraft for its shock value, the film burrows deep into both genuine spiritual horror and the manner in which abject fear divides us (which is a real political lesson for our current divided culture).
At least since Marion L. Starkey’s 1949 study The Devil in Massachusetts (an inspiration for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible), pop culture has taken a more Freudian view of Puritan-era witchcraft sagas, putting the blame on patriarchs whose fear of women’s sexuality becomes rage against female self-expression (or, with Miller, McCarthyist hysteria).
The intention seems to have been to stake out a patch of land adjacent to The Crucible’s superstitious terrain and thereupon cultivate something a little more genre-minded: the closest reference point would be M. Night Shyamalan ’s maligned The Village, albeit without the crackerbarrel twist.
But whereas most fiction surrounding the Witch Trials (most notably Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) focuses on the power of hysteria to convince even the most pragmatic people that such nonsense is true, Eggers chooses to dig deeper, questioning the bedrock of such hysteria.
Just as easily, however, given the film’s self-advertised stabs at historical accuracy, one could read this singular shocker as something even more disturbing: a kind of fright-flick answer to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, presenting a revisionist national history in which true evil exists and religious hysteria is the proper response to it.
This will help your ear accept speech that can sound as wooden as anything in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, but that occasionally erupts with rich, ornate verbosity.
Back in 2015, Robert Eggers delighted critics with the flesh-pecking horror of The Witch , a directorial feature debut which blended the theatrics of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with shades of M. Night Shyamalan and the more grizzly adaptations of Stephen King.
There’s a definite eeriness to the masculine vocalizations of Jesus through her person in sequences which recall the hysteria of The Crucible (1996).
…a setting that gives events a tension that recalls The Crucible, even if it never reaches those heights…
…a gripping battle over the exorcism of a child manages to be part-Quincy, part-The Crucible…
At the other end of the spectrum is Mary Lou (Samantha Morton), the severe leader of an anti-magic group known as the Second Salemers, who resemble refugees from a future touring production of “The Crucible.”
Samantha Morton's puritanical zealot Mary Lou (appearing as if she just came out of auditions for "The Crucible") not only persecutes magic folk, she takes her hatred out on her severely abused, adopted maj son Credence (Ezra Miller).
Outfitted like a character out of “The Crucible,” Barebone steals/adopts children from the magic families she exposes, but doesn’t keep nearly a close enough eye on her own kids, leaving room for her deeply troubled “son” Credence (Ezra Miller) to hold private meetings with a powerful — and power-hungry — auror, Percival Graves (Colin Farrell).
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…spills over in a scene that plays like The Crucible in a community centre…
As the intergalactic civil war heats up, Burger intelligently blends the primal tribal instincts of The Lord of the Flies with The Crucible ’s commentary on people’s susceptibility to superstition in the face of fear, mixing in his own interests in superhuman abilities ( Limitless ; Divergent ).