Robert S. Cairns
In high school we had to read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), an allegory about the McCarthy-era, Communist ‘Red Scare’ in America that used the Salem Witch Trials as its point of comparison. Years later, I discovered there was actually Communist infiltration during this time and that the fear was credible. If the supposed hysteria surrounding the ‘Red Scare’ had some basis in truth, could the same be said of the witches Arthur Miller used as a historical reference?
Years later still, I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943). Another allegory for mass hysteria, I remember wondering why witches couldn’t just be real in this moment of occult-haunted history, and why it seemed as if the intelligent person had to represent them by way of allegory. Dreyer depicted the existence of miracles in his other, most famous film, Ordet (1955). But apparently witches were a step too far for him.
