The Book of the Witch

6/25/2026

The Book of the Witch (2024) breaks an unwritten cardinal rule: outside of a comedy, no witch should ever wear a pointy hat in a movie. You shouldn’t make your villain “a witch that’s been around since 1692 during the Salem Witch Trials” either, because then you’re engaging in a form of cryptohistory. You’re retrospectively trivializing the persecution, scapegoating, and extermination of alleged undesirables based on false accusations and spectral evidence. I’m aware this is just a fictional horror flick. The Salem witch trials were real, though. There were no witches there, only innocent victims to whose injury you’re adding insult. To put it in perspective, you wouldn’t make a film in which Jewish people naturally spread contagious diseases as Nazi propaganda claimed they did.