Summary Of The Film Witches: A Century Of Murder

The Tale of Witches The documentary Witches: A Century of Murder, directed by Chris Holt, explained how the fear of the unknown and hatred caused many deaths for innocent people. Discussing the trails of witches in the 1500’s and 1600’s. In the series three literary terms are used Prologue, Foreshadowing, and flashback. Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb tells us about how the witch-hunts began in Europe with a book written by a monk. She also explained how the fear of satan palyed a hand in the murders and torture of many people. In the beginning Dr. Lipscomb used to the line “This is the British Isles 400 years ago, Mass trails and execution erupted across the country.” The term prologue gives the setting and background of the film or inn this case series, it connects the earlier story to the main story. By using the line above, she gives the setting of where the trails take place. This goes with the term of prologue but also foreshadowing, because most of the prologues uses foreshadowing to give a sense of what is going to happen in the series. By using prologue, she helps the audience pinpoint the events so that later they will not be confused by what is happening in the series.
Foreshadowing is somewhat the same as prologue, but it gives a hint of what is to come later in the story.
The most significant form of foreshadowing is the title that says a century of murders happened because of the belief of witches. Foreshadowing is used a lot throughout this series, another example would be when King James the first wrote the book Daemonologie. The book when introduced in the series was written by someone in high position, when King James 1 ruled England the book spread that caused the people to act in accords to the book Daemonolgie, people were burned who did or did not confess to being a
witch. The last literary term is Flashback, which is the interruption of earlier events that took place earlier than the main story line. Throughout the whole series is mainly flashback that changes between the present and the past. Some of the flashback were of the torture, like the thumbnail which crushes the bones that are in finger, when that some of the accused did not confess to being a witch. And then the flashback of the Mathew Hopkins also known as the witch-finder general, he used methods which were illegal to do. Another example of the flashback is showing the death of Mathew Hopkins, and the money he made capturing and killing the so-called “witches”. In conclusion, all three of terms played in the making of the series. Prologue, foreshadowing and flashback gave the audience that they needed to understand the meaning of the series. By watching this in my own opinion I see that when in the time period such as that anyone could make an accusation and that person would be convicted due to the fear of what science cannot explain and a lot of coincidence. When using these terms director pointed these flaws out, some being that many people use things in a different meaning than intended. After the European witch trails the trails spread to the town of Salem, where the play The Crucible and the murder of many innocent people took place.