Weapons is one of biggest horror films of the year and the Junji Ito-esque picture opens up a conversation about the nature of witch hunts. The film takes place in a quiet Pennsylvania town where 17 children vanish into the cold darkness without a trace. Panic grips the community. Neighbors cast suspicious eyes at those they find “different” or eccentric. Rumors of cults and dark rituals spread like wildfire. As the town hunts for answers, fear turns ordinary people into accusers. In one chilling scene, a schoolteacher is cornered by an angry mob convinced she’s a witch in disguise, responsible for luring the children away. The film is fiction, but its themes are painfully familiar. Weapons holds up a mirror to a recurring pattern in American life – a modern echo of the Satanic Panic, where imagined evils spark real hysteria. In this story, as in reality, we see how easily a community’s grief and paranoia can ignite into a witch hunt. It is a reminder that the notion of “witches among us” is not a relic of the 17th century, but a specter that still haunts the American psyche.
The mysterious disappearance of children taps into primal fears – the same fears that have driven witch panics through history. As the plot unfolds, townsfolk in the movie grapple with their confusion and anguish by scapegoating a supposed cult of Satan worshipers. The camera pans over their anxious faces lit by candlelight as they hold a midnight vigil-cum-hunt, whispering of dark forces at work. This imagery deliberately recalls actual events from the 1980s, when Americans across the country believed that hidden Satanic covens were abducting and abusing children. Back then, nightmarish allegations spread through TV talk shows and sensational news segments, stoking a mass hysteria that ruined countless real lives – despite no evidence of the occult crimes people imagined. Weapons condenses this cultural memory into a two-hour fright, complete with doorbell camera footage and social media rumors amplifying the dread. One of the film’s strongest moments shows how easily truth gets twisted: a snippet of ancient folklore and a few coincidences lead to a frenzied accusation of a single mother as a witch. In that moment, the fictional crowd’s eyes shimmer with the same malice that once filled the eyes of Puritan villagers..
As entertainment, Weapons delivers scares and drama; as social commentary, it sounds an alarm. The story demonstrates how a community in fear can turn on its own, targeting those who don’t fit or those convenient to blame. The director has said in interviews that he wanted to capture “the feeling of a witch trial in modern suburbia.” Indeed, the movie’s climax – with its fever-pitch confrontation and a reveal that forces everyone to question their assumptions – asks the audience to consider how paranoia can become more dangerous than any imagined witch. When the credits roll, viewers are left with unease, recognizing that the film’s atmosphere of irrational persecution is drawn from real events, past and present. It invites us to reflect on just how deep the roots of witch hunts run in Western culture and why, long after the last witch was hanged in Salem, we find new ways to rekindle those fires. To understand that, we must journey back to where it all began – in the dark woods and village squares of old Europe, under the flicker of torches and the shadow of the stake.
Centuries ago, long before “witch hunt” became a modern metaphor, actual witch hunts scorched the villages and towns of Europe. In the late medieval and early modern eras, a fierce belief took hold that the Devil was at work in the world, recruiting human agents – mostly women – to commit evil deeds. The earliest instances of these persecutions can be traced back to the Middle Ages. In 1324, in Ireland, a woman named Alice Kyteler became one of the first recorded people in Europe to be formally tried for witchcraft. She was a wealthy, independent woman – and when her husbands died under curious circumstances, local authorities accused her of sorcery and consorting with demons. The Bishop of Ossory brought charges that read like something from a nightmare: Alice was said to have sacrificed animals to pagan gods, brewed potions from poisonous herbs, and held secret midnight rituals. This case marked one of the first times that heresy (deviating from church doctrine) was explicitly linked with witchcraft in a court. Alice Kyteler escaped punishment by fleeing, but her servant was tortured and burned at the stake in her stead. Europe had tasted its first witch trial, and a dangerous template was set.
Through the 1400s, paranoia about witches began to spread. These were times of great upheaval – wars, plagues, and social upheaval wracked communities. People often sought scapegoats for misfortune, and the idea of malevolent witches causing crop failures or sudden deaths found fertile ground. In 1486, a book called Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”) was published by two German inquisitors. This infamous text was essentially a how-to manual for identifying and prosecuting witches. It described witches as mostly women who had sex with the Devil, cast spells to harm their neighbors, and flew through the night on broomsticks to attend diabolical gatherings. Absurd as it sounds now, the Malleus was taken with deadly seriousness. It became a bestseller of its age – second only to the Bible in sales for many decades – and it poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of witch fears. Armed with this “expert” guidance, both church and secular authorities across Europe launched into vigorous witch-hunting.
Historians estimate that between the year 1500 and 1660, as many as 50,000 to 80,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe. Imagine the collective terror behind that number: tens of thousands dragged in front of judges, forced, under torture, to confess impossible crimes, then put to death amid jeering crowds. In some German provinces, entire villages were emptied of women as the burnings spread like a plague of madness. Towns in present-day Germany, France, Switzerland, and Scotland saw some of the most feverish witch purges. In the bishopric of Würzburg and the city of Bamberg in the 1620s, records tell of bonfires consuming hundreds of supposed witches in a given year. Often the victims were society’s most vulnerable: elderly widows, midwives, herbal healers, or simply outsiders who attracted suspicion. A witch hunt had a sick logic of its own – each execution could be cited as proof of the threat, spurring the hunt for more witches in a widening circle. Torture extracted lurid confessions that fed people’s imaginations: accused women (and some men) babbled about midnight flights, pacts signed in blood, and ghostly familiars like black cats or goats given to them by Satan. These were the stories their interrogators wanted to hear, and so the tales multiplied, each more fantastical than the last, validating the fear that an invisible satanic conspiracy was at work in Christendom.
Yet, as unstoppable as the witch craze seemed, by the late 17th and early 18th century it was finally running its course in Europe. What changed? Partly, the Enlightenment happened – a new wave of skepticism and reason swept intellectual circles. More and more voices, even among judges and clergy, began to question the reality of witches. Influential figures pointed out that there was no proof, that torture made people say anything, and that perhaps these accused witches were innocent victims of superstition. There were also simple practical reasons: generations had been traumatized by the constant trials and executions; entire communities were tired of the turmoil and doubt. Some famous witch trials ended in scandal, with clear evidence of false accusations or personal vendettas coming to light. In one celebrated case in Germany, a man named Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit priest who had heard the confessions of condemned witches, anonymously published a book condemning the trials – he argued passionately that the accused were almost certainly innocent and that the methods of prosecution were barbarically unjust. Such critiques gained traction.
By 1700, most of Western Europe had effectively abandoned witch hunting. Courts grew reluctant to pursue new cases, and laws were changed to raise the standards of evidence (making it harder to just accuse someone of an invisible crime like sorcery). In France and England, skepticism from the elites trickled down; those countries saw their last executions for witchcraft around the 1680s. In Germany and Switzerland, a few late executions happened in the early 1700s, but they were increasingly viewed as embarrassments by educated society. The last recorded execution for witchcraft in Europe took place in Switzerland in 1782, when a woman named Anna Göldi was put to death – an act widely decried by then as a cruel anachronism. Europe’s witch craze had burned itself out. The fires of the stakes had gone cold; the Devil’s conspiracy was relegated to folklore and cautionary tales. It seemed humanity had awoken from a fever dream of supernatural terror.
Even as the old countries of Europe began to abandon witch hunts, the fear found new soil across the Atlantic. The American colonies, in the 1600s, were deeply religious settlements clinging to the edge of a vast wilderness. Life in the New World was precarious – colonists faced conflict with French and Spanish rivals, the threat of attacks from some Indigenous tribes, deadly diseases like smallpox, and the ever-present specter of failure in a harsh environment. In these anxious conditions, belief in the Devil’s work took on immediate reality. The colonies were, after all, founded by people for whom the Bible’s words were literal truth, including the ominous injunction: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Witch trials in America occurred sporadically from early colonial days. The first person in the American colonies executed for witchcraft was Alse Young, hanged in 1647 in Connecticut. Over the ensuing decades, scattered accusations cropped up in New England. But it was in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 that the tinder of fear truly caught fire. The Salem Witch Trials have become the stuff of infamy, a cautionary tale known worldwide. It began in the small village of Salem when two young girls, ages nine and eleven, began experiencing violent fits and mysterious symptoms – screaming, contorting, feeling as if bitten or pinched by invisible forces. A local doctor, unable to find a natural cause, proclaimed the girls were under “the Evil Hand” – bewitched. Once that word was uttered, panic surged. Pressured to name their tormentor, the girls pointed to several marginalized local women: a beggar, an invalid, and an enslaved Caribbean woman named Tituba who worked in their household. These women were easy targets, and soon they were jailed as witches. Tituba, likely trying to save herself from harsher punishment, gave an imaginative confession – she told stories of flying on a pole, of a tall man in black (the Devil) who bid her sign his book, and of other witches lurking in Salem. That was the spark needed to ignite a community-wide hysteria.
In a matter of weeks, Salem Village devolved into a hotbed of accusation. Neighbors accused neighbors. Children accused adults. Servants accused their masters, and vice versa. The courts were overwhelmed with cases. By the height of the panic, around 150 people had been arrested on suspicion of witchcraft. The trials were a nightmare theater: in makeshift courtrooms, the afflicted girls would convulse and shriek that the specters of the accused were attacking them right there, invisible to all but them. The judges accepted such spectral evidence as valid. If a young woman said, “I see Goody Proctor’s spirit stabbing me with a pin,” that was taken as proof that Goody Proctor was a witch controlling apparitions. Under such impossible circumstances, the accused stood little chance. Some broke and confessed, hoping for mercy. Many maintained their innocence staunchly, which sadly often sealed their fate because the court believed no genuine witch would ever confess willingly (a diabolical paradox: confess and live in prison, or deny and hang).
By the time the Salem trials ran their course, 20 people had been executed: 14 women and 6 men. Nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill after brief, grim proceedings. One man, Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea and was pressed to death with heavy stones – an old English punishment for standing mute. The community was in the grip of a collective delirium of fear and piety, convinced that Satan’s legion had infiltrated their God-fearing town. But unlike in Europe’s extended hunts, Salem’s blaze of paranoia burned intensely but briefly. Within a year, the spell began to break. A few sensible voices questioned the validity of spectral evidence and the credibility of the accusers. As the accusations broadened to implicate more respectable citizens – even the governor’s wife was mentioned – authorities began to reconsider. This was a key difference: the colonies, learning painfully from Salem, started to doubt and critically examine what was happening even before the frenzy could spread to other regions. By 1693, the remaining accused were pardoned or released. The courts of Massachusetts later formally apologized for the trials, and restitution was offered to some victims’ families. The people of Salem had awoken from their nightmare with a collective shudder, vowing never to repeat such an injustice.
In the century that followed, witch trials as formal legal events largely disappeared in America. Colonies and later states moved away from prosecuting impossible crimes like witchcraft. In 1730, none other than Benjamin Franklin published a satirical hoax about a witch trial in New Jersey in his newspaper, poking fun at how ludicrous and backward such proceedings were. His satire hit home precisely because educated Americans were by then saying, “Can you believe we ever fell for that?” Laws were changed to prevent witchcraft accusations from being taken seriously; for instance, Virginia had already passed a law in 1655 making it a crime to falsely accuse someone of witchcraft, reflecting an early skepticism in that colony. By the late 18th century, in the new United States, the idea of literal witch trials seemed to belong to a darker, less enlightened past. The phrase “witch hunt” would gradually take on a metaphorical meaning – describing any fevered campaign to round up and punish a perceived enemy, often without proper evidence. Little did Americans know that, in centuries to come, they would revive that pattern in new forms, again and again.
Satanic Panic and the Rise of Modern Supernatural Fears
Even though legal witch trials ended, the underlying psychology of witch hunts – the potent mix of fear, rumor, and the urge to find a scapegoat – never truly vanished. In the 20th century, especially, the United States proved to be fertile ground for new episodes of collective hysteria uncannily similar to the witch manias of old. Perhaps the most infamous was the wave of fear in the 1980s known as the Satanic Panic. During this time, many Americans became convinced that a secret network of Satan-worshiping cults was operating in the nation’s suburbs and schools, committing horrific crimes under cover of darkness. It was a modern reimagining of the witch stereotype: not old women casting spells on cattle, but rather conspiratorial cult members allegedly abusing children in occult rituals.
The panic began with a few sensational accusations. In 1983, in California, a mother accused workers at a preschool (the McMartin Preschool) of molesting her child as part of Satanic rituals. The claims escalated to include underground tunnels, sacrifices, and black-robed figures – all chilling and all entirely unproven. Yet the media and authorities took these allegations gravely seriously. The McMartin Preschool trial became one of the longest and costliest in U.S. history, dragging on for years, even as the lurid charges fell apart due to lack of evidence and concerns of false memory in the child witnesses. But by then, the fire had spread. Across the country, local news reports, talk shows, and church groups stoked fears that “Satanists” could be lurking anywhere – running daycare centers, leading scout troops, or playing heavy metal music that brainwashed kids. Books like Michelle Remembers (a debunked account of recovered memories of Satanic ritual abuse) were widely read, and some evangelical preachers wove conspiracy theories from the pulpit about a war between Christian America and hidden devil-worshippers.
During these years, police departments even conducted seminars on how to spot supposed Satanic cult activity. Innocuous symbols or teenaged dabbling in goth fashion were interpreted as signs of something sinister. Communities held meetings to protect their children from rumored kidnappers in vans who never materialized. The irony is palpable: in a nation priding itself on modern science and law, rumors of black magic and blood rites were accepted with few critical questions. The result? Many innocent people were swept up as victims of false accusations. Nationwide, dozens of childcare workers and parents were accused of unthinkable crimes – participating in cult ceremonies, sacrificing animals or even babies, and abusing children in elaborate Satanic rites. These prosecutions often had no physical evidence, just the testimonies of very young children often coached by fervent investigators. It was Salem all over again, with psychological pressure replacing the rack and thumbscrews as the tools to extract fantastic confessions. In some cases, accused individuals spent years in prison before the cases were overturned when skepticism and reason finally reasserted themselves in the 1990s. Lives were ruined, reputations destroyed, all because of an invisible conspiracy that never actually existed.
The Satanic Panic eventually fizzled out as the 1990s wore on, thanks to diligent reporting and investigations that exposed the lack of evidence and the implausibility of the most extreme claims. People began to see that the “witches” of that era – the supposed Satanists – were phantoms conjured by a mix of anxiety and sensationalism. But the pattern of moral panic did not disappear; it only shifted shape and target. In the very same period, a different kind of witch hunt was brewing in the realm of popular culture: the backlash against Harry Potter. When J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels rose to massive popularity around the turn of the millennium, millions of children and adults delighted in the magical adventures of the young wizard. But a subset of American religious fundamentalists viewed the books with alarm. To them, Harry Potter was not harmless fantasy – it was a recruitment tool for actual witchcraft and devil-worship.
By the early 2000s, some church groups and pastors were denouncing the Harry Potter series as demonic. They claimed that the spells in the books were real incantations, that children would be tempted to experiment with magic and be drawn into Satanism. This might sound extreme, but it led to very real acts of censorship and protest. In some communities, school boards faced demands to remove the Harry Potter books from libraries. A few particularly zealous preachers went so far as to organize book burnings, tossing Rowling’s novels into bonfires along with other “occult” literature like the Twilight vampire series. In one notable instance, a pastor in New Mexico held a public burning of Harry Potter books in 2001, declaring they were an evil influence. More recently, in 2022, a Tennessee minister live-streamed a bonfire of Potter books and other titles he labeled “witchcraft,” drawing a crowd that cheered as the flames consumed the pages. The imagery was strikingly medieval – the crackling fire, the crowd fueled by righteous anger, destroying knowledge out of fear that it was cursed. It was a symbolic witch hunt: the author and her lovable fictional characters cast as the corruptors of youth, needing to be banished to save children’s souls. Of course, this movement was far smaller and less deadly than the panics of old. No one was executed or imprisoned for writing or reading a book. But it demonstrated that even in modern America, the reflex to fear “witchcraft” – even of a fictional variety – still exists in some corners, and can spur people to extreme, performative acts.
The New Witches: Scapegoating in the Modern Era
As the 21st century progresses, America continues to experience bouts of moral panic that historians and commentators often liken to witch hunts. The targets, however, have shifted from alleged sorcerers and Satanists to real social groups. In recent years, a growing chorus of political voices – particularly on the far right – have invoked the language of protecting society from evil as they campaign against those who don’t fit a certain traditional mold. It is not an exaggeration to say that in some circles, being non-Christian, or openly LGBTQ+, or even just advocating progressive ideas can lead to one being labeled as a threat to the community’s moral fiber. The echoes of witch hunts are unmistakable: the rhetoric paints these targeted individuals as almost supernatural villains corrupting the innocent, and rallies “righteous” people to expose and expel them.
Consider how some officials and media personalities have spoken about transgender people or gay educators in schools. In a tactic disturbingly similar to old witch tropes of child harm, they accuse these individuals of “grooming” children – implying a secret, malicious intent to sexually corrupt or abuse kids, or to indoctrinate them into a “perverse” lifestyle. These claims are usually baseless slurs, but they ignite fear and anger in parent communities much as whispers of a witch’s curse might have done in a colonial village. All of a sudden, a transgender teacher isn’t just another human being; in the eyes of the panic-stricken, they become a kind of modern witch, an agent of evil with a hidden agenda against children. What follows are the familiar consequences of a witch hunt mentality: books are banned (works with LGBTQ characters or themes are pulled from libraries under the pretext that they’re dangerous spells corrupting youth), lists of suspects are drawn up (some activist groups have even proposed registries of teachers who support certain curricula, reminiscent of a blacklist of supposed sorcerers), and careers and lives are destroyed by accusation alone (teachers fired on dubious claims, families ostracized from communities, teens driven to despair by the message that they are monsters in the eyes of their neighbors). There may be no literal bonfires, but the social media mob can act as a torch, flaming through reputations and personal safety in an instant.
This phenomenon is painfully evident in some political arenas. Several politicians have found success by exploiting fears that “traditional America” is under attack by nefarious forces – be they secular humanists, queer people, immigrants, or religious minorities. At times, the language used is nearly apocalyptic. They speak of “spiritual warfare” and frame themselves as holy warriors defending against a demonic enemy within. For example, during election seasons one might hear a candidate rail that their opponents are aligned with “dark forces” or “the devil’s work,” sometimes quite explicitly. One doesn’t need to scratch much beneath the surface to find that old Satanic Panic logic repackaged: QAnon conspiracy theorists, who have become entwined with parts of the GOP base, actually believe in a literal, hidden cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles (often identified as prominent Democrats or Hollywood figures) that must be rooted out. This conspiracy theory led one adherent to storm a Washington pizza parlor with a gun in 2016, convinced he was about to rescue children from a supposed torture dungeon beneath the restaurant (there was none, of course). It’s a textbook witch hunt scenario – starting from an unfounded assertion of unimaginable evil, leading to vigilante action.
In state legislatures, we’ve seen a barrage of bills aimed at people for who they are, under the guise of protecting children from an insidious threat. Bans on transgender youth receiving medical care or participating in sports, bans on drag performances by conflating them with sexual predation, “Don’t say gay” laws forbidding any mention of gay families in classrooms – all these efforts are sold as necessary to ward off some creeping malevolence. It is as though segments of society have collectively decided that anyone who isn’t straight, cisgender, and aligned with conservative Christian norms is potentially a “witch” casting spells on America’s children and values. The scapegoating is explicit: rather than addressing complex social issues with reason, it’s politically expedient for some to blame a shadowy other – to point and cry “There is the witch!” so the crowds focus their anger there. The tragic result is real harm. Hate crimes against LGBTQ individuals have risen in areas where such rhetoric is loud. Families of minority faiths or no faith sometimes fear to speak of their beliefs in communities where one religion dominates, lest they be seen as part of the evil undermining society.
It’s important to note that these modern witch hunts, like their historical predecessors, are driven by power and fear. In medieval Europe, a local magistrate or inquisitor could gain authority and notoriety by unmasking witches (and conveniently eliminating personal enemies or marginalized people in the process). In contemporary America, those who lead crusades against supposed moral threats often gain political clout and votes, riding a wave of populist outrage. They promise to exorcise the demons afflicting society – a compelling narrative for voters anxious about social changes they don’t understand or agree with. This dynamic keeps the witch hunt alive: as long as accusing “the other” yields rewards, there will be those willing to accuse.