3 Movies About Witchcraft That Are More Historically Accurate Than You Think, & One Was Based On 17th-Century Court Records

Witchcraft has been part of horror cinema for over a century, with filmmakers mining centuries of superstition and occult practice for stories that are particularly unsettling since the persecution of supposed witches actually happened. The inspiration for witch-themed cinema stretches from early European folklore through the Puritan panic that swept colonial New England, while also sometimes accounting for the witch-hunting crazes that gripped the British Isles during the 17th century. There are also the ceremonial magic traditions that occultists still study today, born from paganism before being locked into grimoires. Most cinematic adaptations of witches lean into embellishment, inventing covens and spells with little grounding in the historical record. However, a small group of filmmakers takes the opposite approach, treating real historical figures and historical documents as the foundation for their scripts.

Cinema remains a storytelling tool, even more so when it’s fiction cinema. It’s rare, and maybe impossible, to have a completely accurate movie because things like pacing and character arcs get in the way. Still, despite horror using impossible images and mind-bending concepts, some movies are surprisingly realistic, even though you might not have guessed in your first watch.

3) A Dark Song

Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song follows Sophia Howard (Catherine Walker), a grieving mother who rents an isolated house in rural Wales and hires the occultist Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram) to help her contact her dead son. Once the pair seal themselves inside a salt circle, the movie depicts Sophia’s months-long ordeal of fasting, prayer, isolation, and escalating ritual work. Those detailed procedures match the actual structure of the “Abramelin Operation,” a ceremonial working drawn from The Book of Abramelin, a grimoire attributed to Abraham of Worms and translated into English in 1897 by S.L. MacGregor Mathers. The goal of the real ritual, as in the film, is to achieve what practitioners call Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, a process real-world occultists, including Aleister Crowley, are documented to have attempted.

A Dark Song‘s screenplay reproduces the procedural specifics of The Book of Abramelin almost beat for beat, including the strict dietary and sexual abstinence requirements and the sealed boundary the characters cannot cross until the ritual ends. While magic is often fast and loose in horror movies, the historical accuracy of A Dark Song means we watch two people grind through weeks of tedium and physical depletion, with no guarantee the process even works. That gives the story plenty of space for the characters to turn against each other and push boundaries, until an explosive final stretch that makes the best of its setting.

2) Witchfinder General

Michael Reeves’ final film before his death dramatizes the career of Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), the self-appointed Witchfinder General who terrorized East Anglia during the English Civil War. Hopkins was a real lawyer from Suffolk who began his witch-hunting campaign in 1644 alongside partner John Stearne (Robert Russell), falsely claiming a parliamentary authority he never actually held. The pair famously extracted confessions through sleep deprivation and the swimming test, in which the accused were bound and thrown into water, with those who floated declared guilty. They were also not beyond torturing and murdering people they claimed to be evil, mostly women.

Due to the historical distance to 1964, some sources conclude the death toll between 1644 and 1647 was roughly 230 people, though other historical estimates run as high as 300. In any case, Hopkins and Stearne are credited with more executions in a single year than the previous century of English witch trials combined. The Witchfinder General film is based on a 1966 novel by Ronald Bassett that blended documented history with invented characters, including the fictional romance between Sara (Hilary Dwyer) and Roundhead soldier Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy). One accurate thread is the fate of John Lowes (Rupert Davies), an elderly Suffolk clergyman who was tried and executed on Hopkins’ orders, eventually used to bring the “witchfinder” down. While an older movie, Witchfinder General is still exemplary of how witch hunts were nothing more than instruments used by people in power to persecute and brutalize others.

1) The Witch

Robert Eggers spent close to four years researching before directing his feature debut, The Witch, working with historians and museums and making repeated visits to Plimoth Plantation to build a Puritan New England setting accurate down to the clapboard siding. Set in the 1630s, the film follows a family led by William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie), exiled from their plantation and settled at the edge of the forest with their children, including eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) and son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw). When the family’s infant son vanishes and the crops fail, suspicion of witchcraft tears the household apart.

Eggers wrote the dialogue for The Witch in Early Modern English, drawing much of it directly from primary sources including the diaries of Samuel Sewall and John Winthrop, period witch pamphlets, and court records documenting real accusations and trials. The film’s closing title card states plainly that it was inspired by folktales and written accounts of historical witchcraft, including journals, diaries, and court records, and that much of the dialogue comes directly from those period sources. Those are not exaggerations, as so many “true story” warnings in horror are, and the craft that goes into The Witch is still commendable. The movie also gave Taylor-Joy her breakout performance, with the star quickly establishing herself as a major Hollywood asset.

7 Best Witch Movies of All Time, Ranked