Three Sovereigns for Sarah

"Three Sovereigns for Sarah" is the true story of the Salem witch trials that took place in 1692. The movie was made in 1985. When we visited the museum connected to "The House of the Seven Gables and Nathanial Hawthorne's house my wife bought a DVD of the movie starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Historically, it is a very important movie. It documents the hysteria of those times and reminds me a lot of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists today. It is the same extremist mindset once found in some Puritans who conveniently called people witches in order to take their land and property. 19 innocent people were hanged and one died in jail. And 190 people were in jail. Sarah, of whom the movie is primarily about barely survives after being kept in a chicken coop with no heat and a dirt floor with just her clothes and straw to keep warm through the winter of 1692. And she somehow survived alone with only food and water but both her sisters were hanged.

I was excommunicated from the religion I was born in and so suffered a near experience suicide from this over the next two years. Thousands of people commit suicide every day from bad experiences in their churches. Some kill themselves after having been molested by priests. Some kill themselves because of crazy priests and ministers and church workers. Many are so insulated within their churches dogma that they have no hope alone without their church in the world.

I'm not saying all churches are bad just as I wouldn't say that all families are bad. The problem is that if people can't think for themselves for whatever reason there is a good possibility that they will not survive a real crisis in their lives.

This movie gives me and all rational people the creeps and gives new meaning to the similarities to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. It is this kind of 12th to 17th century kind of fundamentalist thought in all religions that kills people from without and/or within.

If one is a thinking person this movie is far scarier than any horror movie because it is all real and true.

It reminds me a lot in some ways of the fictitious movie, "Lord of the Flies" because it is the children who create the deaths by a game they play with a little guidance from adults. IT is creepier still because it is all true and really happened.