Erica Blackegg

Girlfriend, let me tell you something. Salem is over-the-top in all ways. It looks like it was custom made for 9-12th grade goths, complete with full, bloody lips parted in ecstasy and a Marilyn Manson theme song. The acting has all the subtlety and nuance of a high school production of MacBeth, and you will laugh hysterically at some of the dialog. The accents indicate the dialog coach quit mid production. One of the baddies is supposed to be German, as is her son, but they both speak in the same London Royal Shakespeare Theatre dialect. Perhaps a German accent would seem clownish? The gore is constant and more like Universal Studios Halloween Horror nights meets Wes Craven than the mysterious acts of witches from literature. Over half of the the witches have a definite vampire thing going down. The witches who live out in the woods definitely seem like the witches of centuries of lore, but they definitely don't swoop around in silk capes and laced bodices. The elder Essex witches are for real! There is a lot of the squishing/squelching sound of walking in/grasping recently dead bodies. Oh, and rotting corpses abound. Everything is designed to be a major gross-out, which I found rather dull. The costumes are lovely but historically all over the place. No women were strolling through the Massachusetts Bay Colony in brightly-colored silks and laces. Even the wealthy ones. Telling the story with some historical accuracy is a challenge, but is much more satisfying than relying on tired old tropes. Still fun to pour a glass of red wine and dig up some worms from the yard for watching. Buon apetit!