Abstract
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, numerous heritage-horror films surfaced about early modern witch-hunting. These films combine fiction with historical information to guide tourists through tense reflective experiences concerning religion, counter-religion, and spirituality. This chapter examines specific rhetorical methods found in these films, including emotional appeals, audience identification, voyeurism, and the use of poetics. Ultimately, these strategies help tourists subjectively interpret the role of religious ideology in relation to their own contemporary post-modern situation.
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Notes
- 1.
Jonathan L. Pearl, introduction to On the Demon-mania of Witches by Jean Bodin, trans. Randy A. Scott (Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995), 20; Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London, UK: Longman, 1987), 21.
- 2.
Levack, Witch-Hunt, 93–95.
- 3.
Ibid., 108–109.
- 4.
Ibid., 66.
- 5.
Ibid., 84.
- 6.
Ibid., 67.
- 7.
Pearl, introduction to On the Demon-mania of Witches, 25.
- 8.
Ibid., 59.
- 9.
Levack, Witch-Hunt, 161.
- 10.
Ibid., 164.
- 11.
John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London, UK: Sage Publications, 2011), 2–3.
- 12.
Richard Crouse, Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils (Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 2012), 38–43.
- 13.
Ian Cooper, Devil’s Advocates: Witchfinder General (Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur, 2011), 24–25.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid., 25.
- 16.
“Witchfinder General: Michael Reeves’ Horror Classic,” special feature documentary in Witchfinder General , DVD, directed by Michael Reeves (1968; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2007).
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51–52.
- 19.
Ibid., 91.
- 20.
Ibid., 82.
- 21.
Ibid., 86.
- 22.
Ibid., 87.
- 23.
John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000), 11.
- 24.
John O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1–14.
- 25.
John T. Elson, “Theology: Toward a Hidden God,” Time Magazine, April 8, 1966.
- 26.
Corroborated by Van Cleve Morris, Existential Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 3.
- 27.
Richard Crouse, Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils (Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 2012), 128.
- 28.
Philip R. Stone and Richard Sharpley, “Deviance, Dark Tourism, and Dark Leisure: Towards a (Re)configuration of Morality and the Taboo in Secular Society,” Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure: Meanings, Motives, and Lifelong Learning, ed. Sam Elkington and Sean Gammon (New York: Routledge, 2014), 56.
- 29.
Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, 8–9.
- 30.
Philip R. Stone, “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions,” Tourism: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54, no. 2 (2006), 151.
- 31.
White, Tropics, 121–122.
- 32.
Ibid., 122.
- 33.
Pearl, introduction to On the Demon-mania of Witches, 20; Levack, Witch-Hunt, 21.
- 34.
Cooper, Devil’s Advocates, 23.
- 35.
Pearl, introduction to On the Demon-mania of Witches, 20.
- 36.
Cooper, Devil’s Advocates, 24.
- 37.
Ibid., 95.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Ibid., 59–61.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Ibid., 63.
- 42.
Ibid., 78.
- 43.
Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 117.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid., 118.
- 46.
Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 5.
- 47.
Ibid., 19–20.
- 48.
Ibid., 20.
- 49.
Pearl, introduction to On the Demon-mania of Witches, 14–15. Explains early modern popular folkloric culture, which is represented by Vanessa.
- 50.
Hippies or more liberal young audiences can be loosely associated with Vanessa’s carefree character.
- 51.
Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 193.
- 52.
Burke , Attitudes, 22.
- 53.
Crouse, Raising Hell, 53.
- 54.
Ibid., 135.
- 55.
Ibid., 142, 148. In fact, Russell was astonished that the film’s religiosity was overlooked, and he blamed its censorship on hypersensitive atheists, stating, “There aren’t many Catholics in England, but I’m sure that if a Catholic censor had been shown the scene of the nuns and the crucifix, he would have understood what was being said and he would have passed it. Atheist censors are always the ones to be most appalled.”
- 56.
Booth , Modern Dogma, 186.
- 57.
Ibid., 183.
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Hurley, G.F. (2018). Touring the “Burning Times”: The Rhetoric of Witch-Hunting Films, 1968–1973. In: McDaniel, K.N. (eds) Virtual Dark Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_6
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