"Night falls hard here, sirs. And with it comes a most dreadful dark...and a most heavy silence."
— Isaac Goodenow
The Sudbury Devil is a 2023 independent Psychological Folk Splatter Horror period film created by Atun-Shei Films and written and directed by Andrew Rakich. Set in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1670s in the aftermath of King Philip's War, it follows two Puritan witch hunters — John Fletcher and Josiah Cutting — who arrive in the small town of Sudbury to investigate rumors of devil worship. In addition to Rakich himself, it also stars Benton Guinness as Fletcher, Linnea Gregg as Widow Gavett, and Josh Popa as Josiah Cutting.
The film is notable for using period-accurate accents (as Rakich is known for doing for his Witchfinder General character) and, wherever possible, appropriately made clothing and props for New Englanders in the 17th century. You can see the trailer here
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The Sudbury Devil began its roadshow premiere in September 2023 and released on streaming on December 21. You can buy or rent it here at atunsheifilms.com.
See also Robert Eggers' The VVitch, a similarly period-accurate film with a similar premise of New England witchcraft.
Bewarned, for the The Sudbury Devil containeth the following tropes...
- Ambiguous Situation: Enforced in one scene, with a trick self-admittedly borrowed from American Psycho. Mr. Gavett, as witches are known to do, flubs a prayer over a meal, in a way that could be easily taken as a Stealth Insult towards God, Christianity, Puritanism, and religion in general. It was shot twice, with Rakich giving two completely different performances in each; one where Mr. Gavett is just a normal, kindly fellow who'd made an understandable mistake and in another a flamboyantly proud servant of the devil barely able to conceal his glee at manipulating the protagonists. Shots from the two were then spliced together, making it just as hard for the audience to discern which is the truth as the witch finders.
- Antiquated Linguistics: In addition to accents, the characters also speak with 17th-century word choice and grammar.
- Army of Thieves and Whores: Fletcher served in Samuel Moseley's company during King Philip's War. Mr. Gavett and Rev. Russell harbor a romantic notion of Moseley's men as former privateers who bravely defended the English colonists. Fletcher, by contrast, says he and his comrades were glorified brigands and cutpurses who were deputized by the colonies to massacre innocent Indians.
- Asshole Victim: The story makes it clear that the deceased Mr. Gavett was a misogynistic prick of a husband who treated Patience like shit, and her illusory version of him is nothing more than a crude mockery of what she saw him as.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Fletcher fails to stop Patience from giving birth to the Devil's child, only asking that said child forever curse New England with its haunting. Of course, if the fact that Patience is the antagonist and this is a bad thing are the same is up to the viewer.
- Big "SHUT UP!": After Cutting defiantly refuses to stop praying in front of Patience and her coven, she goes full demon mode on him:Patience: BE SILENT! BE SILENT! THOU PRAT-SWIVE! THOU MOLLY! THOU MILK-PIGEON! THY GOD IS NOT HERE! HE NEVER WAS! NOW BE SILENT!
- Campfire Character Exploration: As Fletcher leads Russel and Gavett back into the woods, they make camp for the night and build a fire to sit around and drink strongwater. Before long, Gavett suggests they tell war stories, and we immediately learns something about each character: Fletcher is haunted by the Indian children whom he killed and whose heads he sold during the war, Russell sat the war out by claiming that God wanted him to tend to his congregation first, and "Mr. Gavett" is a Devil in Plain Sight, especially when he (possibly on purpose) jumbles the Lord's Prayer and Fletcher is immediately distrustful of him.
- Casting Gag: Carl Sailor, who plays Reverend Russell, has a habit of gruesomely dying in the woods in Rakich's other works.
- Closed Circle: The overwhelming majority of the film takes place in a single small clearing outside Sudbury.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Much more so than your average Folk Horror story. In the film, Satan is portrayed as an incomprehensible Eldritch Abomination to whom all mortals will eventually submit, whether it be willingly as rebellion against their own evil brethren or after being coaxed and coerced into its service. The ending of the film even heavily implies that modern-day Massachusetts and by extension the U.S. were intrinsically founded by Fletcher's dying curse and the physical birth of the Day Star into the world, therefore making an entire country the progeny of Satan.
- Decapitation Presentation: The Canadian to whom Fletcher sells the heads of slaughtered Indian children loves to do this while revelling in his bloodlust.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Most of the characters portray the regressive social attitudes of the time, especially the protagonists Fletcher and Cutting. They routinely denounce Native Americans as savages who deserved to be wiped out, and cast Africans as unthinking brutes. Cutting actually comes to a more racist opinion about Africans than even the source he quotes, who at least felt that some with African ancestry could demonstrate intelligence and humanity; Cutting dismisses all non-Christians as incapable of creative thought.
- Devil, but No God: All the explicitly supernatural events of the film are caused by Satan-worshippers or directly by the Day Star itself, but there is no divine intervention from the godly side of things, lending ambiguity to whether God is merely testing Cutting and Fletcher like they believe or if Patience's claim that their God never existed is true.
- Don't Go in the Woods: Almost everything bad in the film happens in the forests of Sudbury Plantation, including devil worship, weird and gross sex stuff and unspeakable mutilation and carnage.
- Eldritch Abomination: The titular Devil is portrayed in such a way, appearing as a ball of bright light, in visions as an animalistic silhouette, and causing the sky itself to turn into a kaleidoscope of bizarre moons and planets.
- Eternally Pearly-White Teeth: Averted. Every character in the film has some level of visible tooth decay and yellowing, but especially Flora due to her being a slave woman.
- Evil Versus Evil: Ultimately, the film depicts a struggle between the Lawful Evil of the Puritan witch-hunters and the Chaotic Evil of the Satan-worshipping witches.
- Fan Disservice: The film has a lot of sex in it, but precisely none of it is titillating or erotic. Goodenow and Flora compulsively masturbating, Fletcher unceremoniously rutting into Flora as she cackles madly, and Patience and Fletcher having sex as they both bleed out from stabbing each other all stand out.
- Foreshadowing: Fletcher is mentioned as serving in the militia company of Samuel Mosely. Those familiar with Rakich's documentary series on King Philip's War will know that this is an early indication that he's hardly a paragon of righteous conduct.
- Freud Was Right: The pagan ritual stone seen throughout the film has a lot of phallic symbolism. When Patience and Fletcher have sex, a cascade of green energy shoots out of the top of it in a manner extremely reminiscent of ejaculation.
- General Ripper: Samuel Moseley, whom Fletcher served under, was notoriously brutal and vicious during King Philip's War, and did not spare even friendly, Christianized Native Americans during his rampages. Fletcher calls him a "mad rogue for whom murder was a pleasure."
- Girl on Girl Is Hot: When Patience and Flora start making out, Goodenow immediately starts cranking it right next to them.
- Gorn: The violence in this movie is extremely graphic, which is just how Andrew Rakich likes it. Special note goes to Patience (disguised as her late husband) shooting an open hole straight through Rev. Russell with a flintlock musket, and to Fletcher disemboweling Patience at the end — she pulls her own guts out of her stomach, and it is not hidden from the camera.
- The Great Offscreen War: King Philip's War serves as this for the duration of the story, as basically every character either fought in or was affected by it in some way. Fletcher is a Shell-Shocked Veteran missing an eye, Goodenow lost an arm, Patience's husband died at the hands of the Natives, etc.
- HeelโFace Revolving Door: Mr John Fletcher richochets between being Satan's staunch enemy, most willing servant, and a terrified onlooker.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: Throughout the film, but most obviously at the end when Patience Gavett and Fletcher brutally stab each other to death, with Fletcher even disemboweling Patience, only to start having sex.
- Knight Templar: Deconstructed. Our two main protagonists are a pair of literally puritanical witch hunters, but in an effort to make them three-dimensional and historically accurate Fletcher is shown having serious doubts about the atrocities he's committed for God and country. However, the film also shows that people who are remorseful about such things can still be a part of the problem if their fundamental worldview and culture encourages such acts, and because the goals of the Sudbury coven are never really explained in detail Fletcher and Cutting appear to just be trying to kill them for following a different religion from them no matter what they say otherwise.
- Light Is Not Good: Whatever the "Day-Star" is, be it Satan, Lucifer or some kind of Eldritch Abomination, it resembles a light which burns extremely bright.
- Lovecraft Country: The town of Sudbury is very isolated and remote at this point in history, making it an ideal setting for spooky gothic horror.
- Magic Is Feminine: Patience Gavett's consorting with Satan and dabbling in witchcraft is explicitly framed as a backlash to an oppressive patriarchal theocracy that kept her as an abused housewife.
- Male Frontal Nudity: The scene where Goodenow masturbates on the witching stone includes a very brief shot of his penis discharging.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's initially kept ambiguous whether Goodenow's outbursts are genuine demonic possession, or he's just a deeply traumatised war veteran experiencing psychosis. It's probably both.
- Mind Screw: The film boasts a cavalcade of freaky, psychedelic and simultaneously schizophrenic imagery which paints a much larger, more disjointed and complicated picture than can be understood with just one viewing.
- New England Puritan: Most of the characters, given the 17th-century Massachusetts setting.
- Psychological Projection: Christians argue that the Devil sometimes takes a beautiful form to better tempt them to sin and witchcraft, but many of the culturally Christian characters in the film try to present themselves as godly and virtuous while actually being horrible, vicious people.
- Rape, Pillage, and Burn:
- Several English characters in the film have a delusionally romantic view of King Philip's War as a war of noble Englishmen fighting off rapacious heathen Indians, but Fletcher says it was more like this, a systematic razing and brutalization of numerous Algonquin civilizations along the Massachusetts coast almost purely out of revenge and zealotry. He couldn't know it at the time, but the film makes a point of subtly connecting King Philip's War with the Indian Wars of the late 1800s, which are increasingly considered by modern historians to be an ethnic cleansing if not outright genocide.
- For their part, the Wampanoag-led alliance committed extreme violence on white civilians during the war as well, including the opening battle of the war, the Sudbury Fight. Goodenow is a survivor of that battle, and is clearly traumatized (even beyond having lost his arm).
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Josiah Cutting is depicted with a limp and requiring a cane to walk steadily. In-universe this is implied to be the result of a war wound, but in real life, actor Josh Popa had injured his leg days before shooting and there was no opportunity to reschedule.
- Recurring Riff: A horrific bleating noise consisting of three notes can be heard somewhere in almost every track on the film's score, serving as a sort of Leitmotif for Fletcher and his degrading mental state.
- The Savage Indian: Invoked and discussed. On the heels of a brutal war with the Wampanoag and other Native American tribes of New England, this is how most of the white characters view them. The Native American alliance did commit some pretty heinous atrocities during the war — massacring homesteads and hamlets and sacking English towns — and the reason the Canadian traders bought the heads of murdered Algonquins was to sell them on to the Mohawk, who were evidently happy to pay off white people to kill their enemies. However, the film makes it clear that the Native American violence was principally a reaction and retaliation to an inherently violent and oppressive society bent on their subjugation or destruction, that believed itself to have a divine mandate to rule over them.
- Sarcastic Clapping; "Mr. Gavett" does this after getting Fletcher to unearth the horrible deeds he committed during the war, such as killing children and harvesting their heads to sell for profit, clearly deeply hurting Fletcher as he is forced to relive the trauma.Mr. Gavett: What vim! What martial valour!
- Say My Name: When Goodenow taunts the tied-up Fletcher and Cutting by singing a Royalist Christmas song and dancing a jig, Fletcher very quickly loses his patience with the performance.Goodenow: ๐ Come come, my royal ramping boys let's never be cast down, we'll never mind the female toys but loyal be to the crown! We'll never break our hearts with care or be cast down with fear— ๐
Fletcher: Goodenow.
Goodenow: ๐ Our bellies then let us prepare to drink some Christmas beer! ๐
Fletcher: GOODENOOOOOW!!! - Self-Abuse: Goodenow is prone to this, which is taken by the witchfinders as a sign of his demonic taint. Flora also masturbates in front of Fletcher to tempt him, which works. All if it is framed as the Puritans would have seen it, being weird ritualistic violence rather than self-pleasure. note
- Shout-Out: "Mr. Gavett" at one point says "Ah, Sentimentality. the last bastion of a weakling". In a slight rephrasing of one of Colonel Ives' most famous quotes, "Morality: the last bastion of a coward".
- Shown Their Work: The film goes to extreme lengths to make itself both historically accurate and immersive on a shoestring budget, from the characters' garb and accents to small historical details which warrant interesting footnotes about 17th-century Puritan culture in the behind-the-scenes footage.
- Spiritual Antithesis: To Rakich's "In Defense of Puritanism" video on his main Youtube channel. That video, while open and frank about the problematic elements like bigotry within the Puritan movement, argued that the movement was a fundamentally progressive one by the standards of its time, and that its values have become cherished American values. In this film, the audience is shown the ways in which its vices have also unfortunately been baked into American society.
- The Unreveal: We never actually get to fully see what Patience did to Cutting. From the brief shots we do see, it certainly wouldn't have been pleasant.
- Voice of the Legion: Patience gains this when she loudly tells Cutting to shut up and stop praying.
- The Witch Hunter: The protagonists are Puritan witch hunters.
- Would Hurt a Child: Fletcher is revealed to be this when "Gavett" presses him to tell stories of the time when he served in Mosely's Company. Part of his job was burning down Native American villages, and shooting any children trying to flee. The wretchedness of this and other horrible atrocities he committed during the war have stuck with Fletcher and made him into the Shell-Shocked Veteran he is in the film.Fletcher: [visibly holding back tears] I set one longhouse afire that had at least...four families within it? There were...gaps in the wall, just large enough for a small child to wiggle out...and we shot them. We shot them as they ran away, we shot them through the body. And we took care ne'er to spoil the head, for there are Canadians who will pay three English pounds for an Indian head. And children's heads are lighter.
- Wretched Hive: This is how Boston is generally viewed; one character refers to Boston's "tavern rakes about all hours."
Be the devil that we so richly deserve.
