Be careful where you buy your next Halloween pumpkin, or it may seal your fate with the wrong kind of witch. Casey T. Malone’s Blood of the Witch is not the type of fantasy horror you’d expect these days. It harkens back to earlier times, long before most Film Threat readers were born.
Blood of the Witch is a simple tale. An ordinary man named Peter (Nate Kutz) falls asleep, takes a walk in some make believe woods and purchases what appears to be a common pumpkin. Of course the masked pumpkin vendor (Mike Thompson) is far from typical, as is the pretty young witch (Liz Owens) in the long striped stockings.
Malone’s silent tale of power and deception reconfigures the painted expressionism of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and the poisonous visions of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) in a new, but no less formidable, way. Malone uses music as a parallel storyteller to simultaneously calm and suspend his viewers. He is, in many ways, a furtive puppeteer, manipulating us into his world and challenging us to both believe and question the moralistic fable he sets before us.
Another really interesting aspect of Casey T. Malone’s story— or reality— is that it’s hard to be sure if Peter is dreaming. It’s also disturbingly clear that Blood of the Witch is not about the clash of good and evil, since goodness is not a trait any of the characters possess at any moment in the film.
Blood of the Witch is the first of a trilogy, and very soon I’ll have the good fortune to share with you another film in Malone’s unusual little project. In the meantime, please sleep with one eye open, and beware of all sorcerers in our midst…
This film was submitted for review through our Submission for Review system. If you have a film you’d like us to see, and we aren’t already looking into it on our own, you too can utilize this service.
