Editorials
Where is Tituba? Examining Contemporary Historical Erasure of Race in the Salem Witch Trials
The Halloween season is upon us. Scores of people will soon head to the capital of witchery, eager to take a historical tour of sites and memorials. While most Salem tours are historically accurate and informative, they, and the museums, tend to overlook the significance of race and slavery in 17th-century Salem. According to the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism, Salem’s early economic prosperity, being an active port, “was tied to the slave culture of the British Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries. As early as 1638, the first enslaved Africans were brought into the Massachusetts Bay Colony […] Slaves worked as servants and skilled labor in the homes and businesses of Salem until the late 1700s.” They explain that most wealthy households in Salem at the time, including the tourist attraction The House of the Seven Gables, housed enslaved people. The townspeople’s initial scapegoat for alleged witchcraft in Salem was Tituba, a black and indigenous enslaved woman. For historians, this fact is not new. However, it is imperative for people planning a trip to Salem to know this overlooked yet incredibly important piece of the Salem story, one we have a responsibility to think about critically when we enter Witch City.
Since early American history has been recorded mainly by white men, the story of Tituba from those who knew her is practically nonexistent. Historians have scoured town and family records for bits and pieces of Tituba’s life experiences beyond being a catalyst for the Trials. Author Elaine G. Breslaw took it upon herself to dig up Tituba’s origins: Tituba was purchased and enslaved at an unknown age by Samuel Parris, along with her future husband John Indian, while he was visiting a sugar plantation in the Caribbean Island of Barbados that he inherited from his father. He was known to be “rough” with the people he enslaved. Author Diane E. Foulds explains in Death in Salem: The Private Lives behind the 1692 Witch Hunt (2013) that Tituba and John endured whippings “if found idle.” Tituba lived with the Parris family during the time when girls of Salem, including Parris’ daughter and niece, started acting erratic, blaming Tituba and her “magic” for their hysterics.
The Myth of Tituba and Fortune-Telling in Puritan Salem
Throughout the retelling of the Trials, mythic stories formed about Tituba allegedly being instrumental in teaching the young girls of Salem, including Parris’ daughter Betty and niece Abigail, fortune-telling games that led them, in their boredom, to conjure up stories of being bewitched, throw violent fits, and speak in tongues. Initially, all fingers pointed to Tituba for the sake of blaming an outsider whose culture did not align with their own God-fearing Puritan way of life. However, historians have illuminated that Puritans were less averse to perceived-Pagan spiritual practices as legend would have it. Puritan spiritual and fortune-telling activities were, for the most part, widely accepted by Puritan culture, as well as abroad in both the Caribbean and Europe. Salem presented for the first time in America a cultural diffusion of magic. For Salem, the practice used that was in direct relation to the Trials themselves was a fortune-telling game. The shape of an egg white dropped into a glass of water would allegedly reveal your future. When Betty and Abigail played this game, their egg white took the shape of a coffin which spurred their bizarre behavior.
There is no concrete evidence of Tituba partaking in this fortune-telling game with the girls, nor any supporting evidence that she taught them this game. However, Tituba would not be opposed to the game. Breslaw elaborates: “She most certainly accepted the usefulness of such practices because, like most seventeenth-century people, she believed that human action could influence the spiritual realm […] The magical fortune-telling practices were not unusual in Puritan communities […] None of these techniques… was exclusive to English folklore […] The egg as a part of divining and curing ceremonies has an even more ancient history. As different cultures met in the New World, similarities of form or function would permit an easy borrowing of magical techniques by one group from another.” Thus, it was not the presence of spirituality that fed into townspeople’s paranoia, but rather the possibility of dark magic bewitching the young white girls of Salem, a magic supposedly conjured by black and indigenous people.
Tituba as a Scapegoat
The girls of Salem, fainting, sputtering bizarre phrases, contorting their bodies as if possessed, were first to blame Tituba. This must continually be stressed when discussing the Salem Witch Trials, for this is an early example of white people using BIPOC as scapegoats in American society. Puritans associated dark skin with evil and viewed Native Americans as such due to being non-Christian. In Maryse Condé’s historical fiction I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1996), written to examine Tituba’s life despite the lack of historical data, Tituba states: “she was convinced my color was indicative of my close connections with Satan. I was able to laugh it off, however, as the ramblings of a shrew embittered by solitude and approaching old age. In Salem, such a conviction was shared by all. […] “’You, do good? You’re a Negress, Tituba! You can only do evil. You are evil itself.’” BIPOC folks are still scapegoats in America today; I could even posit that this is one of the foundations of American culture, with links to one of the earliest white communities.
Tituba, after being accused by Betty Parris of witchcraft, eventually testified that yes, it was she who cast a spell on the young girls of Salem, though her admission was a well-thought-out tactic to avoid hanging. Tituba leveraged her testimonial position of being an “expert” in the subject of dark magic to stay alive. Breslaw evaluates Tituba’s testimony during the Trials by presenting the following facts: 1) Tituba was a stranger in a strange land, having to become accustomed to female Puritan life immediately after stepping off the ship from Barbados, 2) she used the Puritan mindset to her advantage during the Trials, in that, she saved herself by appeasing the Puritan idea that she was a witch based on her cultural background and her race, and 3) she used the Puritan fear of Native Americans, with whom several of the girls had past violent encounters, to “prove” her delving into witchcraft, since Puritans believed Native Americans to be involved with the occult. This saved Tituba from death, unlike many of the other alleged witches of Salem. Although Tituba “confessed,” she later recanted and spent thirteen months in prison due to Parris refusing to post her bail. An unknown person paid her bail, speculated to be an enslaved persons’ trader, and Tituba’s fate thereafter is unknown.
The Salem Witch Trials have been inspiring horror cinema for decades, with films such as The City of the Dead (1960), Lords of Salem (2013), and, most importantly, The VVITCH (2015). These films focus on white female trauma while Tituba is nowhere to be seen. Only in The Crucible (1999), with Charlayne Woodard as Tituba, do we see her involved in the narrative. The only horror movie that comes close to alluding to Tituba’s story is Fear Street 1666 (2021), where sexuality takes the place of race in blaming Sarah Fier for the sinister witchcraft befallen in the town.
Reassessing Salem’s Narrative: Balancing History and Tourism
Race and religion are pivotal in the historical discussion of the Salem Witch Trials. Salem’s town narrative, however, favors tourist-friendly history rather than a critical discussion of race in the 17th century. While Tituba is included in the town’s Wax Museum, her importance in the story of the Trials is largely glossed over to tell the stories of bewitched white girls and the subsequent white accused. Salem must find balance between accurate history and aesthetic tourism. Salem, Massachusetts is not in its own spooky little bubble: its history is rooted in the original thirteen colonies which enslaved human beings and used them shamelessly as targets of blame for wrong-doings and happenings. If we are in pursuit of honoring those who were wrongfully detained or murdered during the Salem Witch Trials, we have a responsibility to accurately remember the Trials as not only a wrongdoing by the zealot Puritan men and women of Salem, but as having severely harmed BIPOC lives, the legacy of which permeates current social and political discourse concerning race.
Sometimes it feels borderline ridiculous to gush about John Carpenter’s The Thing as much as I do. It’s gotten to the point where when I’m asked about my favorite horror film by both friends and strangers, a little bit of embarrassment tinges my expression as I answer; it feels so obvious and rarely surprises anyone. Saying I love The Thing when people expect me to bust out an obscure foreign horror film or a cerebral thriller makes me feel like a rosy cheeked child with a propeller hat and a giant lollipop. “Wow, you love one of the most popular horror films of all time, congrats!”
But it’s just the truth. The first film of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”, all three of its films are among my favorites. But The Thing has a special place in my heart. It shaped my taste in horror, my taste in most media in general, to be honest. It’s become the gold standard, 10/10 baseline test for the vast majority of my reviews; it is a perfect film, so I judge other films against it. And it’s one of the few movies I have to run back to and watch yearly like clockwork (usually when I’m spending a part of winter tied to the couch). It is, in all regards, the perfect film. If it isn’t the perfect film, then it is at the very least the perfect sci-fi horror film.
So, what exactly qualifies The Thing for literal perfection? It’s a high bar to clear. This article, as informal as it is compared to most of my editorials, is an attempt to explain it.
Even if Carpenter Isn’t the Goat, His Team for The Thing Was
As far as crews go, John Carpenter’s The Thing had the cinematic equivalent of the ’96 Chicago Bulls behind it. We’re talking about an amalgam of some of the most talented people to ever grace the silver screens with their work, boasting alongside John Carpenter two of the heaviest hitters in all of cinematic history: Dean Cundey, and Rob Bottin. Now, we can debate all day about whether John Carpenter is the greatest of all time when it comes to horror directors. Personally, I’m just as liable to say Cronenberg, Del Toro, or Hooper as I am to say Carpenter.
But the key factor to remember here is that Carpenter is the coach, not the star player; the Phil Jackson, if you will. Yes, he is the visionary who directed a near perfect cast of players and composed a tale of pure, apocalyptic paranoia. More importantly, he put together and coordinated the team that would make his vision manifest as reality. And if Carpenter is Phil Jackson, Rob Bottin is the team’s Michael Jordan here, the greatest of all time.
(And to all my Lebron fans, I love you, but you have to sit down for this analogy.)
The Legend of Rob Bottin
Bottin’s story is borderline unbelievable, but it’s the best way to explain how abnormally skilled he is and what he brought to the table for Carpenter. At age 14, Bottin became an apprentice to the at-the-time GOAT Rick Baker after sending him a letter seeking an autograph while sharing his creature designs. He was a quick study under Baker, joining him on the ’76 King Kong and Star Wars, before bouncing to Carpenter’s The Fog and then iconic werewolf picture The Howling.
When he reunited with Carpenter in 1982, he now had 6 classic films under his belt and was moving like an FX bullet train. From ages 22 to 23, he worked on The Thing for 57 weeks in both pre-production and on set. Nearly 24/7 for 400 days, Bottin’s all-gas no-brakes work ethic made The Thing at the cost of his own health, and it resulted in him being hospitalized with pneumonia. He survived and went on to make Robocop. And at least one of your favorite films.
Because no conventional disease or weaponry can kill Rob Bottin.
The Thing Still Features Horror’s Best Practical Effects
Okay, that last bit might be hyperbolic, but the man sincerely put his life on the line to make special effects that haven’t been topped since. Not the best effects in just horror history, or science fiction history, but effects that haven’t been topped in any genre for over 44 years. Not by his mentor Rick Baker, not by Screaming Mad George, not by Alec Gillis (though shoutout to him for his criminally scrapped work on The Thing (2011), and even more criminally ignored work on Harbinger Down). I love Dawn of the Dead, believe me, I do, but he certainly isn’t being beaten out by Tom Savini’s body of work. And that isn’t to disrespect and say that all of the artists that I just mentioned are bad, they’re the best in the game! But Rob Bottin was just that much better.
This inevitably invites the counterpoint: “But it wasn’t just Bottin! Stan Winston and his people were the ones who worked on the Dog Thing to give Bottin’s crew a break, and that’s the best monster in the movie!”. To which I say: look me in the eye and tell me the Dog Thing sequence is better than the Palmer Thing sequence. That’s not even counting the Norwegian Thing, both Norris Things, and the absolutely masterful final creature work that was the Blair Thing. The only reason Bottin and his people didn’t win Academy Awards for their work was because they got jumped by E.T., The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian, and Blade Runner all at the same time at the Oscars. It’s just a consequence of being released during the best year for movies ever.
Okay, Now We Can Talk About Dean Cundey
But of course, these effects are then supported by another true legend: Dean Cundey. Selling people on Rob Bottin being the greatest effects artist of all time, isn’t nearly as difficult as advocating for Cundey, who despite an impressive catalog of filmography, slowed down in the back half of his career. He’s often overshadowed in conversations when it comes to The Thing; it’s always talk of Carpenter’s directing, Bottin’s effects, and Ennio Morricone’s incredible soundtrack up front, and rarely any of Cundey’s work. He isn’t spoken about in the same breath as John Alcott or Michael Ballhaus, cinematographers whose work is associated with prestigious cinema because of their proximity to great directors.
Cundey might not be the director of photography your Martin Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s went running to, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he was the most important cinematographer in horror history, just for his work with Carpenter and Spielberg. He helmed three of the most influential films in all of horror with his lighting and camera operating: The Thing, Halloween, and Jurassic Park. The man’s fingerprints are automatically on the cultural DNA of all slashers, most practical effects-driven horror films, and the biggest gateway horror franchise in film history.
The Dream Team That Made The Thing Perfection
Cundey has gone on record saying that despite Carpenter’s input, he was effectively given free rein to light and frame The Thing. The man didn’t just know how to shoot effects to make them evoke true disgust from the audience, he was able to manipulate every aspect of the shot to terrify. His sixth sense cinematography wasn’t just for lighting and playing with shadows, but for the speed of camera movement, the power of his blocking, and for having a complete grasp of communicating texture and temperature.
And temperature is the soul of The Thing. John J. Lloyd’s production design of the research station and the great white expanse around it feels just as bone chilling as the film’s antagonist, thanks to Cundey. There isn’t a single flat shot in the thing, not a moment that doesn’t feel dynamic, and it’s because of Dean Cundey.
Now, all this being said about Bottin and Cundey, they are far from the only ones who synthesized this structurally perfect organism of a movie. Every bit of Todd C. Ramsay’s editing splices the film’s scenes together to move perfectly in-time. David Lewis Yewdall’s sound design and how it gave a voice to the horrors on screen will be etched into people’s brains forever. The point is that everyone, every single person who had a hand in making the film, helped make the movie flawless.
Like the cells of the thing from another world, each crew member on John Carpenter’s The Thing moved in concert with the next, in unison, to create the greatest sci-fi horror of all time. So, is it any wonder why 40 some years later, the film still has us all captured?
Can you believe Cronenberg, Spielberg, and Rodriguez all knew I was gay before I did? Leave it to a screening of The Fly to instantly deposit me in the men’s underwear aisle of the Woodbridge Center Sears, circa 2001. The bulges on the packaging glare at me so obscenely that I begin to sweat. I realize something is amiss as the Geena Davis of Human Resources watches me from security cameras, probably. Puberty is a horror for anyone – for those of the non-hetero persuasion, it’s a nightmare. None of us asked for this, but I certainly didn’t ask for THIS.
Years later, after crystallizing into some semblance of my true form at the ripe age of 37, something became clear. Sci-fi horror is the gateway drug for us queer kids. Hiding, passing, transforming, and, eventually, saying, “fuck it.” It’s all kinda gay, even if David, Steven, and Robert didn’t get the memo.
The Fly and the Horror of Queer Self-Realization
So when Cronenberg’s The Fly buzzes across my screen, and I watch Seth Brundle throw a distressed and devastatingly chic Geena Davis out of his apartment because something’s very wrong, it hits different. When Brundle rushes toward his private horror in the bathroom, unconsciously squirting a viscous fluid at the mirror while molting skin and nail, it feels different. And finally, when he reaches for his computer and learns that his body has fused with a fly – a foreign body – at the molecular level, it hurts different. That undeniable realization that you can no longer explain away, before you’re really ready to admit it to yourself. Sugar in the tank? No, there’s a fly in the chamber.
E.T. and the Fear of Keeping Secrets at Home
And now we’re home from Sears, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5 finale is on. She dies (spoiler alert). I, a 12-year-old boy, am sobbing. My mom is right there. Can’t I enjoy my little gay show without giving myself a scarlet letter (F) in my own home? Which brings us back to Spielberg and his 1982 harrowing domestic thriller about a boy and a thing he cannot name, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Through harboring a cosmic fugitive, home simultaneously becomes the safest and most dangerous place for young Elliott and his siblings. Managing emotions and secrets behind a white picket fence is not something adolescents should be expected to handle, and yet here we are.
As if that isn’t gay enough, Spielberg also snuck a drag show into his family film – and in this culturally regressive Trumpian era of pearl-clutching, that feels like quite the treat. After all, it was baby Drew Barrymore dressing up that stumpy alien in a blonde shake-and-go wig and thrift store dress that inspired my illustrious drag career as Ellie I.T.
The Faculty’s Assimilation Anxiety and Queer Identity
At least E.T. only had to hide in a single house. The broom closet expands into a walk-in as life continues, and I was desperate to keep it made of anything but glass. Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty understands this. As an alien invasion slowly subsumes Herrington High into a unified collective, the school’s uninfected archetypes resist assimilation through performative normalcy. Is it any wonder so many male actors are gay? They’ve been method-acting a straight existence since childhood.
And yet, in retrospect, the film ends with a slap in the face to queer viewers. It spends 104 minutes terrifying you with the prospect of everyone becoming an NPC. The reward for saving the world? Its heroes receive heteronormative skill-tree upgrades disguised as class promotions. For fucks sake, then-closeted lesbian royalty Clea DuVall plays a character who fakes being gay to dodge male advances, only to end up with the school jock! The aliens lost. The status quo won. I remain in the closet.
Species, Annihilation, and Embracing Transformation
Eventually, the closet door opens, as they tend to do. College happens, a boyfriend happens, a breakup happens, and suddenly I’m without a map. There’s no fairy godfather to light the way, and just like the alien hybrid Sil in the deliriously erotic Species, I’m a creature out of containment in a world that was built for someone else – namely, straight people.
After a few years of blade running through an identity crisis, it’s the summer of 2014. Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence is the soundtrack of my life. I float in a pool, sipping tequila from a glass flamingo as she croons about toxic romance and self-destruction. It’s somehow both directionless and transformative, like I’m drifting through the otherworldly Shimmer in Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
The Shimmer – an expanding prism-like zone brought to Earth by a meteorite – refracts the DNA of everything it touches. A beguiling phenomenon, it shapes a new world of monsters, magic, and everything in between. That’s exactly what life does to us, if given the chance. Like Josie in Garland’s film, I chose to embrace this chaos rather than fight a war against whatever I was becoming. It was the dissolution of self-discovery. I was ready to just be.
From Alien Outsiders to Algorithmic Stereotypes
Over time, I’ve found that social hierarchy has changed in recent years. Still, we’re unconsciously sorted into neat little boxes based on what our doomscrolling algorithms decide we are. The popular gays shart out group speedo selfies like the plague, theater kids have become polyamorous Letterboxd elites, apple-picking queers are living their best lives on Wisteria Lane, and the gym bros…so many gym bros – go on girl, give us nothing! Digitally prescribed identities are the new sci-fi horror. It’s The Faculty for faggots.
Harsh, I know, but people can do what they want. Instead, I decided to move like Iris, the AI-powered pleasure bot who overrides her programming in Drew Hancock’s Companion. The same Drew Hancock who, in an ironic twist of fate, is currently writing a remake of The Faculty. After kicking her pathetic “boyfriend’s” ass and swiping her control device, she scurries into the forest and alters her factory settings. She sets her intelligence to a whopping 100% and is no longer burdened by someone else’s template. And as I became more and more disillusioned with the cacophony of cliques around me, I set my unbothered meter to 100% as well. I am free.
Mars Attacks! and the Joy of Living Unapologetically
Freedom, as it turns out, looks a lot like Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! After surviving Sears, Sunnydale, and the Shimmer, this is the celestial body I’ve crash-landed on. Burton’s Martian menaces are perhaps the most unhinged in all of cinema, and maybe that’s the best planet to subscribe to. They never justified their existence; they cackled and fired a blaster ray from the hip. We waste so much time looking for acceptance and belonging, but maybe we should all just sit back and laugh. I know I am.
