Recently I interviewed Peg Aloi who shared her thoughts on how the film Season of the Witch might depict the witch and how this characterization might relate to witches and Wiccans in the real world. Since our discussion this film has debuted in theaters, and many reviews have not been positive. By contrast, there has been a positive buzz about another film with some similarities that takes place in the same medieval time period, and in relation to the bubonic plague and religious views related to the witch and the disease. The film is Black Death, directed by Christopher Smith, and starring Sean Bean.

Rue Morgue magazine #108 (Jan./Feb. 2011), featured Black Death as a cover story, and included an analysis of the film along with an interview with Smith. During the course of the interview there is discussion about the application of the film to the present day, and whether the conflict between Christian fundamentalists and pagans may or may not function as a parable for our times. In response Smith states:

I think there’s certainly a relevance between being told something is evil and finding out it’s actually the opposite. But [in regards] to Christians versus pagans, I don’t want to suggest that any one side is more right than the other, because the film is not about which religion’s right — far from it; it’s about the way that religions can be manipulated and used by bad people for their own good. And what you have is this group of soldiers that are in this clash between these two things, where they are told on the one hand to go to this village and destroy the evil there, but when they get there they find a place that seems to be the exact opposite of what they were told it would be. … It’s also a movie about the ways faith can be tested. If you are told that if you come to church you won’t die, how do you go back to church and say, “Why didn’t that work?” At the time, the Church got very scared with the question that faith is being challenged by the people. Part of what you see in the film, this idea of needing to find a demon, needing to find someone that we can pin the blame on this thing on, to go and destroy it, and then when we’ve destroyed it harmony can return again, that’s a very modern parable.

Black Death has already been released in the UK, but is set for at least a limited US release in March of 2011.