Salem (2014) s01e00 Episode Script

Today, most people when they hear of Salem, they think of witchcraft.
Afraid of witches? Or being taken for one? In 1692, 25 innocent people were accused of witchcraft.
They lost their lives.
They were executed.
Died in prison from charges they were innocent of when in fact they were very devout people who had done nothing wrong.
This same incident which generates all this great political and social understanding also generated every Great American horror story from Poe to Lovecraft and Stephen King.
So there must be something there, right? There must be something scary there.
There's something about the witch.
The core group of accusers is a bunch of girls in their late teens, early 20s.
Twitching around, and it escalated into something closer to convulsions.
People wondered if it might be witchcraft.
The girls really displayed symptoms that were fearsome to everyone who saw them.
Some of the accusers were motivated by fear that got out of hand.
Old grudges certainly cropped up.
It was human nature at its worst whether the devil is behind it or not is opinion as to what causes humans at all times to do the wrong thing.
The Salem witch trials is a very complicated series of events that happened.
The reason that it is so popular today is that we don't really know the final answer of why they occurred.
I was actually asked by Josh Barry, one of our executive producers, if I was interested in the idea of Salem.
If there was some story to be told about Salem other than what we thought we knew.
It is a funny coincidence the way life tends to work.
Cambridge University press had just collected every scrap of paper, every transcript of every trial examination, every confession.
So literally that had just come into my possession.
I was sort of fascinatingly looking through it when a couple of weeks later I got a phone call saying are you interested in Salem? I said, okay that's weird.
It's kind of spooky already.
And I instantly said yes.
Almost nothing has been done about this time period.
So we want to try to depict Salem as it really was.
And as a result we've had to build and create every single thing on the show.
We have to make everything because this time period is virtually unexplored.
I certainly feel sometimes that when we are here and we have brought all this Puritan versus witch thing into Louisiana it is like already all here too.
Since there's obviously so much witchiness here.
But there is certainly a very charged atmosphere.
We have a full-scale village.
Having a set that is so realistic kind of helps you feel really in the time, it helps keep the scenes really authentic.
What will shock people and fascinate them is that in fact the magic is maybe the realist thing in it.
It is dead true to what everybody at the time, and many of us still now, think was the magic performed there.
I just fell in love with the times.
It is not only scary and cool, it is about a particular time in history when America was in its infancy.
And it was anybody's guess as to who would control it.
The devil was never going to let a promised land be built here without a fight.
Without a battle! And witches, armed with deadly malice are the most malignant and insidious weapons in that battle.
Salem is a small Frontier community.
People are working class folk.
Very small homes, minimal standards of living.
Most people are living in one room.
Imagine a family of eight or 10 people having one bedroom to live in.
The kids sleeping on the floor in the kitchen maybe.
And in the winter where you may not have enough firewood, houses tend to be quite cold.
You do not have the modern conveniences.
It is a pretty rough, Spartan, basic life.
Of course people in Massachusetts in the 17th century are Puritans.
Which means that everything in 1692 was seen as being part of their faith, part of their religion.
It was hard for even the most devout person today to understand how all-encompassing - religion was.
- The devil was real.
He could affect changes in the physical universe.
He could tempt women into sin.
They had very literal sense of the ways that evil can be brought to bear in their everyday lives.
In fact the most famous book that talks about Salem was written by a very famous Puritan theologian named Cotton Mather.
And he wrote a book called the 'Wonders of the Invisible World'.
You cannot underestimate how brilliant Cotton Mather was.
Probably the smartest man on Earth at that time.
The guy was done at Harvard by the time he was 14.
The guy could speak 8 languages.
Including several Indian languages.
Self-taught, all of them.
From ancient Greek to Abenaki.
I mean, brilliant.
He loves science but at the time to love science was to be almost a heretic.
Because everything about the natural world should be in the Bible.
But there is this insatiable curiosity inside of Cotton to understand the world.
In ways that go beyond Bible verses or in ways that help understand those Bible verses even more.
Cotton Mather was the junior minister of the second Church of Boston, along with his father Increase Mather.
He is frequently held up as a bogeyman in this whole thing.
Fear no man's war.
For only a war from hell could destroy Salem.
This was a time and a place and a group of people that believed in God and believed in the devil.
The world didn't just believe in magic and the supernatural but held it to be absolute fact.
Such absolute fact that it was actually written into law.
The devil could be lurking anywhere.
And the devil does not want a town to be built that represents God.
So in their mind, they were spiritual warriors in a new place where there was no protection from anyone else.
He was describing the way that the devil was stalking around the edges of the Christian community that they were trying to establish in New England.
There was a hideous war going on just outside of Salem.
Those were the French and Indian wars.
Most of the settlements of New Hampshire and Maine had been attacked.
Most of the settlements in Maine have actually been destroyed.
A lot of people living in Salem Village have family members who are refugees from that community.
It is a very tense situation.
Because it really looks like the Native Americans and their French allies up in Canada might actually drive all of the New Englanders back into the sea, back to England.
And what do you think Captain Alden? The Indians, they are so mysterious.
Soulless savages.
It is an alien civilization to the English settlers.
The assumption that other gods, other forms of worship are really the Devils delusions.
So the devil is behind that.
Once there is a town on the Frontier that is burned and people are kidnapped and taken hostage, that does not give confidence to anybody.
And it sends a lot of refugees from those outlying towns, many of which are abandoned at this point, into Boston and Salem.
People in Salem are under tremendous stress, they are in a constant state of panic.
People saw phantoms of French soldiers and Native American warriors invading the town.
They weren't there.
They were so panicked that they were imagining this.
Many of the afflicted girls like Mercy Lewis had lived on the Frontier and clearly was suffering what we would consider today to be post traumatic stress.
I can't see their faces.
It's like there's these heads of animals, like a stag.
Mercy Lewis, she's based on the very first victim of malice in Salem.
The first possessed girl.
The one whose possession led them to start trying to unravel who are the witches amongst us.
Certainly Mercy Lewis by the standards today was a very troubled young woman.
She seems to be drawn by an invisible force into the fire as she is possessed.
Why the witches chose her is because she is the Reverend's daughter.
So of course anybody would listen to someone who is so pure.
Of course, she's not really pure.
Why won't you tell me their names? She won't let me.
She? Who? Who is she? In a society where children were meant to be seen and not heard this gave them a chance to act outside their traditional character.
I think Mercy definitely gets drunk off of the power.
No women were allowed to speak unless they were spoken to.
So it is a complete turnaround.
Sometimes we jokingly referred to her as the 17th century Lindsay Lohan.
The first American celebrity, tabloid sort of celebrity.
There's a part of the story that is about young people, especially young girls, suddenly being empowered to turn on their elders and destroy them.
She will show us the witch.
It is fairly clear that there was some fraud going on by some of the girls.
But the question is, how much of it was within their control or to what degree were they suffering from psychological anxieties, maybe even medical ailments that led them to act in the way that they did? She's clearly touched in the head.
She needs a doctor.
Not your prayers.
Mary Sibley, she's never arrested, she's never examined.
She's never suspected.
And she kind of disappears from the record.
And that was the beginning to me of, wait a second, right here the very magic that you are looking for seems to be in the hands of one of the most respectable people in town.
As I believe by law, a woman is not allowed to enter a contract but through the agency of their husband.
- Nathaniel.
- Yes ma'am.
Mary Sibley was for me one of the first little threads in the known story of Salem that I kind of pulled and I was like "whoa, wait wait", and pretty soon the whole fabric of what you think you know has unraveled to reveal a completely different picture behind.
And Mary Sibley was that thread.
I was reading in the transcripts of the trials and it is mentioned in passing that a very proper Puritan woman named Mary Sibley, playing with this kind of folk magic and that was like the opening clue to me to think that maybe there's a whole other door into this which might illuminate what really happened there.
Mary Sibley was a church member, covenant member, of the Salem Village congregation.
Mary wasn't a witch.
She was In a country on her own but she was not free.
Mary Sibley is trying to ward off evil itself by using magic.
Do not fear the woods.
The ministers of the day would have said, it doesn't matter what your intentions are, you cannot perform a magical act and get help.
When you do, you are invoking Satan, even if it is for good purposes.
We often like to say that Mary Sibley is our Lady Macbeth In that she has in her DNA that classic almost pioneer American heroine with unexpected depths of strength.
They will hunt and kill and drown in their very own blood.
The series of Salem is in part a journey to find out who Mary is.
Mary herself is going to find out who she is.
What she is really capable of.
Our premise is whoever controls Salem controls the fate of America.
And the witches are no different than any other immigrant.
The witches of Salem want a country of their own.
You know, it is something you could not believe could happen.
I think what is exciting about this show is that we get to show that almost much as we can and also being What I like to say 'historical fiction'.
It is a wonderful take on taking a serious thing that happened in our history, the Salem witch trials, and we get to explore all those avenues.
Truth hides.
They could be anyone.
- They who? Who's they? - Witches! When I read about the characters, the people who were in Salem and dealing with this, there was a guy named John Alden, he popped right out to me as being the first American hero.
If I say the words to you 'American hero' images should flash in your mind, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, partly civilized and partly wild.
Partly primitive and partly advanced.
Why are you staring at me? Feels deeply but cannot express it.
Really felt like "wow, this guy is the original of that.
" He is the literal archetype from which these come.
" The real historical John Alden was a leader of the Massachusetts Bay colony.
John Alden was the son of the famous John and Priscilla Alden of Pilgrim fame.
John Alden Senior was the first boot to step on Plymouth Rock.
And then one of the founders of Salem.
He was someone who wanted freedom of thought.
Did not necessarily want to impose a theocracy the way that the Puritans pretty much did.
And his son John Alden who is the John Alden that you meet in Salem was one of the first Europeans born in America.
He was a Puritan merchant and leader in the militia.
He was also a guy who sometimes dealt in shady things like giving rum to Indians in exchange for goods.
John Alden is the audience's POV.
They follow him through all these crazy amazing characters and he is the one constant.
Very stubborn about what he is going to believe, very stubborn on how he is going to live his life.
That is a fun role to play.
Judge not lest you be judged.
Who said that? Jesus You might've heard of him.
John Alden.
My respect for your father's memory can only shield you so long.
He decided to vacate himself and he left before they could actually throw him in jail.
On the show there is the romance as well between Mary and John.
This is all that I have.
And I swear, on my parents grave, this is my vow.
I think the love that Mary and John had is the love that everybody wants.
The epic love of your life.
The one that got away.
This was the only person that he cared for growing up.
And the only person that he wanted to be with.
This war will not last a year.
When we first see Mary she is in love with John.
Tituba appears as Mary's servant but behind closed doors they have a very different relationship.
As the story progresses you get a feel that Tituba might be more master than servant.
There is a big part of Mary that doesn't really want to live anymore at this point.
She made a deal with the devil to save her own life.
Say it.
This is what you want.
Yes! On our show Salem Tituba created Mary.
She created her that night in the woods when she made a deal with the devil.
I had always known that this woman, Tituba, had been seen as the cause both the cause potentially magically of what had happened but certainly the cause of the hysteria.
But nowhere had I ever seen mentioned that in fact that the very thing she was going to be prosecuted for.
She was simply executing the orders of another respectable white Puritan woman.
Do you not have everything that you desire? She is Mary's keeper.
There is a real love and affection there.
And over the years that has turned into something else.
They have a sensuous element to their relationship through the magic that they practice.
One, two, three, four.
Raise the devil to our door.
Tituba is an interesting character.
If it were not for the witchcraft events we would never have known she existed.
Part of what illuminates what we are doing in Salem is that we have brought into this, this wider idea of witchcraft.
In part because they were not just a bunch of white English people here and there.
There were people from a lot of different cultures.
Including people like Tituba.
She was probably Araki Indian and had been stolen from her tribe at some point, enslaved.
The slave trade was kind of in its infancy then.
Tituba's overall plan is revenge.
She has been in servitude and maybe slavery before this point.
And she wants to bring down the good people of Salem.
Stop your weeping woman.
What? John Alden compared to all that lies before you.
America from the instant that it begins is already a melting pot, a crucible, whatever you want to call it, of all these different cultures.
So one of the first things that we wanted to do was to bring in all of that witchcraft.
All of that sense of the supernatural.
And to look at the ways in which America might have been a unique meeting point for the supernatural from all around the world.
It was a hysteria that went to the bones.
And they discovered that there were witches.
You took away everything I had, George Sibley.
Can you imagine how good it feels to take everything you have? One of the things that makes witch trials interesting is because they are examples of women in particular, - acting out.
- Because it is a very patriarchal society where fathers run the household, where ministers symbolically lead the community.
Women who are accused as witches tended to subvert those hierarchies.
Often by claiming more power for themselves.
In a very rigid, hierarchical, Puritan society ordered strictly along class and gender lines.
And race lines.
The witchcraft that we see in Salem is really part of a phenomenon in European society and her colonies called the great age of witch hunts.
Between roughly 1400 and 1750 about 100,000 people are accused of witchcraft.
Probably no more than half of them are actually executed for the crime.
What makes Salem special is that very quickly the accusations begin to spread to other members of the community.
Including community members who were very well respected.
So I was really excited at the opportunity to look at the whole European witchcraft movement that led to all the burnings and everything.
And they've discovered that there were witches.
And this cannot be said often enough, there were witches.
That does not mean that all those people terribly burned and hung and tortured were not innocent, they by and large were.
But nobody ever stopped to say, wait a second, in this era there are people who consider themselves to be witches and many of them were the Puritans.
This show has kind of opened up my eyes to understanding that Salem represents fear and mania and hysteria.
There were creaks and sounds in the woods.
There were things that people were unfamiliar with.
They must've had an immense fear that the devil was there trying to destroy them.
It was a hysteria that went to the bones.
And in the case of Salem, our show, the witches are creating the hysteria and exploiting it to full effect.
In a way you cannot even say what genre this is because it is the kind of pure adventure story that has every genre within it.
There isn't really anything like this series on at the moment that I've seen.
The supernatural in it is so dark and so - edgy.
- It is dark in its subject matter, it is dark in the writing.
And is also dark visually and physically.
The show was lit mostly by candlelight and flamelight.
Working on Mary, she really is just sort of a modern woman in this society.
Apart from the killings.
Probably one of the best ideas for a series that I've even heard of in a very long time.
When I first read the pilot I was really amazed by it.
I thought it was deeper and darker and richer and more textured and more dangerous than anything that I read in a long time.
What I love about working on Salem is that it is so completely different than anything I have personally done before.
And so when this opportunity came along I was like, finally.
The first question I was get asked about Salem is, is it fantasy or is it real? Because you've got this magical worldview, this essentially supernatural world, the gods and demons and men struggling together.
It is all of those.
To me a witch is someone who is in touch with nature who uses the earth and its natural resources.
I believe that witches symbolize the power of female.
And they do not care about anybody else but themselves.
They will fulfill whatever they want to do.
And I think that is such a great symbol.
If you look at the definition of witch according to the Bible it never really gets down to a definition of what it is.
All it says, in Exodus, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
So rather than giving us a path for what witchcraft is or what a witch is the Bible gives us a sense of what a witch is not.
And a witch is not us.
If any religion falls into the wrong hands it can be used for evil.
Fear is darn powerful.
And you do not want to get carried away with assumptions.
Whenever we are looking for some way to explain our own misfortune, we are looking for an outsider or someone to scapegoat, it is a lot easier to blame someone else for your misfortune than yourself, right? That is the origins of witchcraft.
As Americans we like to believe that we are tolerant.
That we are religiously open-minded.
That we are just and we are fair.
And Salem forces us to confront the fact that has not always been true.
Salem is an example of 19 people being put to death by the state legitimately for a crime we now believe to be imaginary.
Salem! You cannot expect God to be on our side if we tolerate abominations.
Precious Salem.
Caught up in a stinking witch panic.
Any time things really get out of hand it is in a different costume.
And you don't recognize it as something that keeps happening and happening in different centuries.
I think that the lesson really of Salem is that as long as we have hatred and prejudice and scapegoats.
As long as we blame others for our problems we will always have witchcraft.