The film's own terms are that it is a Superman film. It isn't even "Superman with numbers filed off," for Krypton's sake!

Anything less than an A is worth death threats.

Hey, the Blood Libel might have been true! Little William of Norwich might really have been murdered and eaten by nefarious foreign unbelievers, you know!

That doesn't help! (Also I doubt it makes the general aesthetic of "gunk fished out of the Insinkerator trap" any less blah.)

No. Have you seen who is contending for President of the US? Rubio and Cruz are not "incredibly obscure backwoods pocket of hillbillies," neither was Antonin Scalia. If you pretend that this antifeminist xenophobic radical Christianity isn't at work in high places, you're delusional.

But it was based on something which happened hundreds of years ago!

Yep, 24 and a thousand other movies and series on television that only present Middle-easterners as terrorists had no impact on Western society, any more than the fact that black and Latin@ people have been presented as criminals far more than anything else! Not a bit of impact, and it must just be delusional thinking…

No, but the fact that in story "there really are witches and they really are in league with the Devil and do kill children" is an endorsement of it.

Wahhha, we can't just indulge in our old prejudices any more without people calling us on it! We are soooo oppressed!

So is madder, which was a common dye plant in Olde England and thus in the New.

Er, know what? Do you mean "that"? Because yes, all of those bright old plant dyes were known in mediaeval Europe, and weren't suddenly forgotten by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They've faded, except in cases where embroidery was carefully preserved out of light, but they are truly represented in a lot…

Also, have you heard of The Crucible? That has a lot to do with it.

It does make sense, though, if you see it as an allegory for Religious Right vs either Islamic Terrorists or Radical Feminists, depending on what is terrifying the likes of the dudebro followers of Dawkins and Harris today…

Don't leave out the "blood drinking aristocracy" angle — Stoker was Irish, after all, and while other vampire novelists such as Hambly may well and deservedly mock the xenophobia aspect, I suspect there is something else going on under the surface, when you consider an Irish author writing about a mediaeval warlord…

Except that it's from the Sam Harris/Dawkins angle, it sounds like.

Yes, but people who go trying to fight killer aliens are likewise setting themselves up for trouble, and maneating lions, and terrorists, and Nazis, and towering inferno wildfires — "we will take heavy casualties" is not a valid argument for not doing anything, in Hollywood narrative terms any more than in real life.

And The Crucible was absolutely not about persecuting people unreasonably in the 20th century, because it was about Salem! What a ridiculous notion!

Bah, humbug.

So, the Red Barn Murder, then? (4 yrs off is nothing for Hollywood.)

It isn't at all tonally odd if you regard it as if it was written by Dawkins or Sam Harris…