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Witch Hunt Review — Witch Hunt (2021) Film Review from the 28th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival, a movie directed by Elle Callahan, and starring Gideon Adlon, Elizabeth Mitchell, Abigail Cowen, Christian Camargo, Echo Campbell, Lulu Antariksa, Cameron Crovetti, Nicholas Crovetti, Ashley Bell, Assaf Cohen, [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Witch Hunt: A Messy Brew of Allegories That Creates a Noxious Co-Opting Potion [SXSW 2021]...

Yesterday, writer/director Elle Callahan celebrated the world premiere of her latest film, Witch Hunt, which screened as part of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival. Starring Gideon Adlon, Abigail Cowen, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Echo Campbell, Witch Hunt introduces us to a world where witchcraft has been outlawed by the U.S. government, and anyone who is suspected of being a witch is rounded up and exterminated with prejudice, and the only place that witches can find asylum from these barbaric laws is in Mexico.

In advance of Witch Hunt’s world premiere at this year’s SXSW, Daily Dead had the opportunity to speak with Callahan as well as Adlon, Cowen, and Mitchell, and they discussed the intersection between fantasy and reality in Witch Hunt, their experiences collaborating together on the film, and more.

I would love to start with you, Elle, if that's cool, and have you dive into the story we see in the film,...

Striking a middle ground between teen fantasy “The Craft” and deadly serious political allegory “The Handmaid’s Tale” is “Witch Hunt,” writer-director Elle Callahan’s second feature. Her first, the 2019 “Head Count,” was a strikingly assured supernatural mind-bender, albeit one a little too understated for some genre fans. By contrast, this sophomore effort is comparatively conventional and straightforward in depicting paranormal themes, even given the added fillip of overt current-events commentary. It’s a more uneven work nonetheless, with some odd storytelling missteps and signs of budgetary constriction. Still, the fanciful tale of minority persecution in a U.S. not so different from our offscreen reality should easily attract acquisition interest around its SXSW premiere.

A grim prologue shows a manacled woman burned at a present-day New England stake in front of her two redheaded daughters. We then jump ahead three months to meet SoCal high schooler Claire (Gideon Adlon), whose...