Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de Salem – with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.

“If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

– Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)

Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.

Despite its sensationalist pulpy title and #ColdWar premise, Jack Arnold's adaptation of the Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is an existentialist treatise.

“A strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I had ever thought before – as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light.”

– Scott Carey

The Incredible Shrinking Man plays with the understanding of what it means to be acknowledged as a human, and one's place in the world. The story is told through the eyes of the titular Shrinking Man – Scott Carey – who after being exposed to strange fog, finds himself increasingly lost in this world.

In mere hours, a disaster involving a bus and a truck is bound to happen. The story meanders from the bus passengers to the truck drivers, while the road stretches out before them.

An escape of sorts, in love and lust.

“He puts his cheek to the wall. With a kiss he licks the vertical surface and the greedy plaster sucks in his saliva. Then a shower of kisses.”

– Jean Genet, Notre-Dame des Fleurs (1942/43)