A powerful adaptation of the classic stage play about a Puritan community in seventeenth century Massachusetts awash in guilt, denial, and hysteria when a ring of lustful teenage girls begins accusing its citizens of witchcraft. When one man fights to retain his integrity in the face of madness, the adolescent slander invariably extends to him. Based on actual historic events and meant as a metaphor for the paranoid persecutions of the McCarthy era, the story (re-penned for the screen by playwright Arthur Miller) is a parable about society's fascination with and revulsion for cultural scandal.