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WARNING: UNMARKED SPOILERS

Englishmen

Boston Magistrates

    John Fletcher 

Played by: Benton Guinness

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/fletcher_sudbury_devil_0.png

"We were dock rats and cutpurses, dragged from the six-oak floors of Boston Harbor public houses...and pressed into service, under a mad rogue for whom murder was a pleasure."

A veteran of the Indian Wars, former hunter of Indians, and witchfinder from Boston. Our protagonist, but most pointedly not our hero.


  • Blood Knight: While he clearly feels massive guilt over his atrocities against innocent civilians, he also has very fond memories of fighting actual Native warriors during King Philip's War. He especially exalts the Nipmuck as Worthy Opponents and gets excited when talking about the battles he fought against them.
  • Boxed Crook: Never explicitly confirmed, but he casts himself and his fellows in Moseley's company as common criminals who were deputized by the colonial governments, and does not distinguish himself from the rest in this regard.
  • Defiled Forever: He becomes an agent of Satan because he sees himself this way; once he faltered from his devotion and had sex with Flora, there was no way back into God's grace.
  • Expy: Magistrate John Fletcher is a very deliberate one of Captain John Boyd. Both are celebrated as war heroes, but just feel like murderers. Both are seduced into evil by the main villain but persevere and end up Mutual Killing them at the end, except in Fletcher's case The Bad Guy Wins and he winds up using his seed to birth the Devil's child.
  • Eyepatch of Power: Zig-zagged. The other Englishmen see Fletcher's eyepatch as one of these due to it being a battle scar incurred during his honorable service in the war, but Fletcher himself sees it as just another inescapable reminder of the atrocities he committed and was subjected to.
  • Eye Scream: He wears an eyepatch because a Nipmuck soldier took his eye during King Philip's War.
  • Heel–Face Revolving Door: Richochets between being Satan's staunch enemy, most willing servant, and a terrified onlooker.
  • Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: He expresses all the conservative social mores of his time and place, viewing sex out of wedlock as sinful, witches as temptresses, and black people as stupid brutes. However, he also finds himself irresistibly attracted to Flora, and throws away his career (presumably) by having sex with her.
  • Shell-Shocked Veteran: He committed massacres during his time fighting in the Indian Wars, and still has vivid nightmares about the atrocities he committed. He's mentioned as serving in the company of Samuel Mosely, a notoriously vicious killer whose brutality and racism towards the Native Americans managed to creep out even the war-hardened Puritans at the time.
  • The Witch Hunter: As a magistrate in Puritan New England, investigating and rooting out witchcraft and devil worship is a major part of his duties.

    Josiah Cutting 

Played by: Josh Popa

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/cutting_sudbury_devil.png

"The savages are gone — the Devil remains."

Fletcher's partner in witch hunting.


  • Body Horror: From what little is seen of the curse the coven places on him, plus Fletcher's reactions, it's clear he was horribly mutilated. The camera shows shots of his body being covered in lesions and boils.
  • By-the-Book Cop: Cutting is a much more straight-laced and faithful Magistrate than Fletcher is, which ultimately pins him as a greater threat to the Sudbury coven and causes them to mistreat and torture him while giving Fletcher slightly more preferential treatment.
  • Consummate Professional: Related to the above, he is loyal chiefly to his duties and his religion. When Fletcher commits fornication by having sex with Flora, Cutting tersely informs him that he will need to report the crime when they return to Boston, and makes no indication he will act in any way to shield his partner from the consequences of his actions — which he explicitly notes as Fletcher being likely to lose his office.
    Cutting: I will not speak unduly against thee, but neither will I lie.
  • Defiant to the End: Cutting remains steadfast in his faith to the Christian God, no matter what Patience and her coven do to him. He even defiantly recites a prayer in front of her even as she loudly protests that it's a pointless gesture and tells him to stop.
  • Handicapped Badass: He pursue's a witch hunter's work, despite a war injury making him walk with a limp.
  • Kick the Dog: While discussing Flora and the general question of whether or not non-white, non-Christian people are people, Fletcher tries to point out that both of them have known clever Native Americans. Cutting dismissively says the only way in which such people can be intelligent is in their falsehoods, and that otherwise they're just savages incapable of creating anything themselves.
  • The Unreveal: We never actually get to fully see what Patience did to Cutting. From the brief shots we do see, it certainly wouldn't have been pleasant.
  • The Witch Hunter: As a magistrate in Puritan New England, investigating and rooting out witchcraft and devil worship is a major part of his duties.

Other Englishmen

    Rev. Thomas Russell 

Played by: Carl Sailor

"I would have fain joined the militia myself, but it pleased God that I should remain in Sudbury, ministering to my congregation."

The town preacher of Sudbury. He is the one who summons Fletcher and Cutting.


  • Can't Hold His Liquor: He gets noticeably drunker than either Gavett or Fletcher at the campfire scene.
  • Dirty Coward: When he, Mr. Gavett, and Fletcher are sitting at a campfire, Gavett insists they tell "war stories." When it's his turn, Russell says he "would have" joined the militia, but that "God saw fit" to keep him preaching in Sudbury. Both Gavett and Fletcher laugh at him.
  • Horrible Judge of Character: He can't tell that "Mr. Gavett" is in fact an impostor, and brushes off his flubbing of the Grace Prayer (which Puritans would have taken as a sign of witchcraft). This contrasts with Fletcher, who is distrustful of Gavett and aggressively points out the error.
  • Made of Plasticine: He is killed by Patience impersonating her late husband, who shoots an open hole — complete with the camera conveniently showing us the other side — through him in the clearing with a musket.
  • Preacher Man: He's Sudbury's religious leader and holds a position of influence in the community. In Puritan New England, there was little separation of church and state, and hence the most powerful religious leaders were generally also the civic leaders.

    Mr Gavett 

Played by: Andrew Rakich

"Be not afeared. Thou art safe now."

A local man of good standing, lending his aid to the witch-hunters.


  • Dead All Along: He was killed by some Indian or another years ago. His widow doesn't seem to miss him, and later takes his form to trick the residents of Sudbury.
  • Domestic Abuse: He berated his wife in front of company, and slashed her face with a sword (possibly while trying to murder her).
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Subverted. When Mr. Gavett appears in person late in the film, he seems genuinely distraught over the loss of his wife despite treating her poorly, and even though Patience has already said he died in the war the viewer may assume that she was lying. Then it's very quickly revealed that "Gavett" is a masquerade Patience used to gain the trust of Russell and lead him into the woods to his doom, meaning his show of grief was merely an act on Patience's part.
  • No Name Given: We never learn his first name, unlike his wife Patience.
  • Posthumous Character: We never encounter the living Mr Gavett except in flashbacks. We only see Patience pretending to be him.

Sudbury Coven

    Isaac Goodenow 

Played by: Matthew Van Gessel

"I have of late suffered a weakness of faith. I believe that is why the Deceiver chose me."

A moderately-mad resident of Sudbury who saw... something in the woods.


  • An Arm and a Leg: He lost his arm in the Sudbury Fight at the outbreak of King Philip's War.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's initially kept ambiguous whether Goodenow's outbursts are genuine demonic possession, or he's just a deeply traumatised war veteran experiencing psychosis. It's probably both.
  • The Renfield: Goodenow is an unflinching thrall to both Flora and Patience, but especially Patience, and carries out every task they give him with an unnatural zeal. When Patience tells him to kill himself for her, he messily slits his own throat with almost no hesitation. Matthew van Gessel has even directly compared him to Dracula (1931)'s portrayal of Renfield.
  • Shell-Shocked Veteran: Less visibly so than Fletcher, but his psychotic symptoms would certainly not be aided by the trauma of his past. He was part of the Sudbury fight, and his name is a bit of an in-joke since the Goodenows were an old Sudbury family.

    Patience Gavett 

Played by: Linnea Gregg

"I am the widow Gavett. Patience is me Christian name, and amongst us friends, 'twill serve for salutation."

The widow of the late Mr. Gavett who owned the woods Fletcher and Cutting are searching, thought long-dead, who has been living in the Sudbury wilderness.


  • Ambiguous Gender Identity: There is some subtle potential symbolism peppered throughout the film that Patience may in fact be a transgender man, especially given how she takes the form of her dead husband and seems to have no interest in dispelling the illusion even after it's served its purpose. She also has several visions throughout the film of her literally (but perhaps metaphorically) swapping places with Mr. Gavett after he slashed a scar across her face.
  • Big Bad: She's the leader of the coven of Satan-worshippers in the Sudbury woods and the primary antagonist. Of course, since the conflict in the film is entirely Evil vs. Evil, it's difficult to wholly call her a villain.
  • Determinator: She somehow managed to survive disembowelment for long enough to birth the Day Star.
  • The Dog Bites Back: Downplayed. Patience never actually got the chance to take vengeance on her abusive husband (he was killed by an Indian instead) but she willingly consorts with the Devil and kills all manner of men to strike back against the religious patriarchy which kept her down.
  • Every Scar Has a Story: Patience has a long diagonal scar which cuts across her face, a marker of the Domestic Abuse inflicted upon her by her late husband. It's also a potential metaphor for how Puritan sociey has "scarred" her enough to accept a covenant with the Devil himself.
  • Equal-Opportunity Evil: To contrast the xenophobic and intolerant witch hunters, she and her gang are made up of a psychotic or neurodivergent man, a black woman and her. Additionally, she and Flora seem close enough to start making out, indicating that Patience at the very least might be a bisexual who feels less inhibited by living in the woods than as part of Puritan society.
  • The Gadfly: Exaggerated. She takes extreme joy in tormenting both Fletcher and Cutting in ways both physical and psychological, committing some kind of unspeakable act on Cutting and confronting Fletcher with the war crimes he committed during the war.
    Patience: [To Fletcher, while disguised as Gavett] And what of the great battles? Bloody Brook? Turner's Falls? [mockingly] The Fight I'th'Snow, athwart the Naragansett?note 
  • Ironic Name: In a double-meaning sense. Meaningful, because of the patience she had to show while enduring her husband's abuse. Ironic, because the whole plot is due to her patience with Puritan society having finally run out.
  • Troll: While in the form of her husband, she says grace over a meal, and says "Bless, oh Father, your gifts to our service and posteriors" instead of "your gifts to our use and us to your service." Although based on the old superstition that witches couldn't say their prayers right, it's also mocking the Puritans around her with her rejection of God, pointing out that food only goes, well, to the posterior.

    Flora 

Played by: Kendra Unique

"Let us kill [Cutting], Patience. He is cruel, horrible, and like all the so-called learned white men, he is an idiot. But do not harm the one called Fletcher. I love him, I truly love him and I will make him me husband."

An escaped slave who has been eking out an existence in the woods of Sudbury.


  • Black Jezebel Stereotype: As with all Puritanical cultural values in the film, zig-zagged. Flora tempts Fletcher into fornicating with her and is generally creepily seductive in her attempts to foster the Devil's progeny, but her flashbacks to Barbados show that at least at one point she was an ordinary mother before being traumatized by the inhumanity of slavery.
  • Fan Disservice: Appears naked before the Sudbury Devil... bathed in red light and clearly in thrall to the physical form of Satan.
  • Laughing Mad: Flora is constantly cackling with a crazed, almost lustful look in her eyes throughout the film.
  • Mad Love: Flora instantly becomes very creepily smitten with Fletcher, something that Fletcher kind of reciprocates (at least definitely in a carnal sense) but is repudiated by her being a black woman and a witch.
  • Madness Mantra: She constantly repeats "No more lob-lob!" in desperation, something which ties her to Barbados.note 
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Being a slave, and then a runaway, in colonial America must have been incredibly traumatising and difficult. It's no wonder that she sees fit to throw in with the forces of darkness and make her body a vessel for the Day Star.

Others

    The Day Star 

Played by: Andrew Rakich (physical form)

"It came in the form of light, purer than fire..."
Isaac Goodenow

The Devil himself.


  • Baphomet: When he's finally birthed into the physical world, he takes the form of a goat-headed humanoid.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Appears as a ball of bright light, in visions as an animalistic silhouette, and causes the sky itself to turn into a kaleidoscope of bizarre moons and planets.
  • Light Is Not Good: Most commonly seen as a radiant orb, the presence of which causes mania in his followers.
  • Red Baron: Most characters in the film call it "The Day Star", due to a combination of it appearing as bright ball of light and "The Morning Star" being another name for Lucifer.
  • Take That!: The film ends with Fletcher telling the Devil to commit to inflicting endless misery on the people of Massachusetts. Part of the sequence of the Devil manifesting in our world is a sequence of visions of crowded Boston streets and subway stations. Apparently the Devil's methods of torturing humanity are a little more... infrastructural than usually depicted.

    The Canadian 

Played by: Christian Matyi

<<How goes the war, Englishman? Last I heard, a group of you marched into the swamps and massacred the Narragansett almost to a man! Well done! Good honest work, no?>>
A French-Canadian coureur de bois (independent trader) who bought the heads of slain Native Americans from Fletcher to sell to the Mohawk during King Philip's War. He appears exclusively in flashbacks.
  • Card-Carrying Villain: Unlike Fletcher, he shows no remorse for his gruesome work. However, given that he appears only in Fletcher's nightmares, this aspect of him may be just a reflection of what Fletcher fears himself to be.
  • Evil Laugh: He's constantly emitting cruel laughter when he purchases the heads from Fletcher.
  • Small Role, Big Impact: He only appears in a single flashback, but he gives lots of insight into Fletcher's past, guilt, and inner conflict.
  • War for Fun and Profit: Like many trappers and traders of his time, he doesn't care about the unspeakable violence being committed around him in the forests of New England and only cares about making a quick franc by buying the severed heads of the Mohawk nation's enemies at a low price and re-selling them for a higher one.

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