"Burn, witch! Burn, witch! Burn! Burn! Burn!"

Another Thanksgiving is upon us, mortals, and you've no doubt heard again, the story of the pilgrims who left England in pursuit of religious freedom in the New World. They loaded up the Mayflower with their faith and agricultural ignorance and sailed across the Atlantic, nearly starved, and got bailed out by the natives.

Of course, the buckle-hatted sociopaths' ideals of religious freedom didn't extend to people who worship me. Life in the puritan colonies could be especially hard on witches.

This week's Thursday Thrillers is City of the Dead.

This 1960 John Moxey film opens up with a good, old-fashioned, New England witch-burning, in which some angry pilgrims in Whitewood, Mass., set their torches to a lady named Elizabeth Selwyn (Patricia Jessel). Selwyn's last utterance is to call on Lucifer and put a curse on the town. Flash forward to a university classroom where Professor Alan Driscoll (Christopher Lee) tells the story to students in his History of Witchcraft class. One particularly enterprising student, Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) stays after to pick the prof's brain about how she can learn more. Driscoll suggests she go to Whitewood and stay at the Raven's Inn.

Nan's boyfriend Bill (Tom Naylor) and brother Dick (Dennis Lotis) are scientists who don't cotton to Driscoll's flaky passion for the humanities. They try to talk Nan out of the trip, to no avail. Nan drives alone to the especially foggy town of Whitewood and checks in to the Raven's Inn, where we discover the proprietor looks identical to Elizabeth Selwyn, and that Nan has pretty underwear.

Nan finds Whitewood to be most intellectually stimulating to research, as it is full of mysterious strangers, vanishing hitchhikers, and hotel rooms with trap doors in the floor. After a month goes by and she doesn't return home, Bill and skeptical Dick go looking for her with the help of a Whitewood resident named Patricia (Betta St. John). I don't want to give too much away, but the whole thing ends in black-robed figures on fire.

City of the Dead is safe enough for family viewing so you don't have to wait for your holiday guests to leave to turn it on or anything. It streams on YouTube.