EDITOR’S NOTE: Burned at the Stake was on the CBS Late Movie as The Coming on September 16, 1987 and March 3 and July 6, 1988.

Also known as The Coming, this movie starts in the late 1600s in Salem, as Ann Putnam (Susan Swift) is caught experimenting with black magic. To protect herself, she turns over the names of those who were also involved, sending Reverend Samuel Parris (John Peters) on an orgy of stake burnings to not only destroy all of the witches but to bring back the fear of the Lord in his worshippers. Meanwhile, in 1982, Loreen Graham (also Susan Swift) is possessed by Ann’s spirit.

By 1982, Bert I. Gordon had given up on giant animals after Empire of the Ants and would go on to make movies like Let’s Do It, The Big Bet, Secrets of a Psychopath and Satan’s Princess. That said, along the way, he’d made Picture Mommy Dead and Necromancy, so he was about more than Costco-sized vermin.

Ann Putnam is a real person who, at the end of her life, tried to atone for all the people who died at her hands — well, as the result of her identifying them — and said that they were innocent. As for Gordon, making this near the end of a long career, he’s put together a movie that can’t decide if it wants to be supernatural or a dream. He’s still making an occult movie that could play as a made-for-TV film minus all the profanity and gore the genre had embraced by 1982.

In this film. Putnam can only save a young girl by changing history and bringing someone back in time to fix it. It honestly makes no sense, but it had enough eerie visuals to keep me watching. There’s a skeleton-handed killer who the movie never really explains and we wonder who the protagonist is, who the villain is and how we’ll get the story all figured out. I wonder if Gordon ever divined it himself.

You can watch this on YouTube.