The monsters in the woods, dressed in deep, rich reds, the things “we do not speak of,” are as much Ichabod’s Headless Horseman, a personification of rural intolerance, as they are Dubya’s WMDs—the threat that’s always supposedly waiting right around the corner but is ultimately fictitious

The Village , a group of disillusioned 20th-century support-group members choose to retreat from what they see as a violent, baffling urban present into a simulacrum of a 19th-century agrarian commune, and in their attempts to escape violence, end up creating their own form of it.

20th-century political radicalism begetting the search for 19th-century socialist utopia, which in turn produces 17th-century colonialist fundamentalism.

pseudo-mythological framework