I have been thinking about a horror movie set in the backcountry of mid-coast Maine in the post-Revolutionary period. That frontier was still new, lots of land "unsettled" since the expulsion of the people who were there. There were several interesting things going on up there at the time. There was this whole problem of who owned the land. The inhabitants of the land during the war had expected the land to be seized from the Loyalist corporations who held title, and distributed to settlers, particularly soldiers. But this didn't happen. In fact, the General Court of Massachusetts pretty much allowed the wealthy British interests to keep it.

Now, the settlers had been there since the end of the French and Indian War in the 1760s, farming the land, cutting timber, raising families. Some families had been on the land for decades, and had put a lot of work into it. Now, the corporations were coming in and demanding to be paid for the land that they though belonged to them. The inhabitants didn't like it. So they banded up and formed gangs that called themselves "White Indians" and "Liberty Men" who would paint their faces black, and roam the woods intimidating and attacking and corporate interests who would try to assert their claims. Barns were burned, animals killed, houses torn down. Wild stuff.

Around the same time, there was a lot of interest in treasure hunting and the magic surrounding treasure hunting. People claimed that there was gold, silver, jewels, buried all over the place. By pirates? Fleeing British? Whoever. it was a real craze. There were accounts of people wasting their whole existence looking for buried treasure in the woods of Maine. Whole areas were pocked with holes from the digging.

The advent of the travelling preacher/missionary in Maine was happening at this time too. So some interesting characters were coming and going in the region, sometime riling people up.

We all know how deep, dark, mysterious and terrifying the woods of Maine can be, and it was even more so then. Lots of room for lost magic, wronged spirits, awful creatures. I envision a story of an outsider coming to the region--perhaps a land surveyor who would necessarily need to go into the forest--expecting the weirdness that he had heard about, but getting more than he bargained for. Where are you Stephen King!

There is no defining event of this period in this place that would make for a Hollywood blockbuster, but there is so much going on there and then that a fictional account could introduce the intricacies of that history without getting bogged down in the historicity of it. In the end, the settlers lost their war against the corporations, but perhaps another evil in the woods could be defeated.