Based on the 1903 play La Sorcière (The Sorceress) by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, this adaptation portrayed the challenges facing a young woman living in a territory in Mexico wracked by military and social unrest.

[2][3] With its storyline set in early twentieth-century Mexico, this lost film portrayed the plight of Zora Fernandez (Nance O'Neil), a beautiful and exotic woman who becomes entangled in a love affair and is persecuted by local officials following an armed uprising.

[b] To isolate the "witch", Governor Mendoza forces Zora to leave her village and then issues a proclamation warning citizens that any women who associate with her will be imprisoned for life; men who do so will be immediately hung.

[c] The film's 1916 copyright registration (LP7713) confirms that director and "scenarist" Frank Powell based his script on Victorien Sardou's play La Sorcière, which had premiered in Paris at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt on December 15, 1903.

[8][d] For his film adaptation, Powell made numerous changes to the French dramatist's plot, such as relocating the story to Mexico, advancing its time setting to the early 1900s, simplifying the spelling of Zorroya's name to "Zora", and portraying her as a Mexican native.

"[11] For his film's battle sequences, crowd scenes, and to populate the production's large Mexican-village set, Powell hired and costumed hundreds of extras or "supernumones".

[12] In early August 1915, Motion Picture News reported that New Jersey police had detained and questioned "three hundred or more extras" for The Witch as they disembarked from a New York ferry at Fort Lee to proceed to the studio.

[12] The officers, according to the weekly journal, mistook the "mob" to be part of the thousands of employees who that summer were waging a violent strike against a Standard Oil Company plant in Bayonne.

Then, on his return to Fort Lee, Turner supervised the construction on Fox studio's backlot a 10-acre set with full-size replicas of the Mexican buildings he had documented in San José in Sonora.

[17] It is likely that Powell chose New Jersey's summer months to film in order to present on screen a landscape that most theater audiences in 1916 would view as a generally plausible setting for Mexico.

[19] In Louisville, Kentucky, the reviewer for The Courier-Journal apparently saw the same tragic, fiery ending as well, for the newspaper's film critic reports that after Riques and the witch are captured "Zora calmly pays the penalty.

"[20] Yet, the "photoplay" critic George Graves for the Chicago trade journal Motography and Joshua Lowe of the widely read New York-based entertainment paper Variety describe an entirely different finale to the film, one that is more commonly cited in the media in 1916.

"[21] The trade paper, however, did take issue with some important aspects of the film, most notably with what it viewed as its vague ending and its culturally disconnected, anachronistic costume choices for O'Neil:Considerable mechanical construction must have been required to give the effect of a Mexican village.

[21]Peter Milne of Motion Picture News describes the film overall as "a strong feature" in his March 11, 1916 review, although he does find the story hampered in parts by "overcrowding" with too many characters and too few closeups to help theater audiences distinguish individual players.

[25] In a more indepth review in the March 26 issue of Motography, the journal's "photoplay" critic George Graves describes how "the general excellence" of the acting, direction, and sets of the production overcome "weak spots here and there in the film".

[4] Reviews in city and regional newspapers in 1916 are largely positive too, with many of those news outlets focusing attention on O'Neil's performance and on the film's elaborate action scenes.

[26] The Sun in Baltimore entices moviegoers to see the film by headlining its review with the production's sensational elements, such as "Nance O'Neil Burned At The Stake", along with "Battles, Mobs, Hypnotism, Treachery And Love".