New Perspective on "The Day the Earth Froze"

"The Day the Earth Froze" has long been one of my favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. For those who aren't familiar with the latter, it involves inflicting torture on a human and two wisecracking robots marooned in space by forcing them to view bad movies. The episode is named for a rather odd European film that involves a witch stealing the sun with her animated shawl and the efforts of Nordic villagers to get the sun back.
No, it's not the '50s sci-fi flick that inspired "The Day After Tomorrow."
Anyhow, I've been involved in studying European witchcraft persecutions, and the recent quarter-century of scholarship in that field has incorporated meteorological studies into the attempt to explain the relatively well-defined period of witch persecutions. The period of greatest persecution was during the "Little Ice Age" where calamities such as hailstorms and bitter winters might be blamed on the activity of witches (the Plague years figured in also).
So, maybe it's clear where I'm going with this. "The Day the Earth Froze" gives the appearance of a Scandinavian folk tale. My observation is that the story seems to reveal a truth about Medieval ideas concerning witchcraft that turned out a somewhat more accurate representation of the subject than was conceived by the general public (especially in the US, where an exceptionally bad encyclopedia entry in the early 20th Century gained widespread acceptance for faulty notions). The witch persecutions weren't so much related to an organized pagan religion as they were a response to a creepy change in the weather that tended to reinforce apocalyptic thought. People thought the world was coming to an end, and looked for the involvement of human agency in their misfortunes.

The reasons for witch persecutions were quite varied, in truth, but charges of affecting the weather (damaging crops and all that) were very common.
By all means, see the Mystery Science Theater version of the movie. It's hilarious.