Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter (2011), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015) are the best examples of this trend in artful, unnerving horror that ties its visual terrors to real emotion and human connection (not surprisingly, two of those three are explicitly about nuclear families). These films have been downplayed by some as being too subtle and not living up to their hype, but such complaints have arisen primarily from fans who either distrust any horror film not drenched in gore and sadism or have become so accustomed to their genre of choice residing at the bottom of the cultural ladder that they are immediately suspicious and defensive when any film labeled “horror” earns accolades from mainstream critics and the so-called art-film crowd. Horror has been a cultural pariah for so long that some of its fanbase simply cannot fathom it ever being seated at the big table, a perspective that completely ignores the critical and commercial success of so many great horror films in the past, from Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991). What I have always appreciated most about the genre is its mutability and fluid boundaries, which is why I can appreciate the gruesomeness of Eli Roth’s oeuvre as well the subtle, psychological anguish of something like Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961).

Which brings us to Robert Eggers’ The Witch, subtitled A New-England Folktale, which won rave reviews when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, where it also won the Director’s Award, a rarity for a horror film. A first-time feature filmmaker with a background in classical and experimental theatre design, Eggers spent years researching 17th-century Puritan New England, a historical period with which he has been fascinated ever since he was a child growing up in New Hampshire, and it shows in the film, which is utterly meticulous in its recreation of time and place. Working with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, with whom he also collaborated on several short films, Eggers approaches the story with a highly focused style that favors natural lighting, long takes, and a steadily accumulating sense of utter dread. The resulting look of the film is very nearly black-and-white, with its wintry, desaturated colors and perpetually gray skies evoking a sense of blighted, spiritual emptiness, which is intensified by Mark Korven’s foreboding, at times hellishly shrieking score. Especially for viewers of faith who genuinely believe in an ages-old conception of good and evil, The Witch is a terrifying portrait of how evil operates in the world, both openly and covertly, to undermine our best intentions.

The story takes place in the early 1600s, several decades before the infamous Salem Witch trials. We are first introduced to the protagonists—a family of devout Puritans—who are being expelled from their small village because something about their version of Christianity doesn’t fit with the community (the exact nature of the conflict is left vague, but it doesn’t really matter). Exiled from the settlement (the last thing we see as they ride away are the gates closing them out), the family moves into the wilderness, setting up a farm just on the edge of a dark, towering forest, the kind that we associate with grim fairy tales. The family’s patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson), is stern, but caring, as is the mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie). There are five children: teenage Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), pubescent Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), elementary-age twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and a newborn named Samuel. Very early in the film Samuel is snatched away from the family, literally from right underneath the nose of Thomasin as she plays peekaboo with him, by an unseen entity that everyone wants to believe is a wolf, but that we know is the witch of the title, who resides somewhere in the woods beyond their homestead. While Eggers avoids showing anything unduly graphic, he conveys in no uncertain terms that the infant—the most salient symbol of innocence imaginable—meets a horrific end, thus establishing both the veracity of the witch’s evil and the danger under which the rest of the family now lives, even if they are not yet fully aware of it.

As the story unfolds, the devout family is slowly but surely rent by both the witch and by the idea of her. And that is where The Witch truly stands out. Rather than either recapitulating the political finger-wagging that usually accompanies depictions of religious hysteria (best exemplified in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) or simply exploiting witchcraft for its shock value, the film burrows deep into both genuine spiritual horror and the manner in which abject fear divides us (which is a real political lesson for our current divided culture). Eggers makes no attempt to disguise the supernatural reality of the witch in the woods—there are no “is she or isn’t she?” games being played here—which allows him to engage in some truly unnerving imagery. The witch herself, who appears briefly as both a beautiful young woman (Sarah Stephens) and a decrepit old hag (Bathsheba Garnett), is the source of much of the film’s visual horror, but Eggers also uses the environment as a kind of visual representation of the spiritual evil that permeates the film. Crops won’t grow, the sky seems perpetually corpse-like, the woods are looming and sinister, and even a wild rabbit appears deranged. The animals kept on the farm don’t seem entirely right either, especially Black Phillip, a black goat who Mercy and Jonas claim to talk to.

However, even though there is a clear, unambiguous supernatural presence, the characters bring a great deal of misery on themselves by turning on each other when the horrors arise. This is not to say that they are naïve boobs who see Satan in every leaf, but rather that the accumulated stressors and unnatural deaths of their loved ones drive them to find answers, and with no one else around, they can only point fingers at each other, especially poor Thomasin, whose ill-conceived prank directed toward Mercy sets her up for the worst of the blame (there is also the suggestion that her budding sexuality, which draws an incestuous glance or two from Caleb, might be a factor in the mix). The parents respond with increasing panic, their primal fears of being unable to protect their children increasingly fueled by their belief in witchcraft and black magic, which, in this case, turns out to be well founded. Yet, while Eggers delivers some seriously unsettling imagery, especially a haunting final image that is as simple as it is devastating in its suggestion of evil’s insidious nature and the fragility of goodness, what really stuck with me in the end was the terrible notion of the family, so isolated and alone, turning in on itself at the very moment they should have been pulling together. That is the film’s true horror.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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