In a decade full of incredible horror genre debuts, Robert Eggers's period-accurate folk horror was a standout.
2015 marked the entrance of a remarkable filmmaking talent with
Robert Eggers’ debut,
The Witch: a quiet, atmospheric masterpiece of modern horror. Eggers shot the film with a chilling objectivity that recalls
Kubrick at his best. His voyeuristic camera rarely becomes emotionally involved in the story, it’s often distant or lingering behind someone’s back; it prefers to hide in dark corners, or stalk characters through the woods where barren tree branches reach like claws, or simply wait patiently from the shadowy tree line, watching the family struggle for survival, and unravel as dark magic and paranoia rips them apart. Even the close-ups and dialogue scenes are often shot unconventionally, either filming the character from an odd angle or in profile, again giving us the uneasy feeling that the characters are being watched by a presence they’re unaware of. All of these very purposeful techniques heighten the film’s paranoid mood as the family, terrorized by malevolent forces, teeters on the edge of nervous breakdown, rapidly turning against each other in their secluded wood.
The story - taking place in colonial New England, a half century before the
Salem witch trials - implies that the characters’ unholy fates are consequences of the father’s prideful folly. At the outset, vaingloriously, he rejects the commonwealth, believing the townsfolk unworthy for not being pure enough in their devotion to God, and after being banished by a small council, he elects to drag his wife and five young children off into the middle of the merciless, seemingly endless woods to make a life of their own. Overly prideful again, staring into the brooding sea of damning trees, each one pointing, condemning, he tells his son, “We will conquer this wilderness. It will not consume us.” By the end of the film, unable to grow crops, unable to hunt, unable to protect his children from the evil lurking in the forest, himself conquered and consumed, drained of all conceit, the father is reduced to a husk, unable to do anything but chop firewood as the life he had planned for his family withers away to dust, to dirt.
Writer/director Robert Eggers’ own devotion and diligence to period-accuracy in the dialogue and dialect of the film is humbling in its own right, but he didn’t just stop there, even the look of the film - cinematographer
Jarin Blaschke shot the majority of the film using only candles and natural light - and the characters’ beliefs, reactions, and motivations feel period-accurate.
Today when we think of witches our minds tend to go to Harry Potter, Hocus Pocus, Sabrina, generic Halloween costumes and decorations, and maybe at its scariest, The Wicked Witch of the West, but back in the Middle Ages the fear of witches was tragically real and pressing. A big part of “suspension of disbelief” - something that’s integral to the horror genre - is to put yourself in not just the shoes but the minds of the characters, and completely give yourself over to the story: for 90+ minutes, their truth is your own.
That being said, the unspeakably barbaric ritual committed by the witch character early in this film (you know what I’m referring to if you’ve seen it), as well as the other black magic and possessions, are taken straight from literature and documented accounts and court records of the time. Many people 100% believed that witches were real and were everywhere, and not only were witches commonly performing these types of bloodcurdling rituals, they received boundless pleasure from doing so. If that’s not enough to make you poop your pants, I don’t know what is.
As an endnote, the period-accurate dialogue/dialect may feel alienating or grating in how difficult it is to understand, but if you’re willing to watch this film again, or for the first time, I really recommend doing so with the subtitles on, because the words that come out of the character’s mouths are creepy as hell, and it really adds a whole dimension to the effectiveness of the horror.
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