The Witch

Robert Eggers 2015 horror film, The Witch, baffled general audiences and was, more or less, derided by the people who are fans of the genre.  In fact, the picture is excellent, although fundamentally pointless except as an exercise in ethnography.  Nonetheless, I thought the film was scary in a grim, relentless way and contains images that can't be unseen.  The picture is too subtle to appeal to fans of gore and slowly paced with most of the horror just off-screen.  The audience to which this film would appeal is not likely to see it and, so, the entire venture seems a little quixotic.


An antinomian Puritan named Will, with his family, is banished from the tiny New England hamlet where they live.  Will takes his family into the wilderness where they clear land and build a farm.  Something supernatural lives in the autumnal woods.  Thomasina, the family's teenage daughter, ventures into the forest with a small baby.  The baby vanishes --it's thought a wolf stole the child.  Thomasina has strange visions -- she imagines a shapeless crone grinding the baby in wooden churn and, then, applying the pulverized flesh and fat to her naked body.  The family is riven by conflict:  Will has taken his wife's silver chalice and pawned it, although Thomasina is blamed for the missing cup.  Thomasina's brother, Caleb, lecherously eyes the young girl's swelling bosom.  While hunting with his father in the woods, he encounters a strange black rabbit.  The rabbit bears bad luck.  When Will tries to shoot the animal, his fuse-lit musket explodes and half-blinds him.  The corn in their fields is blighted.  Caleb goes into the forest alone and encounters an alluring female apparition.  He appears a day later, naked and feverish, and, after being bled, dies.  Thomasina's little brother and sister, the twins, Jonas and Mercy, claim that the goat, Black Philip, has been talking to them.  Terror seizes the family and Will uses an axe and nails to confine his the three surviving children in a shed.  The witch comes and sucks blood from a white goat and, then, Black Philip gores Will, causing a huge stack of firewood that he has been obsessively chopping to collapse on him so that he also dies.  After seeing the twins dead, Thomasina's mother, Katherine, goes mad and tries to strangle the teenage girl.  Thomasina kills her and, then, speaks with Black Philip who, now, encourages her to "live deliciously".  With the goat and stripped naked, she enters the forest and encounters a coven of naked witches -- they levitate around a bonfire and, in the film's final shot, we see Thomasina hovering at the summit of great, grey and barren tree lit by the leaping flames below.  A final title reminds us that the film is based upon diaries, books, and engravings made during the early part of the 17th century. 


The film is shot in long takes that emphasize the family's nightmarish isolation.  In effect, the movie is silent, a bit like Sjostrom's terrifying Hollywood picture starring Lillian Gish, The Wind (1927).  Nature is portrayed as demonic and the black rabbit and goat are familiars of the devil.  The woods are ghastly with dark upturned trees and endless grey corridors of leafless ash and oak.  Several shots, including one in which the father and mother dig a narrow pit in which to bury Caleb are spectacularly beautiful, misty with autumn and the little column of smoke rising from the small windowless cabin.  Certain aspects of the film suggest that what happens to the family is a result of their dour, cheerless, Calvinist faith -- and the terrifying witches may be construed, at least in part, as Thomasina's hallucinations.  But too many people encounter the witches and there are seemingly objective sequences involving direct supernatural intervention that can't be interpreted as delirium -- for instance, the scene in which Caleb encounters a voluptuous young witch in the woods.  The sequence involving Caleb's death is extremely disturbing but, perhaps, could be interpreted as evidence of religious hysteria triggering hallucinations.  But, ultimately, the film implies that the witches are real, perniciously malign, and, even, deadly.  Thus, the film is not really a study in the psychological need to believe in evil forces.  Rather, it seems an ethnography of New England witchcraft, something that is suggested by the movie's subtitle, "A New England Folktale".  Before he dies Caleb experiences the caresses of Jesus as a lover and voluptuously rubs his arms over his pale torso proclaiming that he is in God's embrace.  Then, his eyes roll up in his head and he dies.  The twins are crumpled near the bed suffering seizures.  Religious faith itself is shown to be unnatural, grotesque, and terrible.  Everyone hallucinates.  We see a shocking image of Caleb's mother, emaciated with the taut face of a starving animal, huddled in the little boy's narrow grave, clutching at the corpse.  Later, she sees the boy and her lost baby sitting together in a corner of the cabin.  She opens her blouse to suckle the baby and, then, the screen goes black -- in the next shot, the woman's breast is being ravaged by raven, flesh pecked away and blood on her white shift.  The scenes of the great horned goat, black as midnight, goring Will are terrifying as is the sequence in the woods in which the voluptuous young witch leans forward to kiss Caleb while suddenly her hand extrudes from the edge of screen, lurching to seize the boy and shot in close-up so that we can see that the limb is ancient and horribly gnarled.  Will's madness is expressed in obsessive hacking of wood into kindling.  The great heap of wood that he has laid-away for the upcoming window collapse onto him like a dark avalanche so that only his gaunt head protrudes from the pile.  Adding to the film's eerie ambience is the fact that I couldn't understand the actor's accents -- everyone speaks with a strong, impenetrable Yorkshire accent and Will, in particular, has a basso profundo voice that registers subliminally as a low earthquake rumbling; I understood less than one-fifth of what he said, although I don't think the dialogue, written in pidgin Jacobean English has any significance.  I wonder about the point of the movie -- it seems an exceedingly accurate account of the way people acted and thought and their fears three-hundred years ago.  But to what end?  The interiors are all naturally lit with candles and the exterior woods are wild and vacant except for evil presences -- the movie was shot near Kiosk, Ontario -- and the actors all have pale, tightly pinched faces and wear strange shapeless garments.  It looks like a deranged documentary -- in fact, much of the budget was expended on producing the home-spun clothing.  I have the same reaction to Ingmar Bergman's sublime, but ultimately futile, The Virgin Spring.  What, may I ask, is the point?  Witches don't exist and so why do we need to know so much about them.