by Brendan Foley
The witch is a horror trope that has gotten significantly more heat in recent years, probably because, like demons or ghosts, filmmakers don’t need to break the bank to depict the threat posed by witchcraft. Just flicker some lights and shake some furniture and show a lady with stringy hair staring intently and bam, you got yourself a witch movie.
But there’s a disconcerting element to the witch archetype that people don’t like to deal with. Namely, witches (or witch hunts) were real people who were really tortured and really murdered because of real bullshit belief. So recasting the death and mutilation of hundreds (thousands?) of innocents and rendering it into fun fantasy adventure is the sort of gross behavior that movie-making folks should think twice about.
That disparity is especially pronounced here in New England, where local businesses and towns have made a ton of dough thanks to the commercialization of institutional mass murder.
(Weirdly, one of the few films to deal openly and honestly with this hypocrisy is the children’s animated film, Paranorman, which you can watch with your children. Another good film that deals with this subject matter is the awesome Vincent Price-starring Witchfinder General. Do not show your children Witchfinder General. Unless you hate them.)
So when Robert Eggers’ ‘New England Folktale’ The Witch started picking up heat after playing at Sundance, I was excited but also pretty damn nervous. Was this going to be another film that recast one of New England’s most shameful moment from history as a ‘fun’ horror ride?
Eggers takes an interesting approach to the fantastical, laying his cards out right from the get-go. He establishes within the first ten minutes of the film that, yup, there’s a real witch in the woods causing problems for the Puritans and, yup, there’s some real magic in play.
But the presence of the supernatural is never used as an excuse or justification for the hysteria and mayhem that unfolds over the course of the film. Indeed, the titular witch may be one of the most passive horror villains in recent memory, existing only at the fringes of the story while the real terror is self-inflicted by the central family upon one another. By structuring his movie in this way, Eggers allows himself to both indulge in supernatural lunacy without cheapening or excusing the human horror at the core of the film.
The Witch is the story of William (Ralph Ineson) who, along with his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and his young children, is outcast from the Puritan village in the opening scene of the film. William is too hardcore religious for even the frigging Puritans, and so he and his family trek out into the wilderness to build their own farm and be closer to God.
Doesn’t exactly work out that way. What the reveal of the witch so early in the film does is give the audience an edge over the characters. Hitchcock always said that the key to suspense was to show the bomb underneath the table and then make the audience wait for it to go off, and the witch in the woods is the time bomb lying in wait throughout the entire film. As the family’s crops fail, as the animals give blood instead of milk, as disasters strike, and as tensions mount more and more between the children and between the parents and between the parents and the children, the same question hovers over all:
“Is this the witch doing this? Is this just bad luck? Is the witch doing this or are these people just screwed?’
You can find out exactly where the film lands on these questions for yourself when The Witch opens in February, but for now I’ll just say that Eggers refuses to let his characters (or his audience) off the hook by laying the blame at the hooves of some adversary. What the family does to one another is not helped by the witch, but their downfall is rooted in their own beliefs and behaviors and their failure to look beyond those beliefs and engage with one another as people.
What Eggers understands is that the supernatural element exists to highlight and underline the all-to human faces of fear and horror. The Witch is about the dissolution of family and of faith, and the witch and other attendant supernatural beings and elements serve to reflect the failure and moral weaknesses that cause this dissolution, not shoulder the blame.
Instead of waving off society’s problems with CGI spectacle or tangled demonology, Eggers digs into the actual ideology behind the folktales, behind the myths. His is a film that engages with the ripple effects of repression and rage, with the very origin of monsters. The Witch isn’t just a horror story, it’s about horror stories, about how and why we grow monsters in our midst and whisper back the tales so the next generation might do better.
The film is less than optimistic.