‘The Witch’ Is Really About Becoming What We Fear The Most

It’s rare a horror film — let alone one from a first-time director — has the ability to genuinely scare the bejeezus out of its audience members while also challenging them. Yet, since its highly anticipated mid-February release, Robert Eggers‘ Sundance darling The Witch has managed to frighten theatergoers and welcome glowing reviews. Currently third on IMDb’s Most Popular Movies chart behind mega-budget superhero flicks, Deadpool and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, critics have praised the creepy “New England folktale” as a modern day classic and contemporary triumph for the notoriously underdog genre. (Contains mild plot spoilers)

But the gravity of The Witch goes far beyond its already coveted place in the scare fare realm or its terrifying breakout star: a goat by the name of Black Phillip. Based on documented New England folklore, court cases, and personal accounts of 1630’s Puritans, The Witch is less a horror film in the normalized sense — a diabolic entity hunts its prey. Rather, it examines the wholly unsettling root of our country’s doomed beginnings and begs the question: what happens when we, for generations, give in to the devil sitting on our shoulder?

Though it’s called The Witch and there is, fittingly enough, an satanic sorceress lurking in the woods throughout the duration of the film; the real antagonist to our God-fearing family isn’t black magic or Black Phillip or the devil, but themselves. After being banished from their New England plantation, patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) rounds up his wife, Katherine (Game of Thrones‘ Kate Dickie), and their five children to start anew in a secluded clearing smack dab in the middle of a sinister forest. Filmed by someone who appreciates the work of Kubrick and Hitchcock, The Witch is an unnervingly framed account of a family slowly torn apart by sermon-fueled paranoia: convinced the oldest daughter, Thomasin (newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy), is dancing with the devil.

Eggers propells his nail biting “is she-isn’t she” narrative with distinctive direction and top-notch editing by indie frequenter, Louise Ford, leaving his film to be construed in two ways: Thomasin the vulnerable, who was pushed to the brink by her hypocritical parents, or Thomasin the traitor, who actively betrayed her Christian upbringing only to prove her family right: she really was a monster all along. After walking away from The Witch, however, another possibility sinks in that speaks to the deeper, darker core of our nation’s controversial history, rather than siding with any theological interpretation: our fear is the cause of our evils. Fear of others different from us, fear of God’s wrath, fear of those who don’t believe in God, fear of change, fear of our mistakes coming back to haunt us: The Witch is the nightmare-inducing reminder of our hate-fueled, fear-mongered past.

Eggers’ chilling tale of one family’s unraveling presents a larger understanding of our ancestry as intruders (it was the witch’s land first, after all) and paranoid killers: of natives, of women, of those who stand out as other. Thomasin and her parents feared the sinful invading their farm, stealing their infant son, and cursing their only sustainable farmland, but what they failed to realize is their purity was stained from the start, no matter how much they prayed. Though it uses a familiar storybook archetype as its titular gateway, The Witch is really a narrative about becoming what we promised we never would: evil.

[The Witch is now in theaters nationwide]

Photos: A24 via Everett Collection