'The Witch' director says he won't make a sequel

As a critically-acclaimed box-office hit with a rich mythology, The Witch would seem ripe for the sequel treatment. But the horror film’s writer-director Robert Eggers says he has no intention of turning his tale of a tormented Puritan family — which has so far grossed more than $16 million at the domestic box office — into a franchise.

“I think I’m stealing the words from another director I cannot place, but if I wanted to know what happens after the last shot of the film, I would have made a longer movie,” the filmmaker told EW Radio’s Entertainment Weirdly show, earlier today.

Instead, Eggers has a number of other projects in various stages of development, including a miniseries about Russian “mad monk” Rasputin, a reimagining of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu, and a medieval epic called The Knight.

“I’ve been working on this medieval knight thing for over a year now,” he said. So, what’s the delay? “It’s one thing to know how to build a goat shed. Building a castle? There’s a lot more parts for me to understand.”

You can hear an excerpt from Eggers’ Entertainment Weirdly interview, below.