Let’s get one thing straight. I want to be scared by a horror film. I’m begging for it. All too often, however, I brace myself so much for a scare that it doesn’t happen. For that reason, I rarely enjoy horror films, and even the ones that I find to be gorgeous pieces of cinema, (such as Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak), really don’t frighten me.
Congratulations, The Witch. You frightened me. Based in Puritanical New England circa 1630, Willam (Ralph Ineson) decides he is just too pious to even live with the rest of the Puritans, so he moves his wife and five children out in the middle of nowhere to start a farm. When the baby vanishes in (literally) the blink of an eye in front of the oldest child Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), things start to get …tumultuous. On top of that, the crops start failing, and the family realizes there will not be enough food to survive the coming winter. It quickly becomes apparent that evil in the form of a pretty nasty looking witch lives in the adjacent woods. However, the family is too busy accusing each other of witchcraft to take heed.
I will admit, the plot sounds like a cross between The Crucible and Hansel and Gretel. Yet, the execution is better than it sounds. First-time director Robert Eggers really strove to create a depiction of Puritanical New England grounded in realism. Go figure, since Eggers expertise previously were in production design. This director clearly has a knack for world building. That being said, nothing about the world of this film seems romanticized. For instance, the dialogue is not dumbed down for the audience. Think about what English in 1630 (14 years after Shakespeare died) would sound like. I find it refreshing that Eggers (who also wrote the screenplay), would trust his audience’s intelligence enough to take that risk. On top of that, the overall atmosphere is seeped with such bleak grittiness, it makes the actual horror elements somehow more disturbing.
This may be why this film is more effectively “scary” to me than most horror films. It didn’t rely on jump scares (although there were a few.) Instead the slow, creeping hopelessness of the situation combined with the characters’ internal struggle and repression gives this film a much more lingering sense of terror. Not the kind that will make you check under your bed or in your closet for monsters, but the kind that stays in the back of your mind, gnawing at your sanity.
Pleasant dreams, everyone!
