Bitter Dregs Magazine

2015’s groundbreaking Indie Folk-Horror darling, The Witch, the tale of one isolated family’s banishment and descent into a 17th century rural farming nightmare, is many things, all of them more delicious than anything the flailing homesteading family could produce, or barter for. 

Arguably, the directorial debut by Robert Eggers, which made $39 million on a $1 million budget and looks better than most $60 million dollar films, was a timely response to the still interesting and appealingly indie, but overly CG-ed,  jump scared, pretzel twisted (and twists upon twists) torture-porn norms of the last decade or so of horror.

The time was right for folk-horror to gather its petticoats and sing its weird, not at all reassuring folk hymns to us as we awkwardly piled into a wagon with the village shut behind us and the dark woods and empty plains of rural America stretching out ahead, because Father says so. Here lies the endless darkness of our imaginations, our superstitions, our religious brainwashing embedded deeper than splinters, as frightening as stage 4, into our collective subconscious.

Eggers slowly spins a loom of narrative, pacing, action, and landscapes (inner and outer) where the enemy or threat is a moving target, like all good psychological drama (and horror). It’s a History and English major’s own Burning Man, unmissable and alienating, our defiant dream, with its use of well-researched authentic language (from texts and court transcripts of the time) that make this film ripe for a bit of future school use, entertainment and information.

The challenging verbiage uttered by “creepy twins” Jonas and Mercy is directly taken from Salem Witch Trial transcripts, words spoken by panicked and ignorant adults that sealed the fates of many so-called witches. How scary is that?

The film hits on timeless themes that always need interrogation in any film from the over-stretched Superhero genre to the artist-at-war with himself think piece: Who speaks for God -Society? The individual? A child? Everyone? No one?

But the setting and scene takes a gravel path even more primal than things that go bump in the night, on the phone, through the TV: In the search of life, safety, security, God and the devil, do we look to our animals, their own frail bodies, health or sickness directly enmeshed with our own, and our twin fates, on their four unclean legs? Or the wild creatures? Little hares in the fields, so innocent and unobtrusive, what if they are witched? When paranoia, fear, hunger, and your own irrevocable life choices come a-calling at 3 am, common sense and factuality is the first casualty. In isolation, in despair, then as now, people will grasp or invent any god, leader, truth or comfort to fight the unknowable darkness. In our suburbias, little bunnies appear just as in the film, nightly, almost invisibly, but leaving territorial hollows in the grass. Do we befriend them or banish them?

The Witch is a feat of perfect casting with the stellar, scary Kate Dickie (Game of Thrones) Ralph Ineson (once/always to fans The BBC Office’s Chris Finch a.k.a Finchy) whose dulcet tones bring something entirely new to the classic Dads and their hubristic ways theme of film, the newcomer (now massive star) Anna Taylor-Joy as the young lead, Thomasin (not a girl, not yet a woman…) and two rugrats as MERCY & JONAS, the creepiest (and darkly funniest- they can really cut a rug and lash a tongue) twins since The Shining. It’s also a feat of animal casting/animal acting, with the goat that played the iconic Black Philip becoming famously as wild, infuriating and unappreciated as Bruce the Shark was making Jaws.

The film’s genre resisting ways angered some viewers and thrilled others (depending on how fixed they need their genres and how committed they are to  some rather exhausted film (horror) tropes. Decidedly, as an instant and continuing fan of the film that holds up better and better over time when the quibbles about volume and the language fall away, I can attest that in the beginning, the film seemed to anger and disturb grown men and male movie critics far more than women.

It holds its own with the few horror films and psychological explorations written by, and especially, directed by women. Curiously, men of the social commentariat of 2015, the kind of men who love and deeply enjoy all the most offensive horror films, many of those old films deeply misogynistic and truly horrifying for girls and women to allow into their brains and to be told were cool, were comically disturbed by the film, particularly the brief, even easy to miss, fate of the little baby in Thomasin’s care that kicks off the horror.

Without getting academic, post-2015 world history has borne out that the polarizing aspects of The Witch spoke one way to non-horror buffs, academics, outsiders, women, and queer people, and quite another to the establishment: the overwhelmingly male world of music and film criticism and taste making of that time, which has, happily eroded a decade on, but that still adds a humorous slant to an already deeply funny narrative and ironically funny complaint from those least connected to childbirth, babies, and childrearing. Personally, I save my shudder for things like the demonic tree root rape of a woman in the oh so lighthearted Evil Dead, which we all watched in frozen fear while still girls young enough that we didn’t even know to fear intruders of our bodies yet. The Exorcist’s child star being made to perform mutilating self-pleasure with a crucifix, and sending up a twisted mockery of everything wrong with such a scene if we didn’t have Satan to blame for it all.

And the culture and time has moved with A24, with new-folk horror, with Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele and Jennifer Kent (The Babadook). The lasting cultural impact and comment on the film is that heck yes, it’s Feminist, challenging, fresh, and layered. It’s a new kind of horror that doesn’t need many horror references, if any at all, to get the references and the dark humor. It’s spooky, it’s disturbing, it’s beautiful, it’s rebellious, and it’s funny. It’s art.

Those noisily offended critics and suddenly wilting flowers, could have checked themselves to note that women in particular, as well as girls, children and babies (as well as pregnancy and the cheap horror and affect/effects of childbirth scenes which out to be retired, entertainment-wide) are so commonly relied upon in horror, thrillers, drama, comedies and true stories as fodder to be hurt, killed and disposed of, that The Final Girl is one of the core tenets of the genre. Oh, great, there’s one girl left alive for the sequel. We cannot pretend to care about a fictional baby being used to drive the plot forward and not the fate of all the other dependents of the Father from hell, as well as the genre’s untold casualties destroyed so recklessly and predictably that it numbed the world to such acts, aside from children or dogs.

The folk-horror association suits The Witch better than other labels. There are elements that throwback to the great, less manipulative and quieter films made under that banner in the 60s and 70s. And the movie succeeds as one of the all time greats, whose preoccupations are one: the cultural effects of the barely civilized culture of the souls who turned over the rocky soil of a terrifyingly difficult and indifferent new world,  superstitions and fears of evil and outside forces,

and two:  the dark depths of the prison of family itself, that nucleus, that dark beating heart, that co-dependency that can turn to fighting over slim pickings of food, to war, to survival of the fittest to the last of your kind over a changing moon. Who’s the favorite? Who needs Mom more? Who’s abandoned in her wake? Who gets her smiles, her coos? Who gets the slap or the strap? Who stands up to Dad, and does anyone stand with them? Who’s the scapegoat? Who forms the angry mob? What is safer, the slowly starving cabin, the half built outbuildings, the haystacks, or do you chance the woods instead? When you’re on the edge of adulthood, you know. Such decisions are then made in haste, and are irrevocable, just like innocence, death, lost time, wasted resources.

And then there’s the totems, and the signs, and the shadows, and the wishes, and the animals with all their unknown power and passive dark eyes. And among them are a couple of goats, (presumably the lesser of the two is White Philip) AND Black Philip, who has become as culturally relevant as Iron Maiden’s Eddie, in just one short decade. The Witch is a stone cold classic.

There’s humour underneath all this genre-bending and true-to-text historical rough-hewn costume quiet luxury for the close watchers. There’s a Canadian production, there’s a setting on the edge of our own ample Northern Ontario woods. Our woods. Still scary. Lifelong, generations back, the subject of adventure, secrecy, sustenance, danger, ghosts, light and dark. The mind fills in where shadows fail to solidify. As long as we’ve sat on the ground we’ve sat around campfires and told the tales and the myths, and the lies with equal conviction, falsely warmed and lit, overheated and getting singed from the nearby flames, while we fight that fingerlike chill down our backs. Backs huddled away from, but unguarded to, those impossibly dark and endless woods. Burn or freeze. Practical concerns- also the concerns of Modernity where inner children riot mercilessly for healing and feeding, while men in diapers run empires and tell us what to want and feel, and control what democratic freedoms are innate and our birthright. Such as social media was and should be.

The Witch is something special. It will let you decide what it’s about, and what to take from it. For the curious, for the properly spooked, for those long since bent away from that punishing cross on the wall, watching us in bed, and that rigid old book, which was most endearing because of the fine paper, and millions of us left hungry from the pale little wafer, sickened from the hypocrisy and unanswered prayers when they were most needed, The Witch, like all great movies about big questions and social sea changes, offers choices that for once don’t have you crossing yourself in empty superstition and primal, confusing and uncalled for fear the way The Exorcist or other films used to have the power to do. In the modern way, Eggers offers a story of brutally harsh life as something based on wicked, delicious , and completely unreal choice, on (in)tolerances, on free will. The choice is unusually bold and clear. Do you dare snatch it?

Edited and updated from our original essay originally published in this magazine in July 2016 by Jackalinka.