It was 10 years ago today that The Witch arrived in theaters, launching not just the career of historical horror filmmaker par excellence Robert Eggers, but bringing mainstream attention to a curious and niche corner of the genre: folk horror.
A loosely defined category, folk horror first emerged on screen in the late 1960s and early '70s with the field’s “Unholy Trinity”: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Numerous other examples, both in literature and in theatres, appeared before and after that trio of films, but many of them — particularly those aired as British TV movies or produced by small companies — vanished into obscurity for decades.
But Eggers' powerful directorial debut was a box office success, earning more than $40 million against a budget of under $4 million. Its success opened the floodgates for other major Hollywood releases, like Midsommar, along with a slew of indie and international (particularly Southeast Asian) releases. Archival explorations such as Kier-La Janisse’s definitive documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, chronicled a newfound appreciation for the subgenre and its iconography of pagan beliefs, rural settings, inexplicable nature, and age-old myths.
Set in an oppressive landscape of Puritan punishment, religious dogma, and nature-infused sorcery, The Witch was more terrifying for what it didn't show than what it did. When English settler William (Ralph Ineson) and his family are banished from a Puritan village in 1630s New England, they build and struggle to maintain their own isolated farm on the edge of a vast forest. In that wilderness lives an ancient witch, who begins exerting a malignant influence on the family’s children, including oldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, in a striking feature-film introduction) and adolescent son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw).
Anya Taylor-Joy makes a memorable movie debut.
The title enchantress, glimpsed only fleetingly, is seen as both a withered, hag-like creature and a voluptuous woman. But her presence is felt throughout, whether it’s in the impenetrable darkness of the woods or the behavior of the family’s animals, including the eerie billy goat named Black Phillip. Eggers drenches the film in an atmosphere of persecution and chaos, with the family’s strict Christian protocols no match for the witch’s wild magic and the natural environment in which she exists. Yet it’s only in the third act that the film’s mostly implied bloodshed and horror become more physically manifested.
While what happens to William’s family is horrific, there’s more going on beneath the surface. The doomed clan finds themselves battling what is essentially a force of nature — the witch, for all her evil ways, is to some degree a representation of paganism, in the sense that she’s in touch with her own true essence and connected spiritually to the natural world around her. The Witch asks what transpires when human beings living under an imposed structure — in this case, that of religious dogma — are confronted by that primal force.
The film gives two answers. Caleb, on the verge of puberty, keeps sneaking glances at his older sister’s budding chest; it’s no coincidence that when he meets the witch, she appears as a seductive woman with a far more ample decolletage. Ravaged (or perhaps tempted) by her, only to return home in agonizing pain, Caleb eventually reaffirms his love for Christ and dies peacefully with his faith intact, although his young life is cut short by his adherence to it.
The Witch’s infamous goat.
Thomasin, on the other hand, while seemingly as pious as the rest of her family, is offered the opportunity to “live deliciously” by the Devil himself in the form of Black Phillip. The taste of butter, a pretty dress: perhaps realizing what she’s been missing, the teenager embraces the chance to free herself from the narrow strictures of the life she’s led. Literally unbound from her repressive, heavy clothing, her family’s devotion to a constrictive faith, and even the pull of gravity itself, a naked Thomasin is last seen ascending into the sky with a coven of other witches, an expression of pure ecstasy on her face.
This turns horror’s often patriarchal structure on its head: The Witch is ultimately a tale of female sexual liberation in which the Final Girl not only survives but evolves into her perfected form — not by staying “pure” and obeying the rules of society, but by embracing her natural, spiritual, even feral essence. In that sense, the ending of The Witch echoes the climax of arguably the greatest folk horror movie of all, The Wicker Man, which casts no judgment on the people of Summerisle. This is what makes The Witch not just an excellent modern gateway to folk horror, but a subversive comment on horror itself.
