How Robert Eggers’ The Witch Targets Our Deepest Fears

As soon as I saw Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse on the line-up for the festival this year, I was immediately enticed to revisit the bleak, ominous, and darkly alluring world of his breakout horror film, The Witch, from 2016. The Witch walks a tightrope between nightmare and history: set in 1630 in colonial New England, this story inhabits a world just distant enough to feel both darkly foreign while still remaining close enough to be ultimately recognizable. Both through intricate aesthetics and dialogue true to the time period, this film feels like an ancestral memory, evoking visceral fears ingrained at the very heart of our American psyche.

What I like most about this film is the complex historical commentary underlying this seemingly simple folktale. In my opinion The Witch falls in the same realm as works like Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, or even Get Out. The Witch while evoking more straightforward fears of spilled blood or black magic, also conjures many of our cultural fears around sexuality, gender roles, and what exactly happens when we forsake our patriarchal and religious parameters. As an audience, we are pushed to explore these new moral landscapes through the demise of our main character, Thomasin. I love the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy whose dark eyes contrast sharply with her otherwise fair features, reflecting this character’s duplicitous nature. After all ‘sin’ lies in her very name.

Despite these suspicions, witchcraft kind of just happens to our main character Thomasin. Thomasin’s powerlessness to stop this transformation coupled with many physical and sexual parallels show how witchcraft functions as a symbol for womanhood in this film. Thomasin knows something is not right when she discovers the bloody egg of a chick and when she tries to milk a goat and the milk turns to blood. Eggers holds close-ups on these disturbing images, demonstrating that the greatest horror can lie in this still simplicity. This blood functions as a signifier of her witchcraft, just like the blood of menstruation signifies the first signs of womanhood. The color of blood also marks anything supernatural or taboo in the film: from the witch’s cloak, to the apple Caleb chokes on, to baby Sam’s blanket in the witch’s mirage. The mainly bleak color palette of neutral grays, whites, and browns in this film makes the appearance of this color all that more disturbing.

Sexuality also connects witchcraft to womanhood. Thomasin’s mother blames her for casting seductive looks at her brother Caleb, when we know through POV close-ups, that he is the one who stares at her. It is this same desire that Caleb is later punished with, when the witch lures him into her lair. The mirage where the crow pecks at the mom’s nipple demonstrates the empty nature of the mother’s ability to nurture her children and how her strict rigidity when it comes to parenting her children turns her motherhood false. Also when I recognized the actress Kate Dickie from her role as Lysa Arryn in Game of Thrones, I became both fascinated and amused to discover the similarities between that character and this one. Somehow Dickie embodies the role of the shrill strew-ish wife with a problematic relationship to breastfeeding enough to be type casted as such.

However, the very catalyst for the absolute disintegration of this archetypally perfect family really has nothing to do with Thomasin: its ironically her father’s attempts to keep the family away from the church. It’s this clinging to the old ways of life that destroys this family. The father misses the stricter Christianity of the past, the mother longs to go back to England altogether, when Caleb lies about going beyond the valley, he says it’s because he misses the apples from back home. It this very thing, a bloody apple, which he gags on after being bewitched: representing the ugly subversion of this past they all wish to replicate.

The epilogue message at the end of this film states that this story and its language are all based off real accounts from court records, journal entries, and other historical documents. This epilogue message accomplishes what other horror movies have attempted to do with those ‘based off a true story’ warnings at the beginning, yet with an incredibly richer payoff that actually sustains the fear the film evokes. We will see if Eggers’ next film will strike this same successful balance between reality and the world of myth that best targets all of our darkest fears.