Film Review: "The Witch"

     On its surface, The Witch would appear to be another horror movie that mines the rich veins of Euro-American folklore to tell an oft-told scary story about arboreal disciples of Satan afflicting befuddled Puritans.  However, American tastes for supernatural horror do not run along lines of fascination with early seventeenth-century New England.  The writer and director, Robert Eggers, was brave to attempt to tell such a story, since inevitably it would be compared to The Crucible and The Blair Witch Project, among others.  Refreshingly, The Witch does not attempt to set itself in or very near Salem, Massachusetts, and avoids the temptation to make any reference to it.  Rather, it aims to tell an original story culled from the witchcraft lore that terrified Puritan New Englanders in the darkest winter nights and whenever they dared to peer into the dense virgin forest.

     The film opens on a family standing under threat of banishment for religious nonconformity in 1630.  The father, William, is a minister who has apparently been ejected from his pulpit for his doctrinal and theological stringency, and has run afoul of the authorities.  "I will not be judged by false Christians," he declares, and opts to leave with his family to a tract of unincorporated land beyond Plymouth's borders.  One is immediately reminded of Anne Hutchinson, whose 1634 trial for religious noncomformity was compounded by her assuming ministerial authority due to her excellent theological self-training.  Her remove to Rhode Island, and later to Long Island, ended tragically with her death in an Indian attack, and the possibility of such a fate would surely have hung heavily in the minds of the film's protagonists.  They attempt to establish a farmstead, but struggle.  The mother, Kate, is nursing a young infant that is abducted while under the watch of her elder daughter, Thomasin.  A cloaked figure can be seen carrying the baby off into the woods far faster than Thomasin can keep up, and a chain of events is set in motion that steadily heaps suspicion upon Thomasin, who proves increasingly unable to defend herself.

     The film presumes that early modern beliefs in the supernatural, and particularly of witches, is grounded in fact.  After the abduction, a harrowing scene suggests an old woman butchering the baby and smearing her naked body with the viscera in order to gain the power of flight upon a stick (not a broomstick, which was a later seventeenth-century notion).  The witch, appearing under the guises of a hare and--in one hypnotic scene--a beautiful young woman, works with Satan--appearing as "Black Phillip," the family's billy goat--to recruit Thomasin into a coven.  The family's misfortunes, and they are many, are underscored by William's inability to provide for them, which weakens fault lines found in any family: resentment, misunderstandings, coincidences, bad judgment, and misconceptions.  Another death seals the parents' belief that Thomasin has made a pact with Satan, and in the end she agrees to write in his book, strips naked, and follows him into the forest, where she communes with a new family of compatriots who will "live richly," "see the world," and--of course--fly.  She sees no reason not to, as she knows from her father's Calvinist tutelage that she will be damned anyway for the taint of Original Sin that Christians believe compromises us all, to say nothing of her myriad sins both great and small.

     Historically, the film strives for accuracy in its material culture, and is largely successful.  Unfortunately, it does lean a bit too much upon the popular belief that Puritans dressed in nearly colorless clothing.  The spoken dialogue is largely true to the period, though a bit too stilted.  People who are intimate with each other tended not to speak to each other in the language of the King James Bible, the construction of their sentences too formal to be believable.  In this respect The Crucible (1996) is closer to what one would have heard at the time.  Eggers clearly did good research on period beliefs and the records of New England witch trials, as the tropes are all there, and he never heaps them on in bulk, making the film more realistic.  As a specialist in the period, I recognized some tropes that were not formally introduced, which might place the average viewer at some disadvantage, but most Americans know about witches as cackling old crones flying around on broomsticks, using baby's blood for their spells, and that they can take the forms of animals, and so anybody with even a passing familiarity with the Salem witch trials would recognize most of what is presented.  Snippets from trial transcripts shaped some of the dialogue, and here and there I recognized bits of testimony from the trials of Abigail Hobbs and Bridget Bishop in 1692, but otherwise one does not find that such transcriptions were overused.  For financial reasons the filming was done in northern Ontario, rather than in New England, but the landscape comes across as authentic, the immediate setting underscoring a sense of the isolation and homesickness with which the earliest New Englanders struggled.

     Stylistically, the film can be favorably compared with the best work by Stanley Kubrick, as well as to E. Elias Merhige's brilliant short film, Begotten.  The viewer genuinely feels transported to another time and place--one that is immensely terrifying on account of the constant threat of satanic assault, and in a setting that is nothing short of breathtaking in its loneliness and uncertainty.  The spare score by Mark Korven is heavy on discordant period string instruments and ominous a capella singing, doubling down on the tension between family members, and between the family and the forest that shelters an evil they are helpless to resist.  The muted color palette seems to underscore the sense of long ago and far away, except where there is candlelight and blood, at which points the colors are rich, dare I say warm.  Upon second viewing, one can see still more easily that the family was doomed as soon as they passed through the gate and out into the unknown.  Among the townspeople who look back at them as they leave are a pair of Wampanoag Indians, and I had thought that the fear of Indians would compound the family's fears of leaving the relative security of the town, but this does not seem to have entered their minds, which is something of an oversight.  The Indians were presumed by most first-generation New Englanders to be the devil's minions, and some passing reference to this belief would have ramped up the tension just a bit more.  However, the physical absence of Indians beyond the first few minutes of the film speaks to the fact that disease epidemics had already done much to depopulate the region by 1630, while concentrated southern Algonquian settlement lay farther to the north and west than the protagonists would likely have traveled.  That they put down stakes relatively close to Plymouth is mentioned a few times, specifically that the town is only a day's ride away by horse.  Nevertheless, it is questionable that the family simply found an unoccupied or unclaimed tract of land and declared squatters' rights, as the film suggests.  Rather, they would most likely have had to bargain for the land with the nearest Indian community that claimed it as part of their territory, or purchased/leased it from someone else.

     Early modern conceptions of witches were heavy on presumptions that young girls and women were most prone to satanic temptation, due to Eve's inherent spiritual weakness that men believed cursed the female sex.  Thomasin, who is in her very early teens, has begun to blossom into womanhood, and she becomes an object of her younger brother's burgeoning sexual curiosity as well as of her mother's jealousy.  As Carol Karlsen argues in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987), it was in part the fear of female sexuality that motivated patriarchy in general, and witchcraft beliefs in particular after the Reformation.  Thomasin's road to perdition begins with her cruelly teasing her baby sister that she is "the witch in the wood" who delivered baby Samuel to the devil, and from then on every foul coincidence and frightful turn of events happens in her presence, fueling her parents' suspicions, as well as those of her younger siblings.  Too often things said in jest or sarcastically were used against accused witches, and Thomasin's imprudence is the shovel with which she has begun to dig her own grave.  Her father seems to be the last to fully succumb to his fears about her, which only inflame her mother's conviction that she is a rival, a murderer, and a soon-to-be whore.  Such rhetoric fills the writings of early modern clergymen, witch hunters, and magistrates presiding over witch trials, and Eggers uses these just enough to tell a horrifying story that is all the more unsettling for its simplicity.  Nothing is overdone or oversold, though one must remember that this is a movie, and not a scrupulous docudrama.

     Students who have read David D. Hall's Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989) and Karlsen's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman will be able to understand this movie as more than a period horror piece.  I do take issue, though, with Eggers's subtitling the film "A New England Folktale," since the narrative fits no specific story predating the Salem witch trials, but I suspect that this is only to reinforce the setting.  While witchcraft beliefs were far stronger in New England than in the other Eastern Seaboard colonies, they still existed, and so theoretically the setting could have been western Pennsylvania or backcountry Carolina, though to do so would have robbed the film of a necessarily dark atmosphere.  I would recommend screening The Witch in classes on witchcraft and the Salem Witch Trials in particular, and perhaps also in courses on early New England history.  It economically offers a plausible glimpse into the world of first-generation Puritan New England, and one the horror of which stems from the what-if scenario of witchcraft, Satan, and damnation being all too real.