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Before Robert Eggers fully stepped into his own as a filmmaker and teller of folktales with Nosferatu and The Northman, he terrified audiences with his debut, 2015’s The Witch, a horror film set in 17th century Puritan New England. The Witch follows a family in exile from their settlement, forced to fend for themselves deep in the woods while they are under attack by a mysterious witch who represents a holy kind of evil. Like Martin Scorsese's take on Cape Fear, the family’s built-in traumas and repression are a time bomb set to destroy it, with the external evil only lighting the fuse. At the center of the witch’s machinations is Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the teenage daughter on the cusp of becoming a woman in a deeply repressed environment.
Though Anya Taylor-Joy had already been acting for several years at this point, her performance in 2014’s Vampire Academy had been trimmed from the movie’s final cut; beyond that, she had worked in television. But The Witch was a breakthrough, in effect her feature film debut. What The Witch saw in her, which became part of her star persona, was a mix of guilelessness and contemplation. Later films like M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and the great indie thriller Thoroughbreds would draw from this as well, and while she has developed an incredible filmography over the years, her work in The Witch is still uniquely effective. Despite being set in the 1600s, the film has a direct line to contemporary concerns, and Taylor-Joy is a huge part of why.
'The Witch' Takes 17th Century Horror Seriously
Despite its title, there isn’t anything silly or Halloween-y about The Witch, and anybody expecting a traditional witch-based film with cloaks, brooms and shrieking black cats might be disappointed. Outside of one scene where we see the witch seducing young son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), the titular character is an almost primal, Poltergeist-esque force with enigmatic designs on the family. The horror of the movie lives in the unknown spaces in the New England woods, where the characters, limited by their prejudices and understanding of the world, are prime targets. Many horror movies gain their power from claustrophobic settings, but The Witch is set entirely in wide-open spaces, and is no less terrifying for it.
A number of mysterious happenings only emphasize the feeling that the family is within the sights of a malevolent force. After traveling across the Atlantic to live in a New England town, settler William, his wife and their children are banished for religious disagreements. The baby born on their new farm, out in the woods where they have been exiled, is stolen from them while Thomasin watches. The creepiest twins this side of The Shining claim they talk to the family’s goat, Black Phillip. The family lacks the ability to even feed themselves on the frontier. Venturing from civilization with pride and dogmatic beliefs, they have only increased the pressure on themselves. Even the suggestion of Caleb’s incestuous feelings for sister Thomasin lead to the titular witch knowing how to get to him. And Thomasin, besieged by feelings of loneliness, guilt, and desperation, is the final key to the witch’s plot.
Anya Taylor-Joy Makes 'The Witch' a Period Piece with 21st Century Concerns
While The Witch is largely disinterested in applying contemporary psychology or sociological analysis to its situations, those are the things that make it such a powerful example of folk horror. Seeing the collapse of the family unit, the death of the promise that immigrant families could make it for themselves in the (pre-America) New World, and the weight of expectations and objectification set on young women like Thomasin makes for the rare horror movie that doubles as a potent period piece. Robert Eggers hadn’t made a film before this, but his later films like The Lighthouse and Nosferatu worked in a similar vein: despite all the thrills and horrors they present, these films succeed by locking on to the historical concerns and myth-making of a specific group of people, and digging into them with such specificity that they become a reflection on contemporary society.
When Black Phillip leads Thomasin to join the coven after her family’s demise, the feeling is complicated by the contrast between her repressive, abusive home life and the sheer joy and euphoria she experiences after leaving the normal world behind. By casting a then-unknown actress in the lead role, The Witch can feel like a story outside of time as well. Most viewers at the time of release would have no baggage with Anya Taylor-Joy, who, according to Indiewire, actually turned down the safe bet of leading a Disney Channel pilot to make this film, which makes for a very funny contrast (even if some of the Disney Channel original movies could be masterpieces). Whatever quality might have endeared her to the Mouse may have been part of what Eggers was hoping to subvert with the story of her corruption. The movie’s command of tension and the suspense of the unknown is why even now, it’s still a perfect film — as well as a great introduction to two of the most prominent film voices of the last decade.
