One of the Best Horror Films of the Decade Is on Netflix
Horror films love to update classic monsters. Blood sucking vampires become emo hunks, cackling witches become sassy teens, stumbling zombies learn how to sprint. It’s how old tropes can be made fresh. But what’s remarkable about 2016’s The Witch—a strong candidate for the best horror film of the decade alongside the likes of Get Out and It Follows—is how successfully it makes a classic trope feel fresh by taking it back to its ancient roots.
The Witch opens in 1630, decades before even the Salem witch trials, with a family of early Puritan settlers being expelled from their community. “I cannot be judged by false Christians,” the father (Ralph Ineson from Game of Thrones) says. But if he can’t be judged, he can be kicked out. his family forced to make their own way in the dark woods an entire ocean away from the home. Their hard life gets even harder when their newborn son disappears while their daughter Thomasin (a fantastic Anya Taylor-Joy) plays peekaboo. The baby is there one minute, and then it is not. The father is adamant the babe was stolen by a wolf and tries to set traps in the forest. The mother (Kate Dickie, also from Game of Thrones) is distraught and suspects witchcraft. When we see a blurry body rubbing itself in the baby’s blood, we know the mother is right.
But the witch, if she does exist, is not the real source of horror. Belief is. This is a family of Puritans so devoted to their religion that a father might casually ask his son, “Canst thou tell me what thy corrupt nature is?” and have the son dutifully reply, “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin, and that continually.” (This is an authentic Puritan catechism from the 17th century.) As evil events keep occuring—a goat’s udder squirts blood instead of milk, the son Caleb becomes mysteriously ill—the family members turn on the oldest daughter Thomasin, believing she is the one who has made a pact with the devil.
Thomasin has nowhere to turn. She’s trapped in a house full of suspicious family members in an isolated farm beside the haunted woods. Sonically, the film is also brilliantly eerie, with screeching violins and inhuman moans sounding both ancient and unreal. Yet at the same time, the film is gorgeous, with certain shots echoing the paintings of Goya. It is a slow burn film, but one seeped in terror from the first shot to the last.
Director Robert Eggers and his team were immaculate about making The Witch authentic. Everything from the costumes to the stilted-to-our-ears dialogue (“Black Phillip, I conjure thee to speak to me. Speak as thou dost speak to Jonas and Mercy.”) was made period appropriate. Above all, the manifestations of the witch herself are drawn from the classic depictions of witches, the old crones who suck blood, dance naked, and sign their name in the book of the devil. The result is uncanny, as the witchcraft and the family’s deep Puritanism is both alien and familiar to us. The Witch is the perfect dark spell of a film to get you ready for Halloween.
