A Witch Reviews THE WITCH

When The Exorcist was first released in 1973, it terrified me. Partly it was due to the hype over the movie, partly due to the prevalence of the Devil in popular culture and religion. It made you believe that demonic possession was possible, and that the Devil was real.  Now, over 40 years later, it no longer has that impact for me. What was shocking then is tame now, and I’ve moved on to a religion that doesn’t believe in the Devil.

This came to mind while watching the new movie, The Witch, which opens in theatres February 19. This movie will be much discussed, as what you get out of it will depend on where you’re coming from. To right-wing Christians, it is a horror movie with the archetypal Witch taking the place of The Exorcist’s Devil.  To Witches of a certain generation, it reinforces all the old tropes and stereotypes of the Witch, and requires chastisement. To those of a more moderate point of view, it’s the story of a 17^th Century New England family who succumb to ergot poisoning and their own repressed emotions.  Writer/Director Robert Eggers cleverly bookends the movie, initially labeling it as a “New England folk tale”, with an afterword indicating it was an amalgam of published accounts, court transcripts, etc.  So what you get is the standard myth-lore of the Witch, and you need to prepare yourself accordingly.  SPOILERS AHEAD.

The story revolves around a New England man and his family (wife, teen-aged daughter, hormonal son, a couple of obnoxious twins, and an infant) who are exiled from their Puritan plantation village in 1629 (63 years before the Salem Witch trials) for his extreme religious beliefs.  They start a small farm in the wilderness, at the edge of the forest primeval, growing corn and raising chickens and goats. But the corn crop spoils, their traps come up empty, and the father (Ralph Iveson, with a growling bass voice which dominates the soundtrack), secretly trades away some of their few precious possessions.  Then suddenly, their infant son disappears.  Was he taken by a wolf, or is there a mysterious woman in the woods who killed him and used his blood to make a flying ointment?  The mother (a creepy Kate Dickie) is bereft. She accuses their daughter, Thomasin (a wonderful Anya Taylor-Joy), and descends into madness. In a moment of adolescent angst, Thomasin had indulged the accusations of the twins, and proclaimed herself to be “the Witch” in order to taunt them.

Nature itself becomes a character in the movie, representing all the emotions and desires that the family represses.  The parents’ admonition that the children not enter the forest is pure Jungian, and true to form, bad things happen when they inevitably do.

The tropes, clichés, and stereotypes run wild.  The Witch (if she really exists) is depicted as part voluptuous maiden/nymph, part ugly crone.  She may also shape-change into an ominous wild rabbit, perhaps her familiar.  A series of bizarre incidents unfold. The she-goat’s milk turns to blood. The son (under the screeching music evocative of 2001) falls prey to the Witch’s wiles, is poisoned by an apple, and becomes possessed.  And is Black Phillip, the family’s he-goat, really Lucifer in disguise, making the twins his minions?

The pacing of the movie is painfully slow, the English dialect sometimes difficult to follow, the religious dogmatism uncomfortably pious.  The cinematography is in bleak greens and greys, with the only splashes of colour that of blood, and the Witch’s red cloak. There are few actual moments of terror in the movie, and only one jump-scare.  It relies heavily on psychological horror and tension, so much so that the theory that the Witch is purely in their minds becomes more and more convincing.

It will be interesting to see whether this movie will find its audience, and how mainstream reviewers and the pagan community will react to it. For my part, I see this as a microcosm of the Salem Witch hysteria taken to the level of one family, and an interesting starting point for discussing witch crazes past and present.