‘The Witch’ and the Freedom of Horror
It’s hard to predict trends in horror in the moment, as you’re experiencing them. Looking back after a decade, however, I think we can safely say that The Witch changed the landscape of horror in the 2010s. While very, very, different tonally, it arrived to shake up the genre landscape in the same way that Scream had in the 1990s. There were understated, slow-burn horror films already happening in the 2010s, without a doubt, and there had even been A24 movies like Under the Skin to really start pushing things in that direction, I’m not denying that. But when The Witch premiered in 2015 and even during its wide release in 2016, we were still partially riding the found footage wave that had kicked off with Paranormal Activity.
The Conjuring had come along to counterbalance the cheap, DIY efforts of found footage with the return of the polished, large-scale haunted house movie. Insidious and Sinister helped set up that success, feeling like expensive, high-brow paranormal pictures even if they were only made for a few million each. No matter the approach, everything was aimed at the same audience, everything was made for the same viewership, everything even operated on almost the exact same rhythm. No matter how it was presented, it was essentially all the same flavor, and by and large, that flavor was “palatable.”
Then, in 2016, there was The Witch. And I think if there’s a single film you could point to as the reason for the slow-burn, moody, achingly dramatic A24 horror that has driven the genre for the past decade, it’s this one. There were predecessors before and exceptions after, just as there had been for Scream, but this movie truly changed things. It made Anya Taylor-Joy and Robert Eggers household names. It shook up the entire landscape of horror and led to a wealth of exciting, risk-taking movies, all from filmmakers willing to take risks and investors who let them solely because this movie had taken those risks, and they had paid off.
The Witch is honestly not even a movie I ever thought I would write about. It’s not a film I revisit often. But it’s been on my mind lately, and I can’t shake it. If that’s not the mark of one of the greats, I don’t know what is. The film is set somewhere in New England in 1630. It follows a family who have been banished from their Puritan settlement following a religious dispute, and are now forced to fend for themselves. That’s where the horror of The Witch begins, for me. It’s before the film even starts. It’s the situation and the family to which we are introduced. This is the 1600s, the age and general area of the Witch Trials, when Puritans were literally bloodthirsty in their unimpeachable zealotry, and this is a family that was too puritanical for them. That is absolutely terrifying. The only thing that could be scarier would be to grow up as a young woman in that family and of course that is the reality for our protagonist, Thomasin.
Thomasin bears the brunt of responsibility for basically everything. She is both a farmhand and a mother to her younger siblings, while her parents mostly argue about whether or not they are going to starve to death, and to be fair they probably will. Thomasin’s time is limited, even compared to the others, even when stacked against the inciting incident of her baby brother Samuel disappearing on her watch by literally vanishing right in front of her. These woods belong to a witch. She has stolen and killed the baby. Thomasin had nothing to do with it, but of course, that will not stop her being blamed for it.
Everything that happens is her fault, in her parents’ eyes. A child is missing and presumed dead because she failed to look after him. And if that is witchcraft on her part, so is their failure to feed themselves, to keep themselves warm, to relate and commune with others, to be a family. That is what’s fascinating about the horror of this film and the witch’s role in it. This family was on a drastic descent the moment we met them. Thomasin was going to take the blame for all of it eventually. They are already looking to find a family to sell her to, anyone they can find, because they cannot afford to feed her. Because they cannot successfully live around other people, even in the age of puritans, there is no one to whom they can marry her off. And so these events, exactly as grim and as terrifyingly as they unfold, are the only version of this story in which Thomasin survives.
The witch coming into their lives, destroying the family, and Thomasin’s eventual succumbing to the Devil, if that’s where they believed her to be heading all along anyway, that’s better than starving to death. That’s better than being sold as slave labor. That’s better than being killed by her father if they couldn’t have found anyone to take her, which is probably the most likely outcome. Encountering the witch means the death and destruction of her entire family, but she did not kill them, she did not invoke it. It just happened. And in its happening, it is the only situation that would ever have allowed Thomasin her freedom. Something that, in that time and place, she would never have come by naturally, no matter what.
Everyone in this family grew up too fast. There is so little time to be a child, so growing up too fast is simply an unfortunate reality of the era, when day-to-day living means it’s all hands on deck to simply survive. The witch only highlights this. First, by snatching the youngest away in the literal blink of an eye. The witch appears to Caleb as a beautiful woman in a seemingly successful attempt to seduce him, but Caleb is just a boy. He is not yet a man, and this preying on and mockery of man’s weakness is a cruelty on her part, to twist his role as the “man of the house” and (beyond simply being a child predator) kill him with a glimpse of adulthood, twisting it, perverting it, and then leaving Caleb to die like so many children of the era: rapidly, from illness.
The voice of evil and temptation does not lie in the witch herself, but in the family’s goat, Black Philip. Crucially, Black Philip does not tempt Thomasin for the bulk of the movie, or even really at the end. It speaks to the other children, but never to her, and I think that’s because it (or the Devil, as it likely really is) knows from the beginning that she will come it when she is ready. It never needs to coerce her into anything the way it does the other children. At the end, it speaks to her when she demands it, and makes her the offer, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Knowing already what her answer will be, because it’s simply been biding its time, waiting for her to ask.
Through this action, Thomasin embarks on her path to freedom. She finds her voice by demanding Black Philip reveal his, and thus finds her agency in a world where she would never otherwise have it. The Witch is a terrifying movie, on a few different levels. The last thing you expect it to have is a happy ending, and it’s an ending you feel like you shouldn’t think of as happy, given the circumstances. But it is the only positive outcome it could have possibly had.
It is the only path to agency, freedom, and finally community, that its protagonist could ever have known. Thomasin’s family, as much as she loved them, held her down and it’s no secret that she was the only one they considered expendable. At the end, she is smiling not because she’s been driven mad, or succumbed to evil, she is smiling because she had become unburdened. No longer held down, she is free to fly.
