‘The Witch’ Proves Real Horror Still Possible (FILM REVIEW)

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Horror has never exactly been a genre into which studios devote much time, money, or energy. Studios know that the devotees of the genre will be there opening weekend, and they’ve developed a formula for ensuring the most financial success possible with a limited audience: make it as cheap as possible as easily as possible. To use two recent(ish) examples, The Gallows and The Forest both earned paltry box offices returns (in comparison to most movies these days) at around $43 million and $30 million (worldwide), respectively. Despite how awful both of those movie are, they’re now both considered successes because of the cost-profit margin of each (the former cost $100,000, the latter $10 million).

The percentage of the overall audience who goes to and enjoys a scary movie has more or less stagnated, and since they know that very few outside the base are going to care, and that horror has very little chance of impacting the larger trends that move the Hollywood system, they throw us their bones a few times a year and reap unfathomable profits off of unfathomable garbage because they know that we’ll accept it. We go see bullshit because it’s all we have; they release more bullshit because they know we will.

Critically, it’s hard to take. As a fan of horror, it’s maddening. Gone are the days of mood and atmosphere. Forward thinking originality has been usurped by copycatting and retreads. Horror is in a state of such sad disrepair that it is in desperate need of a movie that breaks the mold, that inspires a revolution against the status quo, that utterly changes the game so completely that the genre is saved from itself.

That movie might just be The Witch. It’s not only the best horror movie I’ve seen in the last year or two or even the last decade, it’s one of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen, period. The Witch is a powerful and unnerving reminder of what the genre can accomplish given creativity and, in a just world, will become a beacon for current and future makers of horror.

The Witch follows the travails of a Puritan family, exiled from the confines of their New England settlement due to, even by their standards, the rigidity of the family’s religious beliefs. The family’s patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson) leads his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and five children into the untamed wilds of western New England to build their new life. Things seem to go well for the family until the family’s youngest child is lost while under the care of eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). The disappearance is blamed on wolves, but slowly amongst the children rumors of a witch living in the woods near the homestead begin to circulate. The family soon descends into paranoia, with accusations of witchcraft thrown about with abandon, threatening to tear the family apart.

While those accustomed to the sensory overload of jump scares and hacked bodies might be turned off by the deliberately slow pace of The Witch’s first two acts, the thick churn of tension serves to lure the audience in to a world so full of dread and unknowns that the film’s impact lingers long after the lights have gone up and the audience has gone home. As unnerved as I was by the film watching it, the feeling grew larger the farther removed from the film I got, and hours later I found myself unable to think or talk about anything else.

Writer/director Robert Eggers accomplishes the near impossible with his artfully crafted telling of New England folklore; he’s created a film that takes horror back to basics. At its core, The Witch is less horror than it is a period piece, one focused solely on character. The thrills and chills and bloody violence that permeate modern horror have been abandoned for an unsettling vibe that increases slowly and steadily until the film’s horrifying conclusion. Eggers understands that horror is a genre that takes place mostly in the mind, and he lets the mind do most of the work here.

For much of the film, we see precious little evidence of any witch or witchcraft, and despite the evidence we do receive, the film maintains its focus not on its monster but on its cast. The Witch relies just as heavily on what we don’t see as it does on what we do in order to achieve its masterful tone, letting the mind fill in the gaps where it needs to and leaving us in a state of constant questioning. Eggers claims there are answers to all the questions the film leaves dangling, but the magic of The Witch is in what remains unsaid.

This stylistic choice creates of sepulcher of dread whose walls close in around the audience with every passing moment. While I can’t point out many moments that scared me outright, that’s never the point of the film. No, The Witch wishes more to get in your head, to make you think. The unsettling nature of the film claws its way into your brain like a time bomb that explodes in increments. It’s less about how scared you are right now than it is how uneasy you are later that night while your mind races.

Much of that is due to Eggers’ pitch perfect script, which draws heavily from traditional New England folklore and historical records from the period. However, the cast does a fantastic job recreating how life was led, down to the historical accents of the region and the traditional religious observations of the time. This is where The Witch finds much of its horror—the fear of Satan was real and ran deep at the time, and the Dark Lord’s presence looms over the characters and their situation whether or you see him or not.

It’s the unknown that drives the film, and it’s in the unknown that the true horror lies. How terrifying it must’ve been to be certain of an evil force dwelling just outside your home. How horrifying it might’ve been to discover your fears were founded. As the film’s major focal point, Taylor-Joy holds the project together with a skill of an actress twice her age. Her performance here is destined to become a classic in the annals of horror history. So, too, with Dickie, whose anguish over losing her baby to unknown forces creates much of the dread laced throughout the work.

The Witch is not only a revolutionary achievement, it’s a revelatory experience. For too long, horror fans have been given nothing but scraps to sate their desire for dread, and filmmakers have been fine delivering barrel scraping dregs that the fan base all too eagerly eats up. It’s as much their fault as ours—they’d stop making nonsense if we stopped lapping it up. With any luck, however, The Witch will usher in a new era of horror that finally puts to rest the god awful conventions to which we’ve become accustomed.

The Witch is now playing in theaters everywhere.

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