There’s a frightening sequence in The Witch that culminates with an itty-bitty crabapple. It’s disorienting in its sheer oddity, but there’s nothing especially horrifying about it. The Witch is a powerful horror movie because it doesn’t play to conventional expectations about the genre. Instead, the film focuses on what keeps its Calvinist colonists awake at night, their hardships, nightmares, and temptations wailing down through the centuries to our modern ears.
The Witch opens in a New England town with William (Ralph Ineson) berating the local Puritan council for being insufficiently Christian. He decides to leave the town with his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and their kids. Establishing their own farmstead alongside a dark wood soon tests the family’s mettle. Their crops fail, animal teats squirt blood, and a child is lost. A witch in the woods torments them (there is no question of her existence).
There is a great deal of comedy in the world that’s humorous, but not funny. These are old gags that once worked, but don’t anymore, like the banana peel or Adam Sandler. Activate neural pathways for humor now , these signals tell us, without earning an actual laugh. With horror those cues are similarly abundant and obvious: the scary kid, the dropped frames, the basement, the bathroom mirror and the long hallway. These are just some of the ways movies teach audiences when to be afraid, and how to time the rhythms of a scare.
The Witch is not devoid of horror cues, though it is more confidently crafted and composed than any horror movie this century. The woods are as scary today as they were then. The image of the goat as Satan’s herald is as resonant and unsettling today as it was in the past (if less novel). Yet in this film, what truly scares the shit out of William and Katherine is the prospect of their children’s happiness. They’re miserable Puritans, rife with religious and relational insecurities. In their minds idle play, songs and jokes all represent little cracks in a pious veneer, allowing Satan to slip in a gangrenous claw.
As viewers, we may not be afraid (at least not horror movie afraid) of our children’s licentiousness. A boy’s sexual awakening is not cause for terror. Young women acting out, exhibiting independent thought, perhaps even questioning their fathers… these are not the typical horror movie cues. Yet, it is difficult not to sympathize with William and Katherine.
The camera is often still and tight, leaving us uncomfortably close to their drawn faces, the nap of their fabric, and the perspiration on their brows. William, imagining himself pious, is quick to blame everyone but himself, scapegoating his own daughters. Katherine, meanwhile, hates what her life has been reduced to, resenting her children and husband for their ongoing failings.
All the while, the witch exploits their physical and emotional insecurities, turning them against each other. While their specific religious fears may not be entirely relatable for modern audiences, their befuddlement and anger at their circumstances proves consistently unnerving. Eventually, the moral order we expect from the family unit is entirely spoiled and turned against itself, their small frailties becoming soil for violence and destruction.
The Witch works because it doesn’t care what you are afraid of, it cares what terrifies these 17th century dingbats. And while the witch of The Witch has all the hallmarks of horror villainy, her moves against the family begin to feel less like torments and more like a referendum on their hypocrisy.
