(2016. dir: Robert Eggers) Over the long and fascinating course of horror film history, there have been moments in which the train jumps the track and flies off into a whole new territory, inspiring the whole industry as it goes. There was Hammer, there was Michael Reeves, there was Night of the Living Dead, etc. Today, we have England's Ben Wheatley, with his Field in England and Kill List, and now Eggers with the Witch, a great movie, and unlike anything else you've ever seen.
Did you ever read the testimony given at the Salem Witch Trials? As a kid I was flummoxed by it, wondering how anyone could take such absurdities, equal parts sensational and banal, as truth, even for a moment. From an older vantage point, it seems possible that this community, so rigid in its roles and behaviors, so fixated on righteousness and fear of God, tried for a moment to expand its consciousness, much as the "tune in, turn on, drop out" hippie-mystics would in the late sixties, by allowing for a vast, dark, fantastical realm bordering upon and touching its own, and from this exercise in mind-expansion finding a momentary respite from the drudgery and circumscription of everyday life. In other words, a community built around and focused on an absent God tried to experience the reality of Him by allowing for the physical manifestation of His opposite.
They market the Witch as a horror film, but that's only true in the sense that, say, 2001 is a science-fiction film. But that's misleading, too: 2001 is epic in scope, encompassing more than its genre had previously allowed, whereas the Witch is small, human, very nearly claustrophobic. It's as if you tuned into PBS to watch a very exact and painstaking reproduction of life in Puritan America, only to find that all those crazed stories from the later witch-trials (a man in black taking signatures in a nefarious book, devils in animal form, cursed goats giving blood instead of milk, witches smeared with the fat of infants dancing naked and flying through the night) were actually part of life.
Put it this way: think of the Shining, the Kubrick version. It is one of the best horror films ever made, utterly chilling every time you watch it, brilliantly made, but still it is unmistakably a horror film. It uses the tropes, the themes, the established customs: it's got the jump-scares, the creep-scares, the use of incongruous, eerie images, as well as the traditional pacing, starting slow and accelerating to a train-wreck at the climax. The Witch, on the other hand, uses none of these. Both pacing and camera remain slow and steady, like life back then, moving at a rate which might possibly drive some horror-fans bonkers. The dialogue sounds strange, using verbiage which strikes the modern ear as stilted, almost Shakespearean, but which the actors carry off with grand aplomb. It's an achievement all the more admirable because the tiny cast -- a family of seven, exiled from the community, -- is half child-actors, one of whom (Harvey Scrimshaw as the just-pubescent Caleb) carries a daunting role, a role that might foil many an older actor.
And, ye gods, the use of music. It's as bold as Wheatley's in A Field in England or Anderson's in There Will Be Blood, setting a particular and unsettling tone without mucking down in the slough of the overweening.
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