The Witch (A24, 2015)
The Witch is not so much horrifying in its visual content as it is in its evocative ability to convincingly bring forth a historic space in which the ideology of the American frontier percolates so violently with the Western concept of the religious sublime. Steeped in its historical parlance and rigor, The Witch brings one to the epistemic environment of intense anxiety in which such terrifying potentialities could have been brought into common existence. Because of this, The Witch is unflinching, albeit heavy-handed, in its desire to posit such an encounter of rampant ideologies as the root cause of the horrific intracultural and intra-familial violence that took place amongst the early moments of North America’s colonization. It is firstly sincere, therefore, in its attention to historic detail. However, progressively, this sincerity extends to the emotional, corporeal, and moral anxieties that beset such a historical period.
The Witch follows William (Ralph Ineson), Katherine (Kate Dickie), and their children Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), the twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), as well as their infant child Samuel (Athan Conrad Dube), as they are plunged into isolation following William’s exile from their seventeenth-century New England Puritan settlement after his rejection of the Church’s diluted interpretation of scripture. Despite such condemnation, the family vigorously set forth, breaking ground at the forest’s edge whilst vowing to “conquer this wilderness.” However, they are immediately tormented by horrors that threaten not only their physical existence, but their ardent piety.
William and Katherine’s children begin to disappear and perish, falling prey to what they believe to be a woodland witch. This tears the familial unit apart, and Katherine and William seem to grow afeared of Thomasin as they believe her to be in league with the Devil. After Caleb’s violent death, William seals Thomasin, Jonas, and Mercy inside their goat-pen. He awakes in the morning to find Thomasin drenched in blood and surrounded by the bodies of goats whilst the young fraternal twins are nowhere to be seen. As he stands in shock, he is gored to death by Black Phillip, the ram upon the farm, and as Katherine emerges from the meager house, charging Thomasin in anger and disgust, she is killed by Thomasin in self-defense. Distraught and desperate, Thomasin attempts to speak to Black Phillip as she believes him to be the conduit of Satan. A cloaked man appears and whispers in response, instructing Thomasin to sign her name within his book. As she does, she is led into the woods with Black Phillip following closely behind.
Such a terrible series of events begins when the dogmatic realities of William and Kate, though stoic and unflinching in faith, are pierced and rendered unstable as Samuel, their newborn son, impossibly disappears during a game of peekaboo with Thomasin. The only thing, we later learn, that could have stolen Samuel away is the witch residing in the woods beside the farmstead. As the secluded family attempt to rationalize the disappearance of Samuel, repeatedly suggesting that he was snatched by an opportunistic wolf, the reverberating presence of the witch seems to infiltrate all of their waking and unconscious hours. Even the “Godly land” of the farmstead seems repulsed by the witch’s presence. William’s crop of corn fails, succumbing to what we can assume to be the condemning rot of ergot: the infection of corn which turns the grain into a potent psychedelic hallucinogen as well as a deadly pathogen once imbibed, and which is precariously accepted as the precursor for the pervasive witch trials that occurred throughout seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England.
The Witch (A24, 2015)
Jonas and Mercy, the young fraternal twins, are also seen to reciprocally converse with the he-goat known as Black Phillip; he who gradually assumes the guise of the conduit of Satan. Alongside this quivering presumption, and in response to potential starvation, the young Caleb ventures into the woods in search of game. Alone and afeared, he is lured into the embrace of the woodland witch as she appears youthful and pristine. Caleb returns that eve with lacerations upon his body, lingering on the verge of consciousness. He dies the following day, belching forth a rotten apple from his esophagus, after proclaiming his love for Jesus whilst his family pray vehemently at the side of his bed. The violent death of Caleb only acts to exacerbate the family’s internal sundering. Satan, “the wicked one,” is now not just seen in Black Phillip; he is seen in Thomasin, the infantile twins, and the lingering shadows about the forest edge.
These oscillating anxieties of The Witch are not simply communicated narratively, however, but cinematically. The camera continually moves fluidly throughout the profilmic world, visualizing cinematic space through the distinctly nonhuman apparatus of the Steadicam. The free-moving nonhuman camera, as it resists the desire to be situated within the body of any one character, therefore suggests the existence of an external being, though one who is continually present in the diegesis. Such a modality of the camera draws us not only to the isolation of The Witch’s characters, as we are not allowed to subjectively become a part of their individual worlds, but also to the existence of other proximal beings existing intimately.
Alongside such an anxious visuality, the audible soundscape of The Witch operates along a similar dialectic. In achieving this, The Witch‘s audioscape becomes less a cinematic soundtrack than the Nietzschean musicality of tragedy. The orchestral cacophony of wailing women that becomes the motif of the forest brings us repeatedly to Nietzsche’s notion of the affects of that music which is Dionysian in intent: formless and fervent without recourse to structured language, giving away instead to audible abandon. The presence of such a Dionysian soundscape, occurring firstly when the camera captures the sublime expanse of the forest, finds its textual anchor in the closing sequence of The Witch where a coven of witches maniacally gesticulates amongst the boughs of the midnight forest.
Inherently, though, the attraction of The Witch is drawn from its existence within the somewhat catch-all genre of horror. However, though we are presented with horrific images in Samuel’s death, or Katherine’s descent into madness, it is the ways in which these images interact with the palpable presence of anxiety that slithers its way across the bodies of humans and throughout the recesses of the woods that gives rise to the umbrous specter of fear and revulsion.
The Witch (A24, 2015)
It is this thought that turns me back to my opening statement: The Witch is not so horrible in its surface content, but in its ability to eloquently present the intertwined ideologies that gave rise to such events within a historic environment. Though greatly disturbing, the horror of The Witch is not truly felt in the flaccid body of the decrepit woodland woman, but in those moments where father strikes daughter, or daughter murders mother, because the perceptible though impossible presence of Satan is seen within their tainted souls. This historio-religious anxiety is also experienced in those moments where the camera frames the nonhuman forest as if it was a singular being capable of outward communication. We repeatedly look upon that distinctly sublime face of nature as William does; though, where William sees God amongst the trees, we see Satan.
Therefore, The Witch, through its reserved claims to history, lets us glimpse and comprehend those physical and mental movements that brought people into contact with those beings they called either God or Satan. As such The Witch, as we closely shadow the Puritanical family through their personal piety to their epistemic collapse, brings us to, and immerses us in, that environment where fear and terror truly begin.
Author Biography
Chris Dymond is a student at Queen Mary University of London. He greatly admires those individuals that made up the second-wave of American Avant-Garde film, as well as those who became the North American Structural/Materialists.
Film Details
The Witch (2015)
USA
Director Robert Eggers
Runtime 93 minutes
