A dreamy sequence in which a raven pecks at her bloodied breast straddles the line between fantasy and reality, just as Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) emerges from his own guilty traumas with a poisoned apple in his mouth – extraordinary but not quite conclusive. While the sounds of livestock and creaking gates blend with the wind to form Penderecki-esque night music, Kate Dickie’s bereaved, homesick mother Katherine personifies the down-to-earth derangement that feeds upon hunger, worry and loss. Just as the family are obsessed with the concept of sin (poor Caleb recounts his putrefaction by rote and anguishes about his lustfully hell-bound heart), so Eggers not so slyly suggests that such anxieties perversely invite horror into the home, where shadowy faces flicker in the firelight. Or does it? Despite this monstrous vision, it is still possible (and indeed preferable) to read The Witch as a story whose demons lurk largely within the mind. “We will conquer this wilderness, it will not consume us!” insists William as the camera creeps repetitively toward the Twin Peaks-like woods, but the film tells another story – the story of a demonic goat named Black Phillip that whispers to the children, and of shape-shifting hares (one of several inevitable echoes of The Wicker Man) that call this fracturing family to damnation.Īt first, Eggers favours the physical depiction of the family’s fear, a nightmarish early sequence of their child in the clutches of a haggard, ghoulish figure seeming to dispel any sense of ambiguity about the archetypal nature of this “evil”. What follows is a thematic mash-up of the European folk tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault (the figures of Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty loom large), the paranoid finger-pointing of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, the religious devotion of Dreyer’s Ordet and the historical detail of Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun. Eggers suggests that the family’s anxieties about the concept of sin perversely invite horror into the home It is into these woods that their youngest child will vanish, snatched by a spectral presence into a fairytale nightmare – an abyss of trees accompanied by a Ligeti-like wall of sound a choir of (in)human horror.

The discordant strains of Mark Korven’s score, a superbly evocative symphony of nyckelharpa strings and eerie scrapes, give way to an image of prostrate prayer, as father William (Ralph Ineson) leads his brood in face-down worship on the outskirts of an imposing wood.

The witch part 1 subversion discussion