“This film was inspired by many folktales, fairytales, and written accounts of historical witchcraft, including journals, diaries, and court records. Much of the dialogue comes directly from these period sources.” (1:28:10).
- 1 Richard Ruland and Malcom Bradbury, From Puritanism to Postmodernism (New York: Penguin Books, 1992 (...)
1The Witch’s alignment to the Puritan history, notably Calvinist belief system, is rendered through many of the film’s aspects. Details, costumes, settings, the actors’ embodiments, the language, the naturalistic portrayal of their everyday ascetic routine and the exploration of their Puritan mindset have allowed the film to anchor its historical setting with credibility. However, this accuracy rapidly strays away from conventional Puritan literature whose advertising mission gave “positive shape and design to the daily events of New England”1. Far from the traditional plot in which God guides the protagonists into his Kingdom, this article will point out the ways in which the film wishes to bend Puritan’s myth through the hybridization of genres, notably the American Gothic genre. By setting ablaze the family’s faith and fate, the film turns into the stage of the parents’ quintessential fears of corruption embedded in their notion of inherent sin.
2This article aims to explore the ways in which the film shapes the family’s fears of corruption. This article will take into consideration writings evolving around Puritan’s theology and myth. To better ground my research, the works of Carol J. Clover and Tony Williams will help me underline the revisited tropes found in both American Gothic and American horror film while Martine Beugnet’s and Laura Marks’s haptic and aesthetic concerns will guide me through the exploration of the film’s visuals. In order to identify the ways in which corruption permeates the film, this article will explore the tryptic sources of corruption present in the film. The first part will focus on Puritan primal fear taking roots in wilderness, mediating horror through its landscape and primal elements. The second part will examine the issue of gender through women’s temptation and emancipation, and the last part will expose the sensuous corruption pervading the physicality of the film itself.
- 2 Ruland and Bradbury, From Puritanism to Postmodernism, 9.
3Throughout the film, Puritan imagery is particularly present, relayed through Biblical references. Dialogues as well as the film’s iconography contribute to the family’s fanatic vision of the world. For the Puritans, the tale was “a religious one of travail and wandering, with the Lord's guidance, in quest of a high purpose”2. William (Ralph Ineson), in his obsessive quest for spirituality but also pride, leads his family to exile, by refusing to abide by the community’s religious values, deemed unworthy and corrupted. Having arrived in their soon to be home, Katherine (Kate Dickie), and William, full of hope, are unbothered by the flies swarming around their smiling faces as they rejoice at the vision of their own earthly heaven, their promised manmade Eden (figure 1). The family is depicted as a stereotype of Protestant settlers in North America—with a Christlike, devout, hard-working father at its head—striving for survival and yearning for humility (figure 2). However, this desire to settle and thrive on this land, emanating from a human-centered perspective, is countered by a strategic camera pan into the woods. The wilderness imbues the woods with a sense of sharpness, foretelling danger. The echoes of an eerie gospel accompany the camera movement, as if the family’s hopes and bodies were to be engulfed by an abyss-like wilderness, figuratively cutting off their world from civilization.
Figure 1
The family kneels before their home to be. 00:04:15
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
Figure 2
The family gathers and prays before super 00:27:32
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
- 3 Joseph Des Jardins, Environmental Ethics (Boston: Cengage, 2012).
- 4 The Gospel According to Matthew: Authorized King James Version (New York: Grove Press, 1999), Matt. (...)
- 5 Andreea Poenaru, “The New England Wilderness Between Myth and Paradox,” Analele Universităţii Ovi (...)
- 6 T.F. Hoad, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford and New York: Oxford Uni (...)
- 7 Elizabeth Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic (London: Palgrave Gothic, 2020).
- 8 John S. Hardt, “Doubts in the American Garden: Three Cases of Paradisal Skepticism,” Studies in Sho (...)
4According to DesJardins, the wilderness was also the “Devil’s den.”3 While nature could offer paradise as a sacred virgin land, paradoxically, it could also test humanity’s faith through corruption. Katherine reminds her husband: “Was not Christ led into the wilderness to be ill met by the devil?” (00:32:33)4. As Poenaru argues in her essay “The New England Wilderness Between Myth and Paradox”: “The experiences of the wilderness were conceived as Armageddon. The walk in this Eden was continuously endangered by Satan’s interference, by the possibility of backsliding, a second fall that would transform Paradise regained into Paradise lost.”5 The wilderness’s subversive ability is thus recognized as the family draws a geopolitical line between their settlement and the forbidden woods. William promises his son Caleb that they will prevail: “We will conquer this wilderness…it will not consume us.” The family combats nature’s agency, which repudiates any possibility of a utopic haven. The use of the verb “consume”6 is interesting as it is defined primarily as a way “to destroy by use, wear out by applying to its natural or intended use.” Consume becomes a synonym for corrupt as they both highlight a somewhat fated and fatal attraction to self-alteration. The empathy in portraying Puritan characters is met by the callousness in bringing disillusion to their calling. Puritan’s dichotomic and ambivalent relationship with nature takes in the film a dark turn. By directing human fears towards an eerie setting both alluring and terrifying, the film’s aesthetic shapes the diegetic rural world into an ecogothic vision of wilderness defined by Elizabeth Parker7 as « the darker sides of our relationships to Nature and its shadowy underbelly ». Katherine warns her husband: “You cannot escape the wood!” (00:44:44). Much like Hawthorne’s American Gothic short-story Young Goodman Brown, the forest becomes a labyrinth in which one’s journey is one of irrevocable temptation. Thus, the film’s gothic imagining leads to paradise scepticism8. The family’s idealization of this “godly land” dreamed by William mutates into a vivid hell.
- 9 Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York and London: Rou (...)
5The characters’ aversion and fear of the wilderness is repeatedly emphasized by their inability to make sense of the misfortunes and calamities they must face. A “biophobia” emerges as they come to identify nature as malevolent. Their fears gain a presence and somehow a corporal entity by spreading into the territory. “What is amiss on this farm? It is not natural” (00:30:00) concludes Katherine after Caleb’s loss. The interrogation highlights the way the family shapes an identified evil into an undefined object. Tragedies stalk the family; baby Samuel and Caleb disappear, chicks are stillborn, milk turns into blood and crops, possibly infested with an unfamiliar disease become insufficient, while the animals’ behaviors raise suspicions (figure 3). As malformity, decay, blood, horror punctually surface the bleak visuals of the film, the spectator’s sense of the atmosphere becomes tinted as well. Carolyn Merchant links together the Genesis and its ecological dimension by arguing that “the fall from Eden introduced decay into the human body, or microcosm, which in turn produced corruption in the larger world, or macrocosm. The decay of nature was evidenced by the decline of fish in the seas, infertility in the soils, and corruption in the heavens themselves”9. One of the promotional posters of The Witch shapes the chimney’s smoke into Black Phillip (figure 4), the family’s goat. While animality is perceived as dangerous, shady, and ubiquitous, a deadly poison seems to pervade the air and earth and all its organic elements. Insidious and omnipresent, corruption is imagined as an infectious virus capable of contaminating the soil, polluting the air, and possessing bodies.
Figure 3.1, 3.2, 3.3
Tryptic of unnatural phenomena (00:17:50, 00:37:37, 00:49:40)
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
Figure 4
Smoke shapes into Black Phillip in promotional poster of The Witch
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
- 10 Saige Walton, “Air, Atmosphere, Environment: Film Mood, Folk Horror and The Witch,” Screening the P (...)
6Drawing on the German concept of Stimmung (meaning: mood or attunement) and on Bachelard’s philosophical work on landscape and its non-human materiality and sensuality, Saige Walton argues that within the film “Moods flow and suffuse, moving in and out of visibility, like currents of air.”10, thus marking the many ways in which horror but also corruption is disseminated in aerial and organic terms. The film’s atmosphere is charged and tense as the family continuously struggles with invisibility. The camera along with the sound implement this intentional and unsettling pull to the void and to the off-screen. The leitmotiv of crescendo and bewitching vocals—reminiscent of mythological sirens’ callings—accompanies the camera’s panning, brushing upon the forest’s belt. Low musical notes often juxtapose plunging camera movements into darkness’s depth. Whenever a protagonist penetrates the forest, a piercing musical chord seems to abruptly jerk, causing a disruption of the musical homogeneous flow but also forwarding within the narrative, the encroaching of a dangerous zone. When Caleb sinks into the heart of the woods for instance, Kovern’s music entitled “Caleb’s seduction” is grating, metallic and shrill while the camera, instead of following him, first abandons him to his vain pursuit by slowing zooming out and backing out from the danger (figure 5). In the imminence of meeting the witch, the music shifts into a feminine vocal humming leaning towards a welcoming sensuality. Thanks to these techniques, the spectator is offered glimpses of concealed mysteries. However, the invitation often remains restrained to the thresholds of undisclosed and hidden spheres of dreadful reality.
Figure 5
Caleb enters the forest 00:39:40
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
- 11 Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny],” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological W (...)
7When Caleb resurfaces, his mind seems to have been wrenched away from him. Roaming around naked, he is looked after in the barn’s attic. Underneath the latter’s triangular shape, Caleb lies. The framing of the scene calls onto the religious symbolic of the triangular shape connoting enlightenment and spiritual awakening. Caleb wakes into a feverish deliriousness manifested by a tortuous trance, urging his family in a solemn tone, to cut the witch’s head off. The parents notice his respiratory tract hindered and mouth sealed up by something. Once his head is lifted and his teeth are unclenched, Caleb spews an apple rolling on the floor. The camera focuses on the apple to better emphasize its unnatural expulsion and sudden intrusion within the household. The film is reminiscent of Jan van Eyck’s attention to domestic details as well as Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve. Familiar objects such as an apple, a candlelight or a cob of corn are donned with an unfamiliarity drawing into Freud’s Das Unheimliche11. Endowed by unnatural and double displacement—corporal and symbolic—, an object as trivial as an apple becomes the symbolic and troubling return of the repressed. Hence, the spit apple represents both the sadistic materialization of Caleb’s sins and the ultimate reminder of Eden’s object of desire and corruption (figure 6 and 7).
8As Caleb draws his dying breath, the oxygen he lacks seems to have been polluted by a floating aura of evil passing through his abdomen. “She’s upon me, my bowls, my stomach (…) She’s here” cries Caleb, so that we come to trace the witch’s invisible presence within his corporality to be exhaled into thin air. Next, the twins enter a state of epileptic seizure; duplicating Samuel’s words and possession state as if afflicted in their turn by Caleb’s bewitching. Ensuing concomitantly the theory that the air itself has been defiled as the medium of evil’s hegemony, Caleb’s vivid visions of terror are finally supervened by a final sight of religious salvation that allows him to reach Christ’s embrace. As the camera moves the input focus away from Caleb, it bounces back to capture his family’s reaction. Bafflement and pain are quickly followed by the necessity of blaming Thomasin. Figuratively speaking, within the ecosystem pertained by their diegesis and thanks to the triadic relationship visually enforced in this scene, the family comes to be identified as a component of an organic cycle in motion. Evil penetrates nature and its elements, which in turn, are assimilated by the family. The parents’ suspicions are directed foremost towards their oldest daughter as she is believed to be highly corruptible.
Figure 6 and 7
Caleb’s death 00:54:25
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
- 12 Jean Calvin and Henry Beveridge, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Eerd (...)
- 13 Catherine Armstrong, Landscape, and Identity in North America’s Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745(...)
- 14 Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Madison NJ: Fairleigh D (...)
9Although the object of fear is primarily defined as the proximate woods, its roots appear to trace back to the settlers’ own corporality and psyches. Caleb recites to his father, “Adam’s sin imputed to me a corrupt nature dwelling in me…empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin and that continually” (00:15:01). The recurrent confessions and binary spirituality stress the family’s fragile moral compass. Calvinism believes human beings to be wholly depraved and their sinful condition, to be hereditary. “Before God, of course, we are miserable sinners; in men's eyes most despised-(…) [cf. I Cor. 4:13]”12. William strives to stand as the pillar of piety by constantly reminding and teaching his children to curb their own desires. Although the cause of the family’s banishment remains unknown, the opening scene begins with William defying and rejecting the panel of Puritan judges. “I cannot be judged by false Christians” (00:02:00) claims William as his raspy voice anchors his commanding and self-proclaimed wisdom. However, as tragedies accumulate, the family becomes paranoid and aggravates William’s Manichean vision of life dividing the world between righteousness and sin. By projecting evil onto the void of nature, the family converts the wilderness into an outlet for their vices, failings, and vulnerability. American mythology grounds itself upon an ideology of European conquest which perceived the land as a space to be conquered so that one could be reborn and renewed. Catherine Armstrong argues that “America also fulfilled the primordial urge to find an ideal place, a retreat, and a sanctuary and to define it as something new: according to Marx an impulse present from Columbus onwards. However, the colonial American landscape also represented something hideous and frightening and, in many examples of the literature, attraction and revulsion are present in equal measure.”13 Wilderness becomes defined as a diabolical but also as a tempting nucleus, a trope that is for instance found within American Gothic motifs as in Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. The symbolic battle between the settler and the wilderness takes within both Young Goodman Brown and the film a fantastic and Gothic aspect as it becomes intertwined with the folkloric tales. Tony Williams explains that “derived from Puritan traditions, Gothic motifs find their way into American literature. In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, the title character travels into a dark forest. He projects paranoid tendencies onto this landscape that originate from his unwillingness to acknowledge his wife's sexual desires. This mode of repression parallels similar psychic mechanisms within westerns and horror films whereby the wilderness functions as a displacement mechanism'”14. Throughout the film, William struggles to regain a sense of power but perhaps also revenge against wilderness itself by chopping down wood. Unnecessary piles heap up and, in the end, his hubris meets diffidence, and he realizes not only that he was incapable of preventing the corruption of his family’s integrity but also that he played a role in that corruption himself. “Corruption, thou art my father!” states William by finally welcoming Black Phillip’s deadly assault:
WILLIAM: I confess it. I confess it!!
He scoops up a hand full of earth and holds it tight in his fist. He looks to heaven:
WILLIAM (CONT’D): O my God, I am false. I am bemired with the filth of pride. I am. I know it. Dispose of me as thou wilt, yet redeem my children.
They cannot tame their natural evils.
WILLIAM (CONT’D): I lie before thee a coward and thine enemy and lick the dust of thy earth.
William brings the fist of dirt to his mouth... and swallows it. He takes another handful...
WILLIAM (CONT’D): I beg thee wash them clean in thy blood. I beg thee my Christ... save my children. Save them. I beg thee... (1:09:25)
10By attributing dirt to God’s making “dust of thy earth”, William assigns dirt as an allocation of God’s presence on earth and by digesting it, attempts a humble cleansing gesture. This almost punitive system is a showcase of William’s lonesome recourse, extending solely towards God’s grace. Feeling as if forsaken by God and exposed to Satan, the family increasingly delves into fear, madness and gives in to the pull of violence. The film becomes an expelling and lethal matrix in which the family’s drives resurface. Slowly but surely, the hardships impeding the family’s salvation expose the family’s righteousness as hypocritical. Thomasin’s hidden desires, Caleb’s lies and lust, Mercy and Jonas’s blasphemies and intimacy with Black Phillip, Katherine’s cruelty and materialism, and William’s weakness and ego are all revealed. In one of the most climatic scenes of the film, when Katherine finds her daughter next to her dead husband, she lashes out instantly at Thomasin. She yanks her head by violently grabbing her hair and accuses her of being an incestuous promiscuous scarlet woman: “The devil is in thee and hath had thee, you are smeared of his sin, you reek of evil, you bewitched thy brother you proud slut!” (Figure 8). Katherine’s internalized misogyny and hatred towards her daughter is now untethered from William’s channeling and reasoning. Passions are unleashed.
Figure 8
Katherine attacks Thomasin (1:17:32)
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
11The film’s narrative leads the family’s expectation of the promised land, embedded in the colonists’ imagery of the northern American territory, to rapidly crumble. The Puritan’s tale has been perverted, its Eden poisoned, and its chosen people corrupted. The family is trapped by their own disavowed desires, which they exude from their every pore. Amid this moral depravation, it is womanhood that stands most liable to corruption as it crystallizes around the figure of the witch-to-be, Thomasin.
- 15 Andy Crump, “‘An Inherited Nightmare’, Writer-director Robert Eggers and actress Anya Taylor-Joy ta (...)
12The Witch is marked by its ambiguity regarding its protagonist Thomasin15. The camera’s preferential choice of focus and framing lies with Thomasin. Close-ups frames often capture Thomasin’s lunar and juvenile face contrasting with her worrisome expressions or reactions. The spectator often shares and lingers on Thomasin’s point of view as the camera follows her closely through her dimly-lit treading in her surroundings and apprehensive discoveries. The film’s deliberate dubiety paradoxically invites the spectator to side with the protagonist and objectively witness her innocence and yet tacitly recognize her ambivalence. Her righteousness is ambiguous from the film’s opening close-up as she confesses to God, “having broken every one of thy commandments in thought” (figure 8).
THOMASIN: O most merciful father: I here confess I have lived in sin. I have been idle of my work, disobedient of mine parents, neglectful of my prayer. I have, in secret, played upon thy sabbath and broken every one of thy commandments in thought... followed the desires of my own will, and not the holy Spirit. I know I deserve all shame and misery in this life, and everlasting hellfire. But I beg thee, for the sake of thy Son. Forgive me. Show me mercy. Show me thy light. (00:05:10)
Figure 9
Thomasin’s close-up (00:05:10)
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
- 16 John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and Culture in Early New England (New York and Ox (...)
- 17 Broedel, Hans Peter, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popul (...)
- 18 Heinrich Institoris, et al, Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
13According to John Demos, an early warning sign of witchery was in fact a woman becoming “anxiously preoccupied with her spiritual condition.”16 The film seems to explore misogynistic beliefs such as those found in the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, known as the founding guidebook for the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which arguments of woman’s propensity to evil abound. Throughout this treatise, a woman is portrayed as a weak and yet dangerous creature, an evil thinker driven by her insatiable ambitions17. From this perspective, women, unchanneled by an ecclesiastic or patriarchal order, become mouthpieces of Satan and agents of the apocalypse causing the downfall of men: “If we inquire, we find that nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women.”18 The book notably heavily relies on the Bible to point out the inherent evil of women:
- 19 Institoris, et al, Malleus Maleficarum.
Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. (…) He concludes: All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John Chrysostom says on the text, it is not good to marry (S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours! (…) And the tears of woman are a deception, for they may spring from true grief, or they may be a snare. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.19
- 20 Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (Oxfor (...)
- 21 Geoffrey Scarre, Witchcraft and Magic in 16th and 17th Century Europe (London: Red Globe Press, 198 (...)
14Thomasin is outcast from her own family following that same logic. Because of her becoming a woman, Thomasin is believed to be bound to stray and be tempted by the devil. Neighborhood women whose domestic affairs or exchanges did not follow the regulated feminine behavior of the times quickly fell under suspicions20. Hence, people were led to believe that the destruction of property, crops and health came from a witch's hands21. Unlike community-oriented tales, the film accentuates the family’s downfall in an isolated environment. By doing so, scapegoating is internal. Both Thomasin’s gender and her puberty become problematic and lead her to lose her family’s trust by correlating them to the unexplained mysteries. Thomasin strives to gain her family’s trust back in vain, notably by volunteering to help her mother and taking care of her siblings.
- 22 The Wonderful Discoveries of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Philippa Flower, 1619, Digital Witchcr (...)
- 23 Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, (...)
15The Puritan gender division and domestic roles attest to Eggers’s historical exploration of the 17th century. Left in charge of the domestic role in enduring times, women had to be alert. Labor is divided by gender so that while William and Caleb try to hunt, Katherine and Thomasin oversee the wild stock and the household chores. As social and gender hierarchies were naturally interlinked, the witch trials reflected the domestic pressure upon women. Katherine’s anxiety and questioning of the whereabouts of her valuable properties further underscore her role as vigilante but also her materialistic propensity. Among the similarities in the testimonies attesting to Satan’s attempt at bribing or corrupting them, women notably spoke of the wonderful things he could offer them, such as “coins, gold, butter”22. Food and personal objects became bribing materials for women who daily strove to keep their families alive. Within the diegesis of the film, Thomasin and her mother are portrayed as figures of nostalgia and desires. Her mother cries to her husband about her need to go back to England while Thomasin tries to make her brother recall the “pretty glass window” they had back home. Their need for comfort and beautiful things is for instance symbolized in the mother’s missing silver cup. This worldly concern reverberates in the most vocalized corruption, by the ending of the film, when Satan himself in human form asks Thomasin, “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”. The devil promises these things to lure Thomasin to the witches’ coven. Eggers, once again faithful to popular and historical folklore, portrays the devil as a substitutional provider. “Often the demon gives the woman a token, frequently some money, symbolizing the stream of money he will supply as a husband”23. Roper demonstrates the tell-tale of the economic trade embedded in this relationship from testimonies of the 16th century:
- 24 Roper, Witch Craze, 49.
In 1595, Gertrauta Conrad from the village of Ober Wittighausen, widow of Killian Conrad, confessed how the Devil had come to her dressed ‘in a black hat with a black feather, during the day on her meadow’. He had demanded that she should do his will, and she had acceded, the first time in her chamber, the second in her kitchen in a corner. His sexual organ was cold. He had given her 15 shillings, half a batzen and three kreuzer, which she kept in a corner in an old butter churn, and her servants knew nothing about it”24
- 25 Keith Booker and Elisabete Lopes, “From Calvinism to Consumerism: The Persistence of Patriarchy in (...)
- 26 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001).
- 27 Andy Crump, “’An Inherited Nightmare’ Writer-director Robert Eggers and actress Anya Taylor-Joy tal (...)
16By drawing a parallel on America’s foundation as a capitalist society, Booker and Elisabete point out that “the pleasures that Black Phillip offers (…) which the New England Puritans would see as Satanic licentiousness, suggests a masculinist capitalism and a feminist sensuousness as two possible historical directions that American history might have taken to get beyond the impasse of Puritan asceticism.”25. Thomasin in that case may very well be the incarnation of America’s preference grounded in paradoxical Puritan characteristics. A fundamental choice leaning towards wealth and success26 rather than its rigid self-denying ideology. Eggers has called The Witch “an inherited nightmare”27, which arguably could inscribe his work as a legacy of American Gothic but also as a political critique of the American’s history as a nation.
17The devil appears through a mirage of Katherine’s deceased children. Caleb appears holding both baby Samuel and the silver cup, both representing the very objects of longing her husband had forsaken. However, cut off from sanity, the mother is not interested in signing the devil’s book and is left with a raven pecking at her breast instead of suckling baby Samuel (figure 9). The devil never appears to men—he seeks women for their potential to be witches. A dichotomic world is thus revealed, dividing the world into two gendered paths. On the one hand, starvation, loneliness, dissatisfaction, labor, and loss fill the father’s world. On the other hand, Satan and his minions’ promise of a hedonistic life filled with comfort, possibilities, and pleasure, uncompromised by a moralistic ethic. Witchhood awaits Thomasin. By signing the devil’s book, an alternative is offered as a retribution to women.
Figure 10
Katherine pecked at by a raven (1:13:59)
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
- 28 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film Feminism Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge 1993), 57.
- 29 Franck Collard, « Veneficiis vel maleficiis » Le Moyen Âge cix, no. 1 (2003): 9-57.
- 30 Kaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesot (...)
- 31 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)
- 32 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 57.
- 33 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 57.
18Thus, inward and outward pressure target and push Thomasin to her “fated” design. Whatever she touches perishes and predicts her downfall as a daughter of Eve. Her baby brother is taken away while she is playing with him, her dreams seem infested with strange desires, and under her supervision, an egg breaks into an unborn fetus and milk turns to blood. Milk and blood convey from early the reversal of norms and expectations and the rising notion of the abject as Creed clarifies: “One of the strongest of food taboos relates to the ancient imperative that blood and milk should be kept separate. According to Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk (…) the idea of blood/semen/milk […] becomes a particularly abject act in relation to the biblical taboos on mixing blood and milk”.28 Evil speaks to Thomasin through uncanny details and phenomena, and maleficiums29, known in folklore as evil deeds originating from witchcraft. Her encounter with the disruptive hunted hare, for instance, is far from trivial as its sudden presence offers a point of convergence towards fictionality and biblical legacy as it reminisces of Eve and the Snake’s relationship. In a peculiar way, although stripped away from human values, the wilderness ecosystem appears to be gazing back at its newcomers with some sort of knowledge, anticipation, and intention. To a certain extent, we come to understand that Eggers’ film allows animals to gain higher status than they are given. They cannot be merely hunted or used as they are granted similar presence and values as in fables to the point of figuring a tryptic of promotional posters (figure 10). They seem to carry within them messages and the opportunity to go beyond nature, conventions, and expectations. At this junction of humanity and nature stands Thomasin’s awakening womanhood. Women and nature’s convergence is relegated by their “otherness,” and reunited by language and images (such as “mother-earth”); their constant relegations by patriarchy parallel one another, or merge. Klaus Theweleit states: “Femininity in particular, has retained a special malleability under patriarchy, (…) women have always remained objects and raw materials, pieces of nature awaiting socialization.”30 Womanhood in the film threatens the nuclear family by representing a potential transgression of liminality. The camera’s movements serve this very purpose of marginalizing the figure into the borders of the forest and the off-screen while editing contributes thanks to progressive enclosing photograms to delve into her sacrilegious territory. The titular witch and Thomasin form part of the “in-between, the ambiguous, the composite, highlighting the disruptive, liminal nature of the abject that disturbs identity, system, order” as defined by Julia Kristeva in her theory of the abject31. Creed on this given subject adds: “Abject things are those that highlight the ‘fragility of the law’ and that exist on the other side of the border which separates out the living subject from that which threatens its extinction”32. The forest serves that very purpose of protecting and separating the witch from civilization while enabling the foregather between animality and witchcraft. The film’s promotional posters foreground its triadic animalistic presence to better convey the link between the title and the witch’s familiars. Hence, the witch’s three-fold representational intimation functions as connotation of her ability to morph into animals and transgress human corporality. When Caleb shouts in pain, “It’s her! A toad. A cat. A crow. A raven. A great black dog, a wolf. (…) They feed upon her teats, her nether parts,” the witch is portrayed as a fragmented entity, completed by external creatures emanating from the fauna. Her ability to be “fed upon” connotes her organic features as well as her fusion with nature. A sense of kinship emanates from this relationship between wildlife and witches, alluding to pre-Oedipal motherhood. The witch becomes part of the “Were-creatures, whose bodies signify a collapse of the boundaries between human and animal”33 that Creed analyzes. As they unite, they are but one unholy body.
Figure 11
Promotional posters
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
- 34 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 191.
- 35 Carol J. Clover. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton (...)
- 36 Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, 214.
19Thomasin’s isolation, persecution and scapegoating by her own family has demonstrated the Puritan perspective of women as an untrustworthy weaker sex, easily lured by the devil. The portrayal of Thomasin aligns with the Puritans’ patriarchal perspective and sexual differentiation. Thomasin’s blossoming womanhood and thus maturing body, hinted by her brother’s lingering gazes upon her cleavage, becomes a source of mistrust, a disruptive element, and an object of temptation. For that very reason, Katherine seeks her daughter’s removal: “Our daughter hath begat the sign of her womanhood, she must leave to serve another family” (00:33:18) and underlines the need for the family’s threat to be jettisoned. The American horror film whose roots originate in the Gothic genre is revisited again through the family’s religious angst and disunity—especially between Thomasin and her mother. The convergence of the supernatural and puberty but also conflicting and guilty motherhood remind us for instance of Brian DePalma’s horror film Carrie. Carrie’s mother, Margaret compounds both William’s Christian fanatism and Katherine’s misogynistic neurosis towards her daughter. Ultimately Katherine and Margaret’s violent outbursts demonstrate the inability to process their daughters’ growth into womanhood and her acquirement of sexual potentiality. Throughout the film, Thomasin’s mother is quick to ostracize and blame her daughter for the family’s break-up while she progressively discloses her inner debilitating fears of being betrayed by Thomasin’s rising seductive appeal. She first blames her for stealing her silver cup and attempts to expel her from the house “William! Our daughter hath begat the sign of her womanhood (…) She’s old enough, she needs must leave to serve another family.” (00:33:00) In her attempt to kill her, she vocalizes this internalized hate: “Did you not think I saw thy sluttish looks to him bewitching his eye as any whore? And thy father next!” (1:17:56). Carrie and Thomasin are both professed “witches” by their mothers, their monstrosity must be exterminated: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” claims a self-composed Margaret while an infuriated Katherine screams out by tackling down Thomasin: “Witch! WITCH!” (1:18:00). Creed’s analysis on Carrie points to the mother’s misogyny inherited from patriarchy and Puritan bigotry: “Mrs. White blames all forms of human evil on woman. She believes that the curse of humanity is passed through woman’s blood, from mother to daughter. Woman is the universal scapegoat, the sacrificial victim”34. In an act of self-defense, Thomasin kills her mother with the same billhook they had once used to cut the fungus out of the kernels. By making Thomasin the sole survivor of their family, the film grants her involuntary emancipation from her family, allowing her to cut off her last remaining bond to the repressive patriarchal order. By taking into consideration Thomasin’s survival among her exterminated family, the film offers a hybridization of genres, by incorporating into the Gothic inclination of its narrative, a contemporary trope of the slasher’s genre known as the “final girl” trope. Clover explains that the final girl embodies the female victim-hero as “the image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again.”35 Following these aftermaths, Thomasin follows Black Phillip into the shed and requests Satan to let her sign his book. Her latent awareness of the alternative offered to her is now disclosed. Thomasin does not follow the typical endings by either “being rescued from the killer (ending A) or killing him herself (ending B)”36 but instead actively chooses to join the witches’ covenant. Unlike the usual trope in which the protagonist either lives long enough to be rescued or murder herself the monstruous killer, Eggers falls back into abiding by Puritan’s gendered division. The ending offers a convoluted and paradoxical outcome allowing a feminist development by embracing satanical partnership. Thus, although indebted to the horror film tradition, the film resists and bypasses its typical convention by creating an alternative and subversive ending, ultimately offering a possible modern feminist interpretation in its celebration of shared feminine autonomy.
20Her attraction to the pact—subtle and almost reluctant at first, then ecstatic in the end—moves from resilience to acceptance. Entering a deal with the devil was made inevitable and fated by her sex, her family’s degeneration, and her necessary survival. However, by finally relieving herself from her family’s violence and morals, Thomasin dismantles the patriarchal and fanatic system imposed on her. In doing so, the figure of the witch but also corruption itself become apotropaic, diverting the character from abusive patriarchy. Thomasin starts levitating and although she can no longer redeem her soul, in her climatic ascension among her newly fellow sisters, Thomasin appears triumphant and alleviated from constraints as ecstatic laughter carves her face (figure 11 & 12). By turning Thomasin into the very witch her family had dreaded her to be, the film embraces Puritans’ misogynistic insecurities the better to criticize them.
Figure 12 and 13
Thomasin joins the witches’ covenant (01:26:20)
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
21Puritans’ objects of angst become vividly and actively kinetic as they move in and out of visibility, rendering the family’s spatiality deceitful. Continuous waves of physical and moral transgressions come crushing down Puritan’s beliefs. The continual encroaching of the family’s boundaries, the suppression of one’s alienation from nature, the erosion of religious beliefs, the portrayal of unleashed violence, distorted and naked bodies, body fluids and gender roles combined with the chosen film form demonstrate the correlated transgressions and the sensuous. The repressed, once again, is given form and physicality, only this time through the materiality of the film itself.
- 37 Elizabeth Reis, “The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England,” The Journal of (...)
- 38 Reis, “The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul,” 15.
22Puritans situated the body as a corruptible device whose urges must be constrained within a religious order or else be condemned: hands, feet and all the various parts of the body could only do the soul’s bidding37. This Manichean vision alienates one’s own corporality by distinguishing the soul from the body, for the latter had to be governed by the first. Puritans believed that Satan attacked the soul by assaulting the body, and that because women’s bodies were weaker, the devil could reach women’s souls more easily, breaking these “weaker vessels” with greater frequency38. Thus, the body is to be perceived as corruptible and permeable. A concern that clearly transpires in the film as William adjures his family “We shall never lie open to the wicked one.” (00:56:45), thus alluding once more to the permeability of the body. However, the film itself turns to an open wound to be explored. It counteracts this need for bodily control by allowing its materiality to be unstable, excessive, and sensuous, oozing away from within and giving in to impulses.
- 39 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 166.
23Barbara Creed comments that “after the advent of Christ, pollution is redefined as ‘sin’ which comes from within.”39 In order to come to terms with it, the film’s abominations must be expelled from within and thus are in fact turned inside out. The organicity of this diegetic world highlights the transgression of all natural elements—air, fire, earth, and water. Bodies as well have been undergoing an unwanted and abject mutation manifested foremost by Thomasin’s becoming a witch. In fact, Thomasin’s and the witch’s carnality mirror one another as the latter acts out the former’s mischievous or innocent jokes into ominous threats. She pretends to her sister Mercy to be this witch:
THOMASIN: Aye. It was a witch, Mercy. You speak aright.
CALEB: Thomasin!
THOMASIN: It was I!
MERCY: Liar.
THOMASIN: ’Twas I what stole him. I’m the witch of the wood.
MERCY: Liar! Liar!!
THOMASIN: I am.
CALEB: List not to her Mercy.
THOMASIN: I am that very witch. When I sleep my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with The Devil. That’s how I signed his book.
MERCY: No!
THOMASIN: He bade me bring him an unbaptized babe, and I stole Sam, and I gave him to my master. And I’ll make any man or thing else vanish I like.
MERCY: No.
THOMASIN: Aye. And I’ll vanish thee too if thou displeaseth me.
MERCY: Be quiet.
CALEB: Mercy, she’s but telling fantasies.
THOMASIN: Or perchance I’ll boil and bake thee since we are lack of food. (00:25:20)
- 40 Tzvetan Todorov et al., The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
- 41 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 4.
24Thomasin blurs the lines between bantering and threatening, playing, and confessing, the acceptable and the unacceptable. By alluding to an anthropophagic scenario, the cannibalistic taboo leads way to the collapse of moral values and bodily boundaries between the self and the other. The body is not safe from the other, far from it, it can be consumed as a source of replenishment. Thomasin’s reference to the state of famish, in which the family is slumping into, places her as the forwarding agent causing the upheaval of dichotomic and moralistic establishments. Unconscious and lingering primal lust might be coming up to the surface through the corporality of the titular witch. Repeatedly, whether through the family’s starvation, Caleb’s unprocessed apple or Thomasin’s cravings, the film confers a sense of hunger and appetite exceeding the characters’ framing world and diegesis. Opposite to that feeling, stands the wandering and yet omnipresent witch. When Thomasin, locked in the goat’s shed and alarmed by a suckling noise, turns her head to the shadowy corner, we discover, in torpor, the witch’s bare and elderly form (figure 13). The witch divulges herself in her most folkloric and familiar attire: aged, wrinkled, naked and cackling. The sounds of gnawing flesh, crackling bones, and sucking blood saturate our senses by creating a synesthesia. Through sound and vision, the spectator comes to feel aversion and fear, but also register the voracity and sheer gluttony. The film’s historical verisimilitude40 overlaps with the fantastical components of its Gothic folktale roots while modernizing it by infusing it with a focus on the “body genre” of horror, which Linda Williams describes as “the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion”.41 In doing so, the film form itself seems to be mutating into a living pulsating organ: a skin, capable of visually rendering the paradigm of the film’s inner diegetic turmoil.
Figure 14
The Witch’s true form revealed (00:41:00)
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
25In the scene following baby Samuel’s kidnapping, we are led to the witch’s lair. Although the scene is revealed to us, we can barely distinguish shapes. Details are covered by a veil of engulfing shadows. We can only deduce the ongoing sacrificial ritual performed by the witch thanks to dimmed candlelight. The pictoriality of this scene testifies aesthetically to the oneiric and fantastical threshold that the movie is about to trespass. The witch is painted as a silhouette whose contours trace back to the collective imagery of this figure. Emaciated, aging and terrifying, these representational codes lead us to identify the woman as a witch. The film is therefore haunted by folkloric beliefs, which seems to erode its materiality itself by making the image grainy and unfathomable. The lack of explicitness and the darkness of it may be conceived as a blank canvas, it may function as a mirror or even as a projecting mnemonic space driving us to summon the inherited iconography of this figure. As the film conjures up the pictorial stereotypes and fantasies, the spectator becomes both passively corrupted by the perfidious automatic associations with the witch and agents of corruption, and actively participant in efforts to fill the void. We are quick and prompt to await Thomasin’s becoming a witch.
- 42 Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”.
- 43 Laura U Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota (...)
26The witch approaches, caresses the infant, makes a potion from what we gather is Samuel’s flesh, and applies it as an ointment on her body and a wood branch to levitate away to a glazing moon. The horror of the scene operates through visceral and abject glimpses of Samuel’s castration, killing and the witch’s naked and aging body covered by the infant’s blood. The cavernous setting and wrapping darkness hinder our perception and our senses delve into a primal and somewhat regressive state in which knowledge is bewildered. Between the smearing of the ointment all over her body, then onto her stick (figure 14) and her flying off into the moon (figure 15), the witch jerks her stick until its levitation from the ground. The use of elliptic editing, close-ups, decentered shots, the attention given to movements and blurring effects may enhance the hapticity of the images by leading the spectator to a “sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion”42. As the music aligns with the tambouring of Samuel’s flesh and our sight is hindered, we feel as if we can only watch this rawness hidden, yet we are pulled, paradoxically longing to inhabit the space and dive closer. Marks suggests that the haptic image is erotic in its “ability to oscillate between near and far”43. As we come close to a sense of optical loss, abstraction is drawing near. However, we feel as if, by filling the gaps, we have contributed to the writing and the actualization of the revolting murder.
27The chiaroscuro reminds us of Georges de La Tour’s but also Caravaggio’s lighting contrasts. A light that paradoxically imputes visual clarity and yet offers a layered imagery and pictoriality that I would argue participates to the film’s materiality. The lighting of this scene is low, soft, often sided and thus often creates a contrasted split with warm colors that reminds us of Rembrandt’s lightning technic. Beugnet questions the ability of cinema to explore the film’s material dimension through different artistic practices, such as theatre and painting. Her analysis of transgression in cinema within blurry and scotopic visuals, can be aligned with what is at play here in terms of point of contact between different forms of art:
- 44 Martine Beugnet, Cinema and the Sensuous: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edin (...)
Set apart from experimental cinema on the one hand, and from pornography’s and gore’s cinema of ‘excess’ on the other, the bulk of feature-film production appears to fall almost entirely into the province of narrative forms and photographic realism […] I would argue that in contemporary feature cinema, it is precisely here, this in-between zone of hybrid cinema (Noguez 1999: 186), where (as in a Deleuzean process of ‘becoming’) the more sensual and experimental facets of the medium permeate and work to destabilise the primarily narrative and representational models, that the most exciting forms of filmmaking are currently offered.44
28The film’s stylization enables the highlight split onto flesh or objects to develop an almost three-dimensional volume. Within this scene especially, we are tempted to pierce into the dark and velvet-like opacity of the image’s tactile quality.
Figure 15 and 16
(00:08:16)
The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers. Produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira. Parts and Labor; Rooks Nest Entertainment; RT Features.
29The film’s form yields itself to the celebration of the sensuous through a heightened materiality and pictoriality, endowing it with layers of its own, capable of triggering imagery and haptic reactions. Inward and outward notions collide in the tactile simultaneity of its paradoxical intangibility. If we accept Marks’s hypothesis, this perception of film as skin means that the film’s skin becomes an interface whose design breaches out to the spectator’s affect. By examining the film through a phenomenological approach with the help of contemporary film theories, considering the spectator’s body as receiver, this body becomes a key element of the cinematic perception and instrument of interpretation. We register the film in its immediacy, in its shuddering power and come to realize that as Thomasin ascends, we too relish.
- 45 Tasha Robinson, “The Witch Director Robert Eggers Talks about Bringing Puritan Fears to a Modern Wo (...)
- 46 Martine Beugnet, Cinema and the Sensuous.
30The Witch’s preservation of the Puritan’s way of life is countered and perverted by its modern coating in American horror and Gothic traditional expectations. The Puritans’ dream becomes “an inherited nightmare”45 enacting fears of corruptive wilderness, femininity, and physicality. The naturalistic and surrealist aspects of the film result in the confrontation of men with Nature and their own nature. Corruption takes the shape of a virus while the repressed is made flesh. Corruption appears contagious and inexorable as the form of evil is rendered unstable: swiftly gliding between realms of visibility and invisibility although stemming from a fanatic and patriarchal system. The family’s integrity is fundamentally consumed from within. Transgressions materialize into affects triggering within us bodily reactions and affects ranging from angst and disgust to pleasure. By setting the film in the foundations of early American history, Eggers sheds light on human nature that is still relevant to contemporary fears regarding society, women, and nature. Memory is also instrumentalized as a corrupting agent, festering the film’s skin surfaces, eroding it until it is made dingy and textured. The spectator is confronted with the mutation of its original medium towards pictoriality. The corruption and erosion align with Beugnet’s comments on Trouble Every Day, in which she argues that “the element of chaos, which destabilises vision, stirs up and deregulates the narrative thread and brings about the horror, is related to the archetypal, primeval nature of human desire, but also to closer historical realities caught in the (impossible) process of erasure”46. From this perspective the film’s paradigm appears as an inverted way to come to terms with human nature.