Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Three): The Witch

(trailer)

This is, like, the horror movie that got me into horror movies, if that makes sense. I hope it does, because, while The Witch (stylized at The VVitch for reasons we’ll get into) does do a lot of things right in terms of horror -- especially in creating and maintaining dread -- a sizeable chunk of its audience did not take well to it. It has the same problems, I think, that It Comes At Night -- a movie I talked about last year -- had. It was marketed in a way that lead people to believe it was something it wasn’t.

So what is The Witch not? Well, it’s not over-the-top, for one thing. It’s a very subdued sort of horror, the kind that you have to make when you’re working on a rather small budget and with uncooperative animals. The fact that it looks as great as it does is definitely a testament to how well they used the money the filmmaker’s had.

But when I say subdued, I also mean in how it presents itself. The titular witch, for example, doesn’t really show herself for much of the movie. I mean, she’s there pretty early on and the camera is never demonstrated to be unreliable so the audience knows she’s there throughout the movie, but the way the movie plays out, much of our protagonists’ misfortune could easily be attributed to mundane problems.

This is something that I think is actually to the movie’s detriment. It’s not decisive. It can’t seem to decide whether the events are all because of some hallucinogenic corn rot or because the devil himself is destroying a puritan family, and that threatens to tear the movie apart.

I criticize The Witch a lot, but that’s only because the rest of it is so great. Like Suspiria and other well-made movies before it, it has a very specific aesthetic in mind and uses that to carry most of the mood. This isn’t just in the muted tones or the dress or the cinematography, but also in the characters. How they talk, what they talk about, everything that could be done to transport the audience back to the seventeenth century, this movie tries to do, even extending to the marketing materials. People thought The VVitch really was how you spelled the title, because that's how people did back then.

“A New England Folktale” is the movie’s tagline, and it plays out like one. I don’t want to spoil more than I already have, but when watching (or rewatching, if you’re good and watching these movies before I write about them), look at each character’s most obvious wants. William wants to experience mortal grief to further his eternal reward. Caleb is going through puberty and the sexual ideas that go with it. Thomasin longs for the pleasures of England. Each of them (and the other characters) receives these things, but in a “be careful what you wish for” sort of way.

Plus, there are only, like, three jump scares. If that, like me, was your barrier from seeing more horror, this is certainly a good place to start getting past that to the good stuff in the middle.

-F

Next time: Suspiria (2018), directed by Luca Guadigno