Mary and I saw The Witch at the Morris Theatre this weekend. I liked it very much.
“But,” you say, “it’s a supernatural horror story. How can an atheist see something like that and not sneer at it?”
Easy. It’s a movie. I believe that movies actually exist. I also enjoy some superhero movies in spite of the fact that they postulate huge violations of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. I like movies that tell me something about the human condition, and big budget spectacle is a distraction from the story at the core.
So what’s the story at the heart of The Witch? It starts with a council meeting in a Puritan town in which a family is banished for religious fanaticism — the father has been preaching about how to worship god in the wrong way to the wrong people, apparently. Throughout the movie we’re going to see this current religious fanaticism — the entire family is steeped in these lethal notions of their fundamentally evil nature. Dad trains his son to recite cant about sin and death. One child dies and they are convinced he is burning in hell because the right rituals weren’t performed. So yes, this was a part of the story an atheist can relate to, because we’re imbedded in a culture where that sort of nonsense is taken for granted.
Another part of the story is about loneliness and fear. This family takes a wagon out into the wilderness, finds a clearing in the woods, and builds a homestead, which seems to be the last competent thing the father does. The crops are rotten. He sells off some of their goods to buy traps so they can catch rabbits — they catch nothing. They dread the coming winter, and they amplify their fears with more fearful religion. Of course there are witches. Their whole worldview demands an enemy.
The son is feeling the pains of adolescence. He looks lustfully on his sister — she’s the only girl in his world — and it’s no wonder that he sees a witch in the woods who is red-lipped and buxom and inviting.
The daughter is the center of the story, and this is where we get into real fairy tale tropes. The family is considering selling her into servitude: it’ll be one less mouth to feed, and she’ll bring in some income. She knows. She is resentful.
The twin children are creepy. The goats they’re raising are satanic. The corn is raddled with mold. The mother is frantic with grief and anxiety. The oldest son is confused and filled with guilt. The daughter is radiantly beautiful, and will fetch a good price in town, and knows how she will be used. The father retreats into masculine passivity, and chops a heck of a lot of wood.
You don’t need supernatural agents for this to be a terrifying horror movie. The fear and tension build, and when the witches do appear, they don’t need magic to make the psychological powder keg explode.
And that’s what made it an interesting movie, even to an atheist. It builds the horror out of mundane reality, not the supernatural, so it’s relatable and real. The witches seem less an unnatural force than the product of stewing human beings in a cauldron of isolation and dread and religion.
So I enjoyed it, even though it’s definitely not a happy movie. But it’s well made, and all the acting was excellent, and the story was coherent. Recommended. Even for the godless.
Also playing at the Morris Theatre this week: Gods of Egypt. Could they possibly have found two movies that are more the antithesis of each other? I’m tempted to go tonight just to subject myself to a different kind of horror, the horror of personal disgust and disillusionment and contempt. Might be fun.
Ah, the entertainment of one of the most reprehensible, out of many reprehensible cultural events that resulted in multiple murder.
Using as entertainment, the culture that also gave us witch trials and executions.
Frankly, I’d rather entertain myself by masturbating with a cheese grater.
As pain isn’t my thing, I think I’ll catch up on e-mail on my days off and pet the cat in between gardening sessions.
Although, the cat is a bit jealous, he tends to want to sit on my book when I’m petting him. ;)
No! for the sake of your sanity don’t do it! Everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) I have heard about this movie suggests it is an atrocity against humankind.
By that movie I am referring to Gods of Egypt…
Atrocity against humankind?
Yes, I apologize for that, I really shouldn’t have eaten those beans. It’s just, they looked so tasty!
The horror is the religion.
I thought the end was a cop-out; up until the end we really don’t know if it’s all in their heads or there really is supernatural power at work. Other than splashing blood and stuff, a lot of horror is psychological. A common complaint I’ve heard self-described “horror fans” levy at the movie is that “not much happens” – by which I assume they mean they wanted more axe-chopping gore-splashing perhaps a zombie or two and maybe Bruce Campbell showing up with a lawnmower and a chainsaw to sort everything out. I don’t find labels like “psychological thriller” or “horror movie” to be particularly useful. I’ll note that the same people who hated ‘the witch’ also hated ‘blair witch project’ because of that same lack of things happening. Personally I think it’s just because there’s not much happening on those viewers’ heads but that’s their aesthetics; there are people who scare themselves with their own imaginings and there are people who need gallons of red-colored karo syrup. There are probably an unhappy few who need both.
The lighting in the movie is, at times, stunning. It made me wonder whether the director did a Stanley Kubrick and used a great big old lens and just shot by candle-light or whatever they had. From the softness and depth of field it looks that way.
I’ll have to watch it, thanks for the review.
I enjoyed the visuals and the overall story of The Witch.
But I have never wanted a movie to have SUBTITLES more than this one! Between the actors’ accents and the Ye Olde English, I was only able to discern about a 1/3rd of the dialogue!
Thanks for that information, Leslee! I have 45 db of hearing loss and tinnitus, I’d likely not have a clue what was being said.
My Mom and I loved The Witch. We also both wanted subtitles. Confession: we had to see it twice to decipher some crucial dialog. I’d hesitate to recommend it, because it is tragic and horrible things happen to children, animals, and everyone. Also, as Mallory Ortberg from Slate pointed out, they kept filming the backs of characters’ heads, and I never figured out why.
#5: Yes — the viewing public has been conditioned to equate “horror” with “graphic splatter fest”. This was not such a movie.
At the very end there was a phenomenon that seemed supernatural, but at that point we’re seeing everything through Thomasin’s eyes, and she was fried by recent events. Her expressions, which were somewhere between ecstasy and terror, also suggested we’re seeing more of a psychological state than a literal physical reality.
#7, #9: My wife also complained about the heavy accents, and they were pretty thick. I had the advantage of having been to Scotland a couple of times, so I’ve gotten used to deciphering strangely foreign languages that are almost English. They seemed relatively mild after Glasgow & Edinburgh.
Marcus @ #5
Yes they did apparently. Although shooting digital meant they didn’t have to go quite as big as Kubrick.
http://www.moviemaker.com/archives/moviemaking/cinematography/persistence-of-vision-the-witch-robert-eggers/
If you think we’re bad, you should hear them up in Aberdeen. Even we can’t understand them.
Jumpin’ Jeezus, PZ, ain’t you ever chopped wood?
(Alternative explanation: super athletic PZ finds choppin’ wood easy!)
The wood chopping was sort of the equivalent of Jack Torrance’s typing in The Shining. Something to do while avoiding the bigger problems building in the house.
Actually, in areas with harsh winters, such as New England, when wood is your only source of heat beyond body heat, a pile of wood the size of the house is not unusual.
I recall someone actually calculating the amount needed for a log cabin in Montana once.
It was like, “Well, now I’m done chopping wood, back to chopping wood!” in labor necessity.
PZ #14, I can relate to that. (Sad to say, I guess.)
wzrd1, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that PZ is judging woodcutting in terms of effort or relevance in a generalized manner. He is not. It is made explicit within the movie itself that there are much larger issues that need to be done but the father cutting wood instead is essentially his way of escape. He goes out and does it after every dramatic scene almost. He does it while acknowledging that there are much, MUCH bigger issues that need to be dealt with. Including missing children for fucks’ sake. But he also is dealing with failing crops. He also did something that deeply pisses off his wife just so that he would be able to hunt, essentially admitting failure in regards to relying just on the farm, and yet barely even bothers with attempting to hunt. And later on someone explicitly says that the only thing the father is good at is cutting wood. This is a plot element. This is also key characterization of the father. And it is likely also of symbolic significance. It isn’t PZ just randomly coming up, out of the blue, with a judgment about whether woodcutting is valuable work.
Gonna agree that subtitles would have been helpful.
Marcus Ranum:
Wasn’t there an early scene where an old witch bathes in the baby’s blood and becomes young again or did I just assume witch from first scene was the same witch that tempts the boy later?
I had heard about the “horror fans” saying how horrible the movie was and how it wasn’t even horror and the sad part was that it almost talked me out of seeing the movie. Those people are utterly full of shit. If this didn’t count as “horror”, that is essentially claiming that horror movies can’t be smart, can’t be subtle, can’t be cryptic or artful. So much garbage is churned out in the horror genre, and then saying that one of the few good, thoughtful movies in the genre “doesn’t count” is exactly what I would expect from people who hate horror. Coming from supposed horror fans though just breaks my heart. Distilled version: “This is why we can’t have nice things!”
@17: Oddly historically accurate. Many, if not most of the colonists really had no clue about how to farm and their crops did fail. A break from the historic accuracy was the lack of Native American help in feeding the colonists, who were facing starvation.
Still, I get your point and I’ve not watched the film.
Although, I will say that some men in failing marriages have done something to piss off the wife, just to get out of the house. ;)
You know, burn the dishes, wash the bread. :P
Oddly, I’ve never done such things and we’re not past our 34th year together.
If I do go see it, I’ll have to remember my often forgotten (frequently, intentionally) hearing aid. I figure that if I can understand what comes out of Liverpool, I can understand this – with my hearing aid in.
That was a creepy scene, but you didn’t see a transformation. You saw oddly angled, murkily-lit perspectives on bits of a woman’s body as she does something horrible with the child’s body. Like the shower scene in Psycho, there was a lot that you didn’t see that was filled in with what you expected to see.
@20: Ah, but that’s the true art of such a scene. The viewer fills in the blanks in a far superior (or disgusting) way, a way that would otherwise change the rating and expense of the film.
I have to admit, I never heard of the idea that atheists aren’t “supposed to” enjoy supernatural fiction or whatever. It’s fiction. Religious people are the ones who claim it’s real – or that at least their particular version is.
Uncertainty is a core feature of old-school horror stories: never knowing whether they are assaulted by the something magic or mundane is what reduce their protagonists’ to impotence.
A very good example is Stephen King’s work: most of his books belong to the horror genre because their protagonist never know at first whether they’re going insane or witnessing something surnatural, but the Dark Tower series, which stands at the nexus of his multiverse, isn’t a horror story.
Why?
Because Roland Deschain knows from experience that the shit he’s facing is real and not from his own fevered mind: whether it’s the insane machines of the old imperium or the primeval demons that arrived from Todash Darkness, he’s had years (if not millennia) of experience dealing with those: the mystery is over, the monster has been seen, gauged and deemed vanquishable, and all that remains for Roland is to charge in, sandalwood guns blazing, while looking awesome outmatching eldritch creatures and senile magical robots
This atheist horror fan liked the movie very much.
@Marcus Ranum #5
Yes; it was shot by natural light and candlelight. I recall reading that director Robert Eggars felt he had cheated a bit by having the family burn two or more candles when in reality people that poor would only have used one. But that would have been way too murky.
I thought after the first witch rubbed the baby remains on her, she flew. Wasn’t she shown flying, silhouetted against the full moon? And I thought the first witch was the same as the boy-tempting witch, but it could have been a different one.
I had a lot of trouble with this movie. How did such a wood chopping guy build this house with windows and siding ‘n such and where did the all animals come from?
I mean, they get kicked out of a community with the shirts on their backs and and yet seem to have all the stuff they need to get by, just like they went down to Home Depot.
If it had been done in a surrealistic style I would get it, but they did it as realism, and it ain’t !!!!
So does The Witch weigh the same as a duck and is therefore made of wood?
laurentweppe @23:
When I saw The Innocents as a boy, there was no question (to me) that the ghosts were real. Seeing it years later, it was almost as obvious to me that it was all in the governess’ mind. It still stands up as a great movie.
Marcus Ranum @5: Unlike most of my acquaintances, I thought The Blair Witch Project was brilliant. Unfortunately, it seemed to spawn a shitload of crappy predictable “found footage” films.
Atheists aren’t allowed to enjoy supernatural horror stories? Oops! Wish I’d known that before I wrote two.
Actually, the first one was explicitly trying to write a ghost story where the ghosts were “real” (really something outside of currently understood reality and somehow related to people who had died, not intentional fakes or natural phenomena) and yet the world is still essentially naturalistic and there is no afterlife. Not sure I succeeded, but it was interesting to try to think about how that might work.
I found The Witch to be an extremely atmospheric, very well acted, visually stunning film that largely bored me. I recommend seeing it, and there are really interesting things it can tell you, but the pacing really ground the whole thing down. It’s really difficult to walk the fine line between atmospheric and dull, and I personally don’t think the film succeeded in that respect.
The bits I really liked were when characters would begin reminiscing about their lives back in England. Sort of giving you a little glimpse about how much harder life had gotten for them (and possibly how they weren’t always quite so zealous, and were able to laugh and didn’t fear one another).
@26, David
Presumably he had more skills than just “wood chopping.” The house, the chicken coop, the fences, the goat pen were all things that someone with time and a basic knowledge of carpentry could make (there were nothing particularly artful). There were no glass panes in the windows (there’s a whole conversation about how they had glass windows in England), the animals they brought with them (with the exeception of the goats, which they presumably traded for or purchased). They still bought things in town, they still traded with the natives. They didn’t start out destitute, they left with all their possessions and wealth (such as it was). When the bulk of the movie picks up, they’ve been bled dry by circumstance. They talk about having “nothing left to trade” which is why they discuss sending Thomasin off.
@25, kellym
I don’t remember that shot at all. It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve seen the film, though.
Hmm.. Ok, admit I haven’t seen either. Was going to see witch, but by the time I got a day off they had relegated it to like one show at like 9PM at night, or something… But.. what I have seen of Blair Witch suggests that it has a **lot** in common with things like the TV show Ghost Hunters – i.e., a bunch of idiots with cameras, scaring themselves to death, over bloody stupid nonsense. Two hours of Ghost Hunters is my idea of torture. Its not even “good” paranormal nonsense, so.. if I am right about the similarities… lol
That said… I think it would depress me more if fans of Ghost Hunters, and the like, **like** The Witch. I would take that as a far worse sign than that the same people that hate Blair Witch also hate this one.
@33, I agree, torture.
My wife is into watching that crap, along with “Mountain Monsters”, both of which she finds immensely funny.
Odd, as she has family members that would be referred to as “hick” or similar epithets that the latter program reinforces.
So, when she watches that, I read my book and ignore it.
34 years of marriage has taught me to explain my objection well and added the “superpower” of selective hearing when necessary.
Of course, in selective hearing mode, I also remove my hearing aids.
Kagehi @33:
You should have your suggest-o-meter checked.
The director says the intent was that the baby smearing was followed by flying. I think other interpretations are valid, too.
Further to my #35: When an innovative film makes good, there are hordes of folk with dollar signs in their eyes hoping to cash in on the look, which is easily duplicated, without the imagination. Alien and Blade Runner also spawned a lot of look-alike crap. So if you see a trailer for film X you haven’t seen, which looks kinda like crappy show Y (which was made after X) you have seen, it doesn’t suggest anything except filthy lucre.
Ah, but the originals become part of the cultural reference, whereas the lousy knock-offs could only make reference as shoddy work, similar to Earl Scheib and his automobile paint jobs.
For you youngins, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Scheib
Meanwhile, I have abdominal aortic dilation, a precursor to aortic aneurysm. That causes a pulsatile belly in many cases. The end result universally is, “Yeah, the pulsation was so severe, I was expecting an alien to pop out of your belly”.
I’m fine with that, as I’ve used the same line as a joke and understand the condition, risks and causes very well.
Meaning, currently, at 2.2 cm, prognosis is good. If it advances and dissects, the chances drop between 5 and 11% of survival.
So, I’m going to watch out for any hint that that alien will try to be born. ;)
This movie was endorsed by freedom-from-religion group The Satanic Temple, because of its portrayal of the side effects of religious fanatacism. (TST are Establishment Clause purists with a trolly name, e.g. they don’t believe in a literal Satan, in case anyone is unfamiliar).
You know, one of my favorite day off activities was talking to the Jehovah Witlesses that came to the door at my previous home.
I’d discuss religion, travel, concepts and general topics, using their own bible and some inconsistencies and disproofs of love, etc.
The attrition rate was astonishing! They took to sending elders to the door.
Proving that religious viewpoints adheres to the definition of insanity, repeatedly doing the same stupid thing, expecting different results.
I did it when we lived in Philly and at our last home. No sign of a witless since we’ve moved to Louisiana.