The Witch
Evil takes many forms.
In seventeenth-century New England, a Puritan family is cast out to the edge of an unforgiving wilderness. When their infant son vanishes without trace, paranoia and suspicion take root. Thomasin emerges as the focal point of a descending nightmare where superstition and hidden forces collide. Robert Eggers crafts a tale of suffocating dread and psychological fracture, where the very fabric of faith becomes the instrument of their undoing.
The Witch restored rigor to folk-horror by treating its aesthetic constraints as compositional law rather than stylistic flourish—the Academy ratio, the northern light, the archaic dialogue impose a formal asphyxiation that earlier folk-horror had used selectively. Eggers dislocates the rural-versus-modern tension that defined 1970s folk-horror by trapping us inside Puritan interiority, where the external threat dissolves into family pathology. The film's influence reshaped what folk-horror could say about isolation and belief without irony or relief; it made minimalism the genre's new default language.
- Original Format
- 35mm (Arri 435)
- Aspect Ratio
- 1.66:1
- Original Runtime
- 92 min
- Sound
- Dolby Digital
- Color Process
- Color
Shot on 35mm by Jarin Blaschke, exclusively natural light. Robert Eggers' debut. Unusual 1.66:1 ratio chosen to evoke Vermeer paintings.
