“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Taking Tolstoy’s words literally, we can see that for Robert Eggers, an unhappy one takes the shape of a Puritan family living in exile in 17th-century England, and is preyed upon by demonic forces surrounding their home of survival. The Witch (2015) is Eggers’ directorial debut, depicting the family’s supernatural experiences. It is a horror movie well-deserving of the same accomplishments as Eggers’ esteemed and foregrounded movie, Nosferatu (2024). While The Witch is overlooked compared to its most recent successor, its summarized subject is also insufficient to discuss it in its entirety—its multilayered nature, in which the purity and originality of gothic horror lie.
The Witch naturally adopts traits from the gothic genre while reversing our expectations, which we subconsciously base on decades’ worth of adaptations and horror traditions we’ve grown accustomed to seeing. It is not a gothic adaptation or a conventional gothic horror in the sense that it’s not laden with aristocratic symbols and beloved monsters. Rather, The Witch is a subtle portrait of generational trauma, corruption of faith, gender norms, and power dynamics taking place within narrow familial and social contexts. To study Eggers’ horror debut through a contemporary and gothic lens is to study the genre’s objective in literature—a purpose that arose in the Enlightenment period as a reaction against preferring intellectualism over emotions, which Eggers has embraced and purified through modern cinema.
A stereotypical perspective of the Gothic is the aestheticism conjured in a mind familiar with the genre but not its origin. The infamous setting in Gothic narratives sets an aesthetic standard with stormy weather and ancient castles, feeding into expectations of a gloomy and eerie image, and fostering an effect of beauty and terror as represented in the “sublime.” Additionally, such tools as the weather reflect the characters’ psyche with symbolic hyperboles to illuminate the weight of their sorrow or fear, most often through violent thunderstorms or encapsulating fogs. In The Witch, Eggers’ setting plays a much bigger role than changing weather. He focuses on the surrounding wilderness of the family’s new home, specifically depicting the forest as an entity larger than the farm, the family, or their Puritan faith.
The wilderness, alive and oppressive, not only reflects the obsolete emotions of the characters but also intensifies the guilt, loss, and disgust they feel, to the point where they are driven mad.
The wilderness in the movie, as an extension of the family and paranormal forces, drives the knife into the heart of the movie, where the story unfolds.
It is important to note that the forest, as well as the demonic forces it shelters, do not corrupt the family but bring out the errors of their judgment, the hubris of the characters such as lust, pride, and resentment; and their dysfunctional dynamics born out of the adopted norms and extreme piety they’ve normalized. The forest that awaits them beyond their dissipated farm is not just a backdrop to what Eggers means to show, but also a breathing entity in scale and function. There, in the depths of inconquerable woodland, the witch coven thrives and embodies the vitality of nature—a tangible force to blame when the family refuses to face why they might have been targeted by such evil.
Neither nature nor these preternatural forces can survive without the other, and it is inescapable territory once you’ve entered into their jurisdiction, transforming you forever, much like Bram Stoker’s castle of Dracula. This further reflects the movie’s gothic nature by highlighting the irrationality of the family’s metamorphosis—their gradual insanity, and their desperate clinging to guilt and religion in the face of their worst fears. Their experience may be interpreted in so many words while circling back to its terror and lack of civilised reason, a strength of Eggers to be able to depict more than surface-level filmmaking. In the end, the paranormal entities, their home of wilderness, the family’s sin and corruption serve the ideology of the literal devil embodied in a black goat—but they also come to life as symbols to illuminate the evil lurking innately within the characters.
The objective of the gothic is to express the irrational emotions and fears ideally repressed in societies with intellectual and civil foregrounds. Gothic, as a result, showcases the dark side of human nature where both benevolence and evil challenge free will. As written by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Sheridan Le Fanu, and many more, gothic works serve as an explicit mechanism through such tools as settings and supernatural interpretations to explore themes in unconventional and exceptional ways, emphasizing this repression within exaggerated themes like revenge, control, and sexuality. Keeping this definition in mind and simplifying gothic traditions rather than focusing on conventional storytelling and picturesque standards, The Witch transforms into a wide landscape to be examined more deeply than any superficial depiction of historical fiction and horror.
Finally, Eggers’s means of using gothic horror is more than simply putting a unique signature on his debut, but is also a deeply unsettling choice to fully capture the significant takeaway of the movie’s entire plot.
Thomasin’s story elevates the movie to a profound revelation and a dark coming-of-age, enriching the story by portraying the transition from youth to womanhood, rather than maintaining a flat storytelling with some disturbing imagery.
Her story, then, wraps up the underlying themes and elements while giving depth to his filmmaking beyond cinematography. It becomes clear why the movie embraces the witch and not the witch coven.
Thomasin’s transformation into being seen as a woman and no longer representing the innocence of a young girl stems from every dysfunctionality her family has embraced. She takes out her temper on the twins, who are revealed to be emblems of evil; similarly, her mother bears an overbearing jealousy and takes out her resentment on her eldest daughter; the sins of their father damn them all, and Thomasin’s younger brother represses his urges of lust nevermind understand them as the impulses of ignorant youth. Furthermore, the issues revealed by forces beyond their control contribute to Thomasin’s negative view of herself, representing the weight of every puny sin and responsibility imposed on a young girl within a heavy religious context. Eventually, while the wilderness represents the worst fears of her parents and siblings, it transforms into a valuable asset where she finds complete freedom for her desires and her mind, free from the voices of judgment.
In the end, each element of the movie is brought together to reveal how Thomasin achieves a sense of agency through an exaggerated sense of evil that her family feared, ultimately using it as an excuse to torment her as a young girl with desires and tempers. While it is common to see how women are stripped of their individuality in historical fiction, Eggers seizes the opportunity to pair it with a gothic sensibility to self-restraint and defiant faith. As much as I couldn’t care less about horror in cinema, this aspect of his debut has made it memorable even for someone not a genre fan. I find The Witch to be a perfect example of what is rarely matched by any movie I’ve seen in a theatre these last few years—a fresh take with a balanced intuition as to why a choice of storytelling has been renowned and beloved through the centuries.
Thanks for the read