By James Mottram
“It took four years to get the right investors to make this movie, and who saw this film the same way that I did. Yeah! Let’s make a Pilgrim horror film in Jacobean English,” writer/director, Robert Eggers, laughs to FilmInk of his debut movie, The Witch. Set in 17th century New England, the film is largely set on the wooded outskirts of a Puritan village where William (Ralph Ineson) and his farming family have been banished, the reasons for which remain initially unclear. The family’s isolation and physical hardship, however, are the least of their worries, as a strange, supernatural force in the woods soon makes its terrifying presence felt. “I wanted it to be a nightmare from the past,” Eggers says. “If you could upload a puritan’s nightmare to the mind’s eye of the audience, that’s what I wanted. My goal was to make something archetypal and morally ambiguous…I wanted to do something Pre-Victorianised and pre-Disney-ised. There are stories that have survived time – they’re ambiguous and they’re scary and they’re hard to wrap your head around, but they feel right, damn it,” Eggers laughs. “That was my goal.”
Robert Eggers has achieved that goal, with the former production and costume designer scoring raves for his debut feature at The Sundance Film Festival, where he picked up the directing award. “It was overwhelming and gratifying and humbling,” he says. “I had to believe that there would be an audience for this film. Maybe nobody will see it when it opens for real, but the response has been so much greater than I anticipated…it’s wild.” On today’s blackened horror landscape, originality is king, which should instantly see The Witch, ahem, cast a spell over audiences on the hunt for a scare-fest that does things a little differently. With its fascinatingly antiquated dialogue, nail-grinding tension, admirable sense of restraint, and strong performances, The Witch is a canny stand-alone. “I’d tried to get a lot of other scripts produced before this, but they were too weird and difficult to categorise. One was even darker and more disturbing than this. Eventually, I realised that I needed to make something in an identifiable genre in order to get a film financed, but I didn’t want to compromise my values and who I am. I grew up in New England. It was part of my imaginary playground as a child.”
With its pre-Salem Witch Trials setting and themes of possession and witchcraft, the film has lazily been described as a melding of Arthur Miller’s classic play, The Crucible, and the 1973 horror masterpiece, The Exorcist. “The Exorcist was actually something of a guide as to not what to do,” Eggers smiles. “The Exorcist is a great film, but when that was released, showing things was the most powerful thing that you could do, and the stuff that they show in that movie was extremely powerful at the time. But for me, it was about not showing things. The Shining is the only horror movie that I was thinking about when constructing this. I’ve got a snobby, arty farty taste in things,” Eggers laughs. “I like making films that are more entertaining than the things that I watch!”
Filming in Canada for financial reasons, Eggers was put through the wringer during The Witch’s rushed, time-starved shoot. “25 days was very generous for our budgetary level, but it was impossible and horrible for what we were trying to accomplish. It was a complete nightmare,” Eggers sighs. “We were five hours north of Toronto in this region of sixty people. There was no Wi-Fi, no cell service, not enough toilets…it was rough.” Another of the film’s challenges was the size and importance of the child roles, which was made even more difficult by the nature of the film itself. “It was difficult to find parents who would let their kids be in this movie,” the director explains. “I’m sure that [casting director] Kharmel Cochrane has some interesting emails! Plus, they had to be good and they had to be from Northern England. It was a big thing. I like working with kids. There are kids that are easy to work with, and there are adults that are hard to work with. The difficulty is children’s working hours. Obviously they shouldn’t be expected to work adult hours, but it makes things tough on the schedule. The animals were the most difficult though…actually, it was just the goat, Charlie. He didn’t care that I was trying to make a movie, and I get that, I totally do. I wouldn’t give a shit about me if I was Charlie either, but it was hellish.”
The tough slog, however, has been worth it. Right after the film’s initial bow at Sundance, Eggers’ (who is now working on “a medieval knight fantasy epic on a much bigger scale”) phone started to ring hot. But despite all the excitement and buzz around The Witch, its director remains refreshingly humble and down to earth. “I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity, however brief it might be,” he says. “It’s been a bit of a circus, which I didn’t expect. But perhaps because it’s a genre film, people’s ears pricked up. I’m extremely grateful.”
The Witch is released in cinemas on March 17.
