Hollywood’s annual release calendar is divided roughly into thirds: the summer-action season (which actually starts in the spring); awards season, which begins in earnest in September; and the rest of the year, the postholiday winter months when some scrappy genre movies get to fight for screen time against prestige, Oscar-buzz holdovers. We’re currently in the third period, and during the past month a number of horror movies have made it to local theaters. Three of the releases are notable: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Screen Gems release that tanked at the box office; Southbound, a low-budget anthology (or omnibus) film from the Orchard, a burgeoning indie distributor that specializes in youth-oriented fare; and The Witch, which premiered at Sundance last year, won filmmaker Robert Eggers the best director prize, and was quickly snapped up by tastemaking distributor A24. In terms of quality and ambition, they range from inept to impressive, and only The Witch has anything resembling a new approach to the genre.
Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible, about mass hysteria during the 17th-century Salem witch trials, was also an allegory for the witch hunts of the Red-baiting McCarthy era. The Witch could be interpreted as an a reflection of frightening ongoing national battles over childbirth and women’s rights to self-determination. As in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), defenseless children are targeted by demonic forces. In The Witch paranoid accusations begin when the infant boy disappears (prey to wolves, or ritual sacrifice?) and escalate with the resentment of teenage Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), who learns that due to her budding womanhood she’s to be sent back to civilization as a servant to a richer household.
