The Witch
Despite the setback with The Blair Witch Project, Spooktober trucks on, and like one might paira wine with their dinner or whatever you alkies do, E and I paired The Blair Witch Project with the Witch, which I guess is more like pairing a wine with another wine. And thankfully, it was much more palatable on the fear-inducing side. Don’t get me wrong, it’s foreboding and anxiety-inducing, but at least E wasn’t punching me afterwards. SPOILERS AHEAD FOR BOTH THE WITCH AND THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (BWP). Part of that being that the witch is shown to you straight away, which makes it a perfect counterpart to BWP, and whose witch you never see. The effect of that is that the ceiling of fear you feel is minimized, but it also sets a foreboding tone immediately, and raises the anxiety floor to a tough level, whereas that takes a while to build in BWP. Fear aside, the Witch is a masterful movie. Coming into this, our exposure to Robert Eggers was The Lighthouse, which we struggled with, and the Northman, which is one of my favorite movies, so batting 50/50, and I was very curious as to which side the Witch would fall. All three movies carry a similar air of foreboding, but our enjoyment and captivation was much more akin to the Northman than the Lighthouse. For his directorial debut, Eggers establishes immediately that he has a master sense of pacing, storytelling, writing, attention to detail and directing at large. The Early Modern English is difficult to understand at parts, but it gives such an authentic vibe to the Puritan aesthetic. E and I both really loved this movie, and our rating puts it as the #3 horror movie on ZEJ and in the top 25 overall, pending Jord’s future rating.
-Z
