Welcome back to The Kasturi/Files here at Speculative Chic! It’s Day 27 on the merry road to Halloween! Join us for more film discussion, book recs, and drinkies from Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files! One of the movies we’re talking about today is from 1966, so you don’t get to complain about spoilers. Just sayin’. Settle in — this one’s a doozy.
Gemma: So — am I right in thinking most horror fans these days must have either seen Robert Eggers’s 2015 debut feature film The Witch, or at least heard about it? For a while there, it was a mark of coolness either to love it or hate it. Long before Ari Aster’s Hereditary, it was briefly the front-runner for the debatable genre of “elevated” horror, i.e. horror that people who normally only watch art films don’t have to feel bad about liking. (Other examples of this include Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night, of which a friend of mine once complained: “Ya know what comes at night, exactly, in that one? Fuckin’ nothing!”) Like most films that end up in this category, The Witch is extremely serious about its business and tends overall towards subtle mounting despair rather than jump scares and grand guignol. It’s also an unabashed period piece — identified in both credits and promo materials as “A New-England Folktale,” it’s set during the same period as the Salem witch trials, and its characters speak a dialect so accurate and Northern English-thick that it really does need subtitles. It’s physically gorgeous but bleak as all hell, as befits a movie about Puritans, and its strongest visual cues come from Benjamin Christensen’s silent film Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages on the one hand, Francisco Goya’s notorious “Black Paintings” on the other. In other words, people raised on a steady diet of YouTube and Family Guy just miiiight find it a bit of a slog.
Sandra: Just as a sidebar, I loved The Babadook, but I didn’t really care for It Comes at Night, not because nothing comes, but just because I felt like I’d seen this sort of thing before, and the film wasn’t really offering anything new. I also find Joel Edgerton difficult to watch, though I can’t explain why in any sensible way. Anyhow! I’ve never watched The Witch with subtitles, because I think of it the same way I think about Shakespeare — you just kind of have to let go of your presuppositions and let the language wash over you, and before you know it, you’re in it, and you understand it without difficulty. It’s just getting into the rhythm of the thing, really. (And don’t I sound like a pretentious asshole?) But yeah, I get why some might find it a bit of a slog; as you say, this is not at all the film for the YouTube generation and anyone raised on a steady diet of Jackass. (Don’t get me wrong, I think Johnny Knoxville is fucking funny as shit, but I wish more people would vary their tastes a little. It’s okay to like wildly divergent things. You can enjoy both Ingmar Bergman and Bachelor in Paradise. You know?) But I am in danger of veering off into a rant. Help me out, Gemma.
Gemma: Dude, let’s get you settled on your fainting couch with some smelling salts. Anyway. For those with at least enough patience to remember reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in high school, The Witch pays out, in spades. Eggers takes a fascinatingly simple tack, yet one you almost never seem to see, these days — he proceeds as if everything his main characters believe is true just might be true. From the sad “fact” that all of them are supposedly born in sin with sinful natures and will never know if they’ve merited God’s salvation or not until the very moment of their deaths, to the idea that if your unbaptized baby son disappears while playing peekaboo with his older sister, he might have been stolen by a wolf, or, just maybe . . . kidnapped by a witch, many of whom probably live in this Godless wilderness you’ve come to, then killed and ground up in a butter-churn to make extremely fatty flying ointment! I mean, you don’t know. One’s about as likely as the other, really. That’s called faith.
Sandra: That’s what I adore about The Witch — it absolutely commits to its premise, no fucking around. And it demands that its audience also commit to it wholeheartedly. As if in fact, you too are borne into its examination of sin and redemption for the two hours it’s got you. Faith indeed.
Gemma: The Witch revolves around Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), whose father just can’t seem to keep his damn mouth shut about why he’s a better Puritan than everybody else, which gets him and his family banished from the settlement they originally set up in, to build a haphazard farmstead in the true middle of effing nowhere. Soon enough, the aforementioned vanishing of the family’s newborn sends everything into a terrible down-spiral: winter is coming and the prospective harvest has turned to black rot, while Thomasin gets saddled with most of the housework and her twin brother and sister run wild, constantly singing songs to the farm’s highly aggressive male goat, Black Phillip. Her father swaps her mother’s silver cup for food and doesn’t tell anybody he did, then lets Thomasin inevitably take the blame for “stealing” it; middle child Caleb, his otherwise depressive mother’s pride and joy, tries desperately to play intercessor between Thomasin and her parents (while stealing a more than occasional look at her cleavage, here and there), but ends up also getting lost in the woods during an impromptu hunting trip, only to turn up later naked, raving and covered in mud. Naturally, the only way they know how to treat him is with bloodletting and prayer, neither of which seem to work. What’s next? Start calling each other witches, of course.
Sandra: The speed with which things go wrong is amazing. You’re only about eight minutes in before the baby disappears. And that peekaboo moment — it is so terrible and frightening, giving you every parent’s fear: joy to despair in a heartbeat. And oh, those shitty little twins! I’m always delighted by filmmakers who aren’t afraid to portray children as assholes, because you know, not all children are precious and wonderful. Some are jerks as kids and grow up to be adult jerks too. Which doesn’t mean it’s okay for witches to eat them, or turn them into flying unguent, of course. Maybe. I love the imagery of the baby-stealing witch in the red (sinful!) cloak walking in the woods. It’s Red Riding Hood writ bad: she’s the wolf in the woods, long strayed off the path.
What Eggers does so well is to use those ever-encroaching woods and the . . . nature of nature, and the time period’s lack of effective light against the darkness to create a profoundly tense atmosphere and a world that often feels like you are literally on a different planet. Susan Cooper once said that forests are unbiddable places, and I’ve never seen a better extrapolation of that idea than The Witch. The eerie music with its jangly violin score and wordless singing as the camera zooms toward the woods and the terrible sense of isolation saturate the whole film. There’s a coupling of those elements to the narrative McGuffin of Thomasin’s father (and therefore his whole family) literally being cast out of their community — with the quite real dangers such isolation can bring: you’re in the wilderness, basically alone, in a time when your days were spent working on pure survival. There’s always danger of things like bears and wolves, and now witches too? Throw in all that joyless religion and you end up with such a feeling of desolation and despair throughout the whole movie — and of course, despair itself is a sin. As the family enters that downward spiral, you as the viewer (and complicit voyeur) are caught in it too, and it begins to feel like your own sins are being tallied up against you as you barrel relentlessly toward the only possible conclusion.
Gemma: On the one hand, it’s more than possible that the black rot on Thomasin’s family’s crops might be ergot, the fungus whose poison some people believe might have caused the citizens of Salem to hallucinate all that spectral evidence. On the other hand, it’s equally true that in hardcore Puritanism, things really only happen for one of two reasons: because God specifically wants them to happen, or because people’s sins have moved them so far away from God’s grace that he’s willing to allow the Devil and his creatures to prey upon them. So everything is always your fault, no matter what, and free will doesn’t actually help matters much. Because she can’t stand what brats her twin siblings are anymore, Thomasin tries to scare them into being good by telling her sister Mercy that she — Thomasin — is a witch. This then comes back to bite both her and Mercy in the ass, later on, when Caleb starts screaming about sin and puking up crab-apples. Mercy immediately tells her parents what Thomasin told her while Thomasin slaps back by pointing out that Mercy and her twin Jonas spend all their free time making up songs about Black Phillip being “king of all!”, so their father scoops all three of them up and nails them into the cow-shed. Hysteria mounts and mounts, with no safe way to express it available to anybody: blaming witches is better than blaming God, we can only suppose, but not by much. Better to blame yourself, and suck it the fuck up.
Sandra: You know that I will only ever accept the supernatural explanation, and not the ergot-hallucination option! Whether it’s God’s will, or the Devil’s, there’s a fetishy devoutness to the father’s kind of worship, which is no doubt what got so up the nose of the other Puritans back in town — no one likes to have someone else’s supposed superiority shoved in their face on a regular basis. And Daddy’s Puritanism will allow for no lost tempers or inability to deal with bratty siblings; there’s no sense of humor or room for any kind of error. So Thomasin’s flippant claim that she’s a witch leaves her open not just to her father’s disapprobation, but perhaps (if all this is real) opens a tiny window in her soul that the Devil can squeak through. And given that Thomasin’s the best of the bunch, it’s really her the Devil wants to get his hands (hooves?) on, more than any of the others. But he’ll let his witches destroy them too, of course. In for a penny!
And as we so often talk about here, it’s the family dysfunction that is always so fascinating when watching movies about, well, families. Autocratic father (well, okay, maybe all men were autocratic in those days), mother who dislikes her eldest daughter, slightly incestuous yearnings from little brother, bratty younger siblings, BUTTER-CHURNED OINTMENT BABY, and so on. It’s like the whole family has been put in solitary confinement, together, and collectively goes crazy until they are ripe for the picking by the forces of darkness. It’s as if it’s not that you’re out of God’s grace, but that God has no jurisdiction here. Only the Devil reigns. Eggers does a great job of showing you the genuine terror in the idea of having your sins are unpardoned, resulting in a literal trip to hell — not something it’s easy to relate to in our present supposedly modern world. I remember some writer saying that civilization lay not in us, but in our things. Once you took away our things, we were no longer civilized. Thomasin’s family does not have much to start with, and as they lose everything, their civilization and humanity is stripped away until even Thomasin tires of the struggle and gives in. “Wouldst though live deliciously?” asks Black Phillip/the Devil. Why not have butter and a pretty dress? It’s just so much easier.
Gemma: The Witches (1966, also known as The Devil’s Own) is a Hammer Horror movie directed by Cyril Frankel from a screenplay by Quatermass series creator Nigel Kneale, and later characterized by actor/writer Mark Gatiss as being part of a wave of British “folk horror” which would also include things like Hammer’s own Witchfinder General (directed by Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (directed by Piers Haggard, 1971) and the original The Wicker Man (directed by Robin Hardy, 1973). Shout! Factory just released a really nice BluRay copy of it, which I happen to own, but if you can’t find that, the whole thing used to be up on YouTube. That’s how I saw it the first time, after all.
Sandra: Lawdy, I love me some Hammer Horror!
Gemma: Both the film and the novel Kneale adapted it from — by “Peter Curtis”, a pseudonym for historical novelist Norah Lofts — maintain a nicely mounting air of Shirley Jackson meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style post-1950s paranoia. In the book, the story is told from the highly restricted POV of its protagonist, Miss Mayfield (played in the movie by Joan Fontaine, who brought Hammer the property after it’d been dropped by Seven Arts), a woman so self-effacing she doesn’t even think of herself by her own first name (Gwen) — though she constantly calls Miss Tilbury, the “saintly” childhood friend whose vaguely lesbian charisma enticed her to spend decades of her life teaching at a Christian missionary school in Africa before a sickness-prefaced mental breakdown forced her to return to England, “Rose.”
Sandra: As a side note, Miss Tilbury doesn’t show up in the film and pretty much all the character names were changed too, not that it really matters, but just as an FYI for the purists out there.
Gemma: Once back “Home,” Miss Mayfield feels dissatisfied and alienated, and still fragile, until a prospective job opens up in a small public school in Walwyck village (Heddaby in the film) endowed by the family of pleasant young Canon Thorby (renamed Bax in the film, where he’s played by handsomely neurotic Alec McCowen), whose philanthropic ancestors were local squires.
Re-energized by the idea of occupying a position so similar to what she was doing in Africa, Miss Mayfield is interviewed, immediately gets it, and moves almost the next day into a fully furnished house in Heddaby’s bucolic surroundings. The neighbors are friendly, the children charming, and her peers — especially the “Reverend” Bax himself (Not actually a priest at all, just likes to wear a collar occasionally to feel good — yep, you heard right! — SK), whose decayed church turns out to be historically interesting yet non-functional/possibly deconsecrated — are a joy to work with. Indeed, everything seems utterly hunky-dory until Miss Mayfield intercepts an oddly spelled anonymous note passed in class which reads: Linda Rigg’s granny treats her something crool. Quickly, she identifies it as having been written by pretty young Linda’s would-be beau, over-intelligent gardener’s son Ronnie Dowsett, and decides to check out Linda’s home situation. This sparks off a series of events which lead to an ever-widening pattern of weird “coincidence” resulting in unease, terror, destruction, injury and even death.
Sandra: This actually seems grimmer in the book than in the film; the movie lends itself to a bit of 1960s hippy-dippy optimism, despite Fontaine’s fear and occasional dreamy hysteria. Unlike with The Witch, you’re pretty sure The Witches is going to work out okay (for the hero and heroine at least). No truck with this witchery! Good Christians will win out!
Gemma: Short story short: Granny Rigg, who has a reputation in Heddaby as a “cunning woman,” is indeed a witch, and a member of a cult that apparently involves over half the villagers; she also has plans for Linda, ones which very much do not involve the girl — already illegitimate, her mother having gotten “in trouble” and “run off to the city” — becoming “over-friendly” with the likes of Ronnie Dowsett. However, Granny Rigg is not, in fact, the witch-cult’s guiding light: someone else is pulling her strings, playing out a long game that involves Linda…and Miss Mayfield…intimately. This turns out to be Bax’s older sister, a rather colorless figure in the book, although “Curtis” inserts some interesting implications about her perhaps being a possessed corpse resurrected by Granny Rigg (Rigby in the book) after a successful suicide “attempt,” but whom Kneale very smartly re-imagined as energetic, waspish “Ladies’ Mag” journalist Stephanie Bax. (“It’s a sex thing, of course,” she says, of the rural witchcraft tradition, “mostly practiced by post-menopausal women — a way of recapturing power lost with youth and desirability.”) Plausible and ruthless in equal measures, Stephanie’s outright courtship of Miss Mayfield as her consort/sidekick brings the book’s lesbian subtext to an alternately seductive and terrifying head.
Sandra: In the film it’s a lot more subtly implied — this was 1966 after all, and that sort of thing was well in the “Celluloid Closet.” Granny Rigg is also more of a small-time practitioner than a full-blown Machiavellian, supernatural manipulator of the village folks, outsiders, and her own granddaughter.
Gemma: By taking control of the witch-cult Granny Rigg may have been born into, and using her mad research skillz to codify its rituals, Stephanie has, in a way, made herself over into the figure of absolute religious authority her brother — who playacts at priesthood by wearing a dog-collar and sitting in a study crammed with religious statuary listening to church music on a massive stereo system — only aspires to be. As high priestess, Stephanie wears both a chasuble and a horned diadem, possibly of her own design, accepting reverence and dictating behavior with complete confidence; the fact that both of these are very male-coded items is probably significant, too. But Stephanie’s “belief” in the symbolic/superstitious system she works so hard to maintain is utilitarian, practical and entirely selfish; instead of worshiping Satan per se, her energy is actually directed towards recapturing her own measure of youth and sexiness by planning to flay Linda’s young virgin flesh to wear like a new coat…no, seriously. Kneale adds a shot of potential Mexica blood-sacrifice to the proceedings, conjuring images that play like Ed Gein crossed with Xipe Totec, through this wonderfully creepy rhyme/spell Stephanie quotes: “Grow me a gown with golden down,/Cut me a robe from toe to lobe,/Give me a skin for dancing in.”
Sandra: Bear in mind that we don’t find out a lot of this stuff until very near the end; Stephanie seems to be Miss Mayfield’s good friend and intellectual peer (and perhaps discreet love interest) for most of the film, so it’s a Terrible Shock to the viewer when she turns out to be heading up the witch cult. Gasp! Betrayal!
Gemma: True! Halfway through the narrative and long before this revelation, however, Miss Mayfield suffers a second nervous breakdown with accompanying amnesia that knocks out the most recent months of her life (post Africa), and finds herself confined to a (possibly sinister?) nursing home. Fontaine sketches out a masterful portrayal of a naturally shy, retiring woman forced to fend for herself, to become an undercover operative in her own life who literally cannot trust anything she thinks she “knows,” reduced to feeling her way unaided through the seemingly endless dark room of a suddenly denuded psychic landscape. Who can she turn to? Is any of the kindness she’s offered genuine, or is it all a socially acceptable scrim over threatening pagan energy? Soft-spoken and vulnerable, Fontaine makes her slow but steady way forward on sheer, exposed-nerve will, braving hallucinations (the African masks of her first breakdown, a child’s doll stirring to horrible life, shadows and voices she knows can’t possibly be there) to reach the physically palpable truth of the matter, the farmlands’ Heart of Darkness: a defiled sanctuary full of lumpy, pasty British peasants smearing themselves in drug-soaked “flying ointment” so sticky-dark it reads like excrement and performing an orgy-like modern dance-number while Stephanie Bax holds court, steering them around like puppets caught in the fatal pull of her hypnotic influence.
Sandra: As you said, Gemma, the dance orgy is a real riot, as if Bob Fosse was directing the musical theater version of The Wicker Man or something. And that crazy crown of hands that Stephanie wears, each finger a lit candle! Deliciously cuckoopants!
Gemma: As other critics have noted, it’s a shame that this rare contemporary-set Hammer chiller has slipped into obscurity over the years, elbowed out of most reference books and Google alike by Nicholas Roeg’s popular children’s film of the same name (starring Angelica Huston, still super-fun, but not at all the same thing — SK). Possibly, Kneale’s screenplay strikes the modern viewer as a bit too subtle/pastoral for most people’s tastes; the film’s initial pace is certainly leisurely, just as its implications are kept strictly BBC-standards-compliant, perhaps rendering it quaint by comparison with (for example) The Wicker Man’s happy pagan boobfest. But perseverance is definitely rewarded with a rousing climax, even if it is followed by one of the most hilariously quick attempts at re-heterosexualizing a narrative I’ve ever come across. Still, what’cha gonna do? From my point of view, the only real drawback to Hammer’s The Witches is the uncomfortable realization that forty years on, the likelihood of even a genre-bound B-picture being headlined today by three active, interesting women in their fifties (including Granny Rigby) — all doing equally awesome work, if in strikingly different ways — is still so incredibly rare as to sound risible. So seek it out, even on YouTube if you must, and enjoy the estrogen.
Sandra: Hell yes, seek it out! It sure beats the tarnation out of other fare you see “older” women in, like Mamma Mia. (Ugh. Poor Meryl Streep.) Also, “happy pagan boobfest” is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.
Anyway, to sum up, The Witch and The Witches are very different films, though of course are both about, er, witches, unsurprisingly. There’s some overlapping symbolism with animals (hares, for example, a classic shape that traditional witches shift into, hence “going into the hare” in Irish and British folklore), and folkloric/pagan overtones in both movies, and they make a nice counterpoint to each other, but they are very different-feeling narratives. The Witch is an insular, despairing narrative with a bleak outcome, whereas The Witches is more of a gleeful romp into paganism, with the nice Christian lady defeating the mad old priestess and restoring order to the world. Nihilistic, isolationist chaos vs orderly communal salvation. The choice is yours. Or take on both, as we did.
Cocktail: Witches Brew
Sandra: You guys, spell-casting is exhausting! Sometimes you need a restorative beverage just so you can carry on bewitching the neighbor’s flock of unruly sheep and turning naughty boys into pigs. Here’s a charming little drink to keep you going!
Ingredients:
(makes two shooters)
- 1 fresh lime
- 3 drops purple food coloring
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1/2 cup vodka
- 1/3 cup lime juice (in addition to the fresh lime)
- 1/4 cup raspberry liqueur
Directions:
Rim the shot glasses by cutting the lime in half and squeezing its juice into a saucer. Add the purple food coloring and stir. Place the sugar in another saucer. Dip shot glasses into the lime juice and then into the sugar. Pour the other ingredients into a cocktail shaker (use up the leftover lime juice in the saucer to make up part of that 1/3 cup — waste not, want not!). Add the ice. Shake well. Strain into the prepared shot glasses. To turn this shooter into a tall drink, replace the 1/3 cup lime juice with a 1 cup of citrus soda and serve in a highball glass over ice.
Knock it back and try to avoid getting burned at the stake.
Book Recommendations
Sandra: Again, I have to come back to Bernard Taylor’s The Reaping, which is literally about using witchcraft to prolong life. For the young adult set, there’s The Changeover by Margaret Mahy, about a girl whose brother’s life force is stolen by an evil warlock. Plus local good witch cult.
I also have to recommend one of my favorite poems of all time, “The Lammas Hireling” by Ian Duhig. It’s about northern Irish witchcraft and you can read it here, or, oh, hey, shameless plug! I also reprinted it in the genre poetry anthology I edited, The Stars As Seen from this Particular Angle of Night. Not sure how easy it is to get copies nowadays, but I’ve got a pile in my basement if anyone wants to buy one.
Gemma: A Mirror for Witches by Forbes is always a good rec to go with The Witch.
Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).
I think I read somewhere that the goat in The Witch was horrible and actually hurt one of the actors so badly that they had to go to the hospital.