In the bleak midwinter of isolation and ancient curses, three films summon witchcraft’s most insidious dread.
Folk horror has long thrived on the tension between the pastoral and the profane, where remote landscapes conceal horrors rooted in folklore and faith. Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), Lukas Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa (2019), and Oz Perkins’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2016) stand as modern exemplars of this subgenre, each crafting slow-burn nightmares around young women entangled with supernatural forces. These films eschew jump scares for pervasive unease, drawing from historical accusations of witchcraft to probe isolation, repression, and the feminine mystique. By pitting them against one another, we uncover how they redefine terror through atmosphere, symbolism, and subtle performances.
- Dissecting the masterful atmospheres that transform isolation into a character unto itself across all three films.
- Comparing thematic depths, from Puritan paranoia to Alpine paganism and Catholic dormitories haunted by the devil.
- Crowning a victor in this coven of dread, based on lasting impact and cinematic craft.
Wild Woods and Withered Wilds: Settings as Spectral Protagonists
The New England wilderness in The Witch is no mere backdrop; it pulses with malevolent life, its gnarled trees and fog-shrouded glades echoing the family’s descent into madness. Eggers, drawing from 17th-century diaries and trial transcripts, immerses viewers in a 1630s Puritan outpost where the forest devours light itself. The isolation amplifies every creak and shadow, turning the family’s farm into a besieged Eden. This environmental dread mirrors the internal fractures, as crops fail and livestock births monstrosities, suggesting the land rejects their rigid faith.
In contrast, Hagazussa transplants the curse to the austere Alps of 1860s Bavaria, where snow-capped peaks and peat bogs foster a primordial chill. Feigelfeld’s protagonist, Maren, ekes out existence as a goatherd shunned for her mother’s witchcraft accusations. The landscape here is tactile and oppressive, with mist rolling through valleys like spectral breath. Unlike the frantic piety of The Witch, the setting evokes a pagan endurance, where nature’s cycles blend blessing and blight, from hallucinatory herbs to ritualistic fires that barely pierce the gloom.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter shifts to a more contemporary enclosure: the cavernous halls of an upstate New York boarding school abandoned for winter break. Perkins crafts a sterile purgatory of echoing corridors and frozen boilers, where the absence of life heightens vulnerability. Snow falls relentlessly outside vast windows, paralleling the emotional frost within. This man-made isolation differs starkly from the wilds of the other two, yet achieves similar claustrophobia, as if the building harbours its own demonic frostbite.
Across these films, settings transcend scenery to embody the supernatural. Eggers wields wide-angle lenses for vertiginous forests; Feigelfeld favours long takes amid swirling mists; Perkins employs symmetrical compositions for institutional dread. Each locale weaponises solitude, proving folk horror’s potency lies in place as much as plot.
Accursed Mothers and Bewitched Daughters: Lineages of the Occult
Central to The Witch is the unraveling of the Puritan family, with Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) emerging as the vessel for Black Phillip’s temptations. Her arc from dutiful daughter to empowered witch critiques patriarchal control, her nudity in the film’s climax a defiant reclamation. The mother’s hysterical accusations fracture the unit, revealing faith as a fragile shield against primal urges. Eggers roots this in historical witch panics, where women bore the brunt of societal fears.
Hagazussa extends this maternal curse across generations, with Maren haunted by her own mother’s pyre and passing shadows to her daughter Ivunn. The film’s dual timeline weaves past traumas into present rituals, exploring body horror through miscarriage and mutation. Feigelfeld, inspired by Germanic folklore, portrays witchcraft not as moral failing but ecological symbiosis, where women commune with swamp spirits amid male aggression. This raw physicality surpasses The Witch‘s suggestion, confronting viewers with visceral rebirths.
Perkins’s film bifurcates its narrative between schoolgirls Joan and Rose, whose possession unfolds amid parental neglect. The blackcoat figure looms as a maternal surrogate twisted by Satan, blending Catholic iconography with fetal imagery in hallucinatory sequences. Unlike the overt woodland pacts, dread here simmers in psychological dissociation, culminating in a revelation that loops time itself. The daughters inherit not just curses but institutional repression, echoing real scandals of clerical abuse.
These lineages underscore a feminist undercurrent: witchcraft as rebellion against domestic and doctrinal bonds. Yet Hagazussa pushes furthest into corporeal grotesquerie, while The Blackcoat’s Daughter excels in temporal ambiguity, leaving The Witch as the most archetypal family implosion.
Silent Screams: The Alchemy of Sound and Silence
Sound design elevates all three to auditory nightmares. In The Witch, Mark Korven’s score deploys dissonant strings and period chants, punctuated by the goat’s guttural bleats that morph into infernal whispers. Silence dominates family prayers, shattered by Thomasin’s sobs or the rabbit’s unnatural stare, forging unease through withheld release.
Feigelfeld crafts Hagazussa‘s sonic palette from natural recordings: wind howls through chalets, goat bells toll ominously, and ritual chants resonate in cavernous spaces. The protagonist’s muteness amplifies ambient horror, with bodily fluids and breaths hyper-amplified during trances. This immersive naturalism rivals The Witch‘s artifice, grounding pagan rites in sensory overload.
Perkins favours minimalism in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, where distant machinery groans like distant thunder and Gregorian chants fade into static. Footsteps echo eternally in empty halls, and the girls’ whispers build to shrieks that pierce the void. This restraint mirrors the film’s bifurcated structure, using sound bridges to confound timelines.
Sound proves decisive: The Witch most bombastically orchestral, Hagazussa organically primal, Perkins most austerely psychological. Together, they silence screams to let dread whisper.
Folkloric Flames: Historical and Mythic Taproots
Eggers meticulously researched Salem-era texts for The Witch, incorporating real Puritan lexicon and goat-lore from medieval grimoires. Black Phillip embodies the Devil’s biblical forms, while the witch draws from Eastern European tales of forest hags. This authenticity anchors the film in colonial America’s theocratic terror.
Hagazussa delves into Bavarian perchten runs and herbalist persecutions, Feigelfeld consulting ethnomusicologists for authentic chants. The title references runic ‘hagazussa’ for hedge witch, blending Norse paganism with 19th-century rationalist backlash. Its myths feel lived-in, less theatrical than Eggers’s.
Perkins nods to 1970s exorcism cycles and Victorian seances in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, with the blackcoat evoking nuns’ habits and Lamia figures. Influences from The Exorcist lurk, but filtered through boarding-school lore akin to Suspiria.
Each film resurrects folklore uniquely, with Eggers most scholarly, Feigelfeld most indigenous, Perkins most syncretic.
Visceral Visions: Cinematography’s Covens
Eggers and Jarin Blaschke light The Witch in natural hues, candles flickering on faces amid desaturated woods. Close-ups capture sweat-beaded brows; wide shots dwarf humans against encroaching dark.
Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa, shot by Felix Vratny, embraces grainy 16mm for a cursed daguerreotype feel, steam and smoke veiling rituals in amber glows.
Perkins and John Bailie use stark fluorescents and shadows for The Blackcoat’s Daughter, slow zooms building paranoia.
Cinematography binds their spells: intimate yet epic.
Slow Burns to Inferno: Pacing and Payoffs
The Witch escalates deliberately, climaxing in euphoric surrender. Hagazussa meanders meditatively, its horrors cumulative. The Blackcoat’s Daughter withholds most, rewarding rewatches.
Pacing distinguishes: Eggers most accessible, others demand patience.
Crowning the Coven: Legacy and Lasting Hex
The Witch ignited Eggers’s career, spawning folk horror revival. Hagazussa cult acclaim for extremity. The Blackcoat’s Daughter Perkins’s breakout.
Eggers’s triumphs in accessibility and influence, but all enchant.
Director in the Spotlight
Robert Eggers, born July 7, 1983, in New Hampshire, grew up immersed in maritime folklore from his childhood summers on Peaks Island, Maine. A self-taught filmmaker, he worked as a production assistant on films like Heaven’s Gate before studying at New York University’s Tisch School briefly. His debut The Witch (2015) premiered at Sundance, earning critical acclaim for its period authenticity, researched from primary sources like Cotton Mather’s writings. Eggers’s obsession with historical accuracy stems from his theatre background, directing Shakespeare adaptations.
His follow-up The Lighthouse (2019), starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, explored 1890s lighthouse keepers in claustrophobic black-and-white, blending Greek myth with Freudian tension. The Northman (2022) scaled epic with Alexander Skarsgård in a Viking revenge saga drawn from the legend of Amleth, Shakespeare’s Hamlet precursor. Upcoming projects include a Nosferatu remake (2024). Influences include Kenneth Anger, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. Eggers’s films redefine genre through ritualistic formalism, earning Oscar nominations for screenplays.
Filmography highlights: The Witch (2015) – Puritan family faces woodland evil; The Lighthouse (2019) – Psychological descent in isolation; The Northman (2022) – Norse saga of vengeance; Nosferatu (2024) – Gothic vampire reimagining.
Actor in the Spotlight
Anya Taylor-Joy, born April 16, 1996, in Miami to a British-Argentine family, was scouted at 16 in London after ballet aspirations. Raised multilingual in Buenos Aires and England, she debuted in The Witch (2015) as Thomasin, her breakout earning Gotham Award nods. Trained at Drama Centre London, her ethereal intensity suits horror and prestige alike.
She exploded with Split (2016) as captive Casey, then Thoroughbreds (2017) opposite Olivia Cooke. The Queen’s Gambit (2020) as chess prodigy Beth Harmon won her a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award. Blockbusters followed: The New Mutants (2020), Emma (2020) as Jane Austen heroine. Recent roles include The Menu (2022), The Northman (2022), and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). Upcoming: Nosferatu (2024).
Filmography highlights: The Witch (2015) – Bewitched daughter; Split (2016) – Resilient survivor; Thoroughbreds (2017) – Murderous teen; Emma (2020) – Witty romantic lead; The Queen’s Gambit (2020 miniseries) – Chess virtuoso; The Menu (2022) – Diner victim; Furiosa (2024) – Wasteland warrior.
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Bibliography
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