One of the most important series in recent years has been ‘Lady’s Gambit’ on Netflix, which has made the talent of the actress known to many people Anya Taylor-Joywho had already amply demonstrated what she was capable of in a good handful of films, being chosen by M.Night Shyamalan for its sequels to ‘Unbreakable’ (2000) for good reason. Now Netflix gives the opportunity to discover the debut in the cinema of the furious future (except for an uncredited cameo), the horror film ‘The Witch’ (The Witch, 2015).
A film about which much has been written at the time and that has had all kinds of receptions between critics and the public, which from an initial division has been confirmed the important weight that its world premiere had in the future of fantastic horror cinemathanks to its serious approach to the genre, in which symptoms can be seen that the witches, the impact, the gore and the legendary material were no longer something that critics would despise.
With its careful treatment of staging, with certain visual aspirations taken to the extreme – the use of the 1:66 aspect ratio, lighting solely based on natural light sources – some confuse the artistic aspirations of its director, Robert Eggers, with a disregard for the source material or the fear of being considered a horror movie without more, but it is simply the work of an author who chooses a more leisurely and embellished way of telling his story.
It is not hard to imagine why many despise this work with few scares and with its well-dosed moments of impact, but when we take into account the evolution that horror movies have taken since ‘Lords of Salem’ (2012), ‘Babadook ‘ (2014) and ‘The Witch’ herself, we can verify that they were three works that knew how to advance against the undeniable modern references of the genreWhat Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, and Wes Cravenwhich had dominated the genre explosion in the 2000s, exhausting their aesthetics and forms by the constant production of cinema for the video market.
For example, far from neglecting those referents, instead of taking a starting point like ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘, as Rob Zombie had done in his debut, in his best movie, also about witches, can be seen the influence of Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argentolet’s say that “the b-side” of the genre in about 70 that had left their mark on its dirtiest and bloodiest side but that in the early 2010s it was being mechanically replicated in a lower budget version in ephemeral movements like the mumble gore.
Discover the terror in Bergman, Polanskyor even in such unknown Britons as jonathan miller had been present in some samples of the horror cinema of the house Glax Eye Pix, but both for those who agreed to classify the films of the production company of ‘The Witch’ as ”high terror” and for those who hate everything that comes out of A24 because of the implications of that label, there seems to be a gap of ignorance regarding titles like ‘Wendigo’ (2000), or even such interesting continuations of the phenomenon found footage What ‘lovely molly‘ (2011), with all the elements of atmosphere and drama that Eggers and Aster bet on.
Egger’s Legacy
The truth is ‘The witch‘, more indebted to Rob Zombie’s satanic piece than is usually recognized, is scary and poses as a simple, precious and dark review of the legends and taleswhich manages to draw a story of credible religious paranoia within the development of coming of age feminine under the tradition of Angela Carterwith some traces of traditional satanic cinema and echoes of the New England mythologies already developed by ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (The Blair Witch Project, 1999).
And although ‘El faro’ (The Lighthouse, 2019), a beautiful but confused splash of stuffed references without any palate, has not managed to live up to his debut, Rober Eggers showed that his meticulous style and careful atmosphere were a new path for a horror cinema in need of a more relaxed gothic and less dependent on the fluctuations of soundof which the Warner school has ended up abusing, sealing a decadence that its sequels begin to show in commercial releases.
However, the evolution of the genre has not been slow in trying to replicate the phenomenon, and there is not only a return to folk roots in Europe, with films with a historical background “period” like ‘November’ (2017), ‘Hagazussa‘ (2017), or ‘Gretel & Hansel’ (2020) but encouraged the return of witches to the cinema in works with little relation in tone such as ‘The Autopsy of Jane Doe’ (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, 2016) or ‘Hellboy’ (2019) and has influenced modern ones like ‘Pyewacket’ (2017), ‘The Dark and the Wicked‘(2019)’sator‘ (2020), ‘Relic‘ (2020) and even in more youthful versions of witch films such as ‘Dark Mother’ (The Wretched, 2019) or horror films in the forest such as ‘Cursed Forest’ (The Hole in the Ground, 2019) or ‘The Ritual ‘ (2017).