I want to talk about the horror genre today, and I want to talk about it with one specific film in mind (THE WITCH) and in general as a concept of genre.
There’s a great article over on medium.com which talks a lot about the sort of horror films I love (THE WITCH, THE BABADOOK) and one which I vehemently didn’t (IT FOLLOWS) as films which defy the horror genre. Each one of them didn’t feel like one of the big blockbuster horror films like SAW or even THE CONJURING, where jump scares and constant fear feeding is a part of the story.
{Spoilers Hereafter for Several Movies: THE WITCH, THE BABADOOK, IT FOLLOWS}
Horror is an incredibly personal genre – what scares you is part of your psychology. It’s part of your emotional connection to the media which you consume, because fear is a vital piece to success when it comes to horror. I’ve always preferred slow, creeping horror to jump scares and gore. I’ve never watched any of the SAW movies because I am totally disinterested in watching hideous murder scenes. It’s the same reason I didn’t see 127 HOURS.
THE BABADOOK terrified me. The idea of a book coming to life and taunting me is something which I’m viscerally uncomfortable with as a writer I hated IT FOLLOWS because I felt like it created horror out of the experience of having sex – and it employed rape as a choice to get rid of a curse. What’s interesting to me about these three movies (and many others in the genre) is that they all feature women as the protagonists. In many ways, it begs the question of why horror isn’t more of a feminist genre than it is.
So why I loved THE WITCH so much is an incredibly personal and intrinsically fascinating question. What scared me about it isn’t necessarily what scared Stephen King, or my friend who went and saw it with me. What set me on the edge of the seat, hiding behind my hand isn’t necessarily what would scare someone else. What scared me about THE WITCH were the historical touches, and my fear that it would end with the shot of a girl hanging from the neck until dead. I feared that there would be rape (which did not happen) or some other fate given to a girl who did nothing wrong.
Horror being a personal genre feeds a lot of why I loved THE WITCH.
Unlike a movie that relies on jump scares, monsters coming out of the darkness, or ghosts slamming their faces against the screen, THE WITCH relies on something many people can relate to: Fear of family, fear of disappointment, and fear of the unknown.
THE WITCH deals in fear that gets built up for 15 minutes at the beginning, and then lets the coals die down, so that you’re sitting in anticipation, with bated breath, to see when the horror will come next. I jumped at crescendos in the music because I thought they heralded something terrifying – but it was just the forest, seen through the trees.
A thing you might want to be aware of about THE WITCH is that in some ways it really front loads the gore or the horror, and leaves you wondering when it will get that bad again – and it never does. It never gets as horrifying as the murder of an infant and using that child’s blood to slather oneself in gore.Instead the fear really turns inward. What it’s like to be a teenage girl in Puritan America, to have your mother hate you for many things you haven’t done. The fear of being sent away to be a servant, to be sold to another family, and amid all of this – the Devil is right there waiting to take his due. During the possession scene towards the end of the film I was reminded of all the exorcism scenes I’ve seen in the past, and how this one may have been the least flashy, but the most effective. The film’s simplicity lent itself to distress.
My favorite part of the movie is the ending – which I won’t give away, but I felt at the end of the day that it was a feminist movie. It reminded me a lot of the ending of THE BABADOOK, because in a way, the ending is a happy one. Perhaps not a traditional happy ending, but one that I walked away feeling satisfied with as a watcher.
When I write horror, I try to write horror that would scare me, or that would shake me up and keep me awake. THE WITCH totally did that for me. I hope it fuels some creepy thoughts for me as I continue to think about the effect it had on me as a viewer. I want to see it again, and again, and catch all the little things I may not have during my first viewing.