‘The Witch’ mines horror from centuries-old New England Puritan angst

TORONTO – Film director and horror fan Robert Eggers was looking for a fresh take on the witch myth. So he sought inspiration in archaic and bygone worlds.

The result is his unsettling supernatural tale “The Witch,” set in 1630 New England and told entirely in Jacobean English.

“In some ways it’s so unoriginal, like there’s nothing original about it,” Eggers chuckles during an interview at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival, where he screened his debut feature.

“But I’m interested in stuff that other people aren’t as interested in. And my influences are older and I just like digging further back into the past.”

Eggers admits he spent five years trying to convince people to shoot his unusual vision, which centres on an ultra-devout Puritan family banished by their community to a desolate woodland area.

Forced to rebuild their homestead on rugged land at the edge of a dark forest, they soon suffer a series of calamities that the pious parents determine must be the work of Satan.

From there, it doesn’t take much for them to blame their eldest daughter for attracting the scourges, but it becomes increasingly clear that something far more dangerous is lingering in the nearby woods.

Eggers wanted to “make something that was kind of horrific, or at least approaching horrific, which is different than a horror movie.”

“Maybe this colonial horror movie is just like an artisanal hipster horror movie or something,” says the bearded Brooklynite, making himself chuckle again with his impromptu tagline.

“Maybe it’s riding on that. I don’t know. But certainly my intention was to go to the archetypes.”

Eggers studied diaries and court records of actual accounts of witchcraft from the period, as well as 17th century literature in order to nail down the grammar.

He also immersed himself in English Calvinism to authentically detail the destructive dynamics at the heart of this “family drama.”

Gender politics were an obvious angle, he adds of the film, which earned him the best director award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“There certainly were men who were accused of witchcraft but in this early modern period we have a very male-dominated society and there really is this idea of female power equating as evil,” says Eggers, who has an extensive background in design for film, television, print, theatre and dance.

“That’s not how we talk about feminine power today, but I think that really, unfortunately, (is) still in the unconscious of our present culture. We haven’t completely released that.”

The 26-day shoot took place in an abandoned lumber town in northern Ontario, about an hour from North Bay, Ont., with a Canadian crew. Eggers says cobbling together Canadian tax credits allowed his vision to come together.

He says perseverance helped him find a way to make “The Witch” without compromising his ideals.

“Ninety per cent of the stuff I’m interested in is horror-esque and fairy tale-esque. I wrote a lot of screenplays (that I) realized no one wanted to make because they were super-weird and obscure and like, genre-less,” says Eggers.

“I was like ‘All right, fine, how can I make a genre film where I’m not compromising at all? How can I do that?’”

“The Witch” opens in theatres Friday.