The Witch
The VVitch (2015) — dir. by Robert Eggers
The VVitch is a contemporary horror film produced by A24. The film takes place in a small, rural village in 16th-century New England, focusing on a poor, secluded family and the slow burn of their internal, cyclical paranoia. Thomasin, the eldest daughter within the family, in her late teens, played by Anya Taylor Joy, is the central character of the film. Thomasin's family undergoes the dying of crops, scarce money and scarcer resources, and she is the unappreciated, even degraded, daughter who takes on all of the various roles her parents force upon her, taking care of her younger siblings with increasing anxiety and exhaustion, made to do far more housework than anyone else in the family. She is insulted and demeaned by her mother, underacknowledged by her father, and mocked and tormented by her siblings. In the beginning of the film, Thomasin plays peekabo with her baby brother, during which he suddenly disappears. It is revealed that the child has been kidnapped by a local witch and murdered for a potion. Later on, her other brother is also led into the forest and seduced by the witch, becoming possessed and ultimately dying. All the while, strange animals representative of death and destruction appear, such as the family's black horned goat, a hare, and crows. Slowly, the family turns on Thomasin, blaming her for the surge of death and misfortune. Strange occurrences continue to plague the family, such as a changeling offered to the mother that she believes to be her baby, and begins to nurse, which is revealed to actually be a crow maiming her breasts. The black goat, known as Black Philip, kills her father in front of her, and Thomasin wakes up at one point with bloodied hands. Her mother attacks her, blaming Thomasin for all of the destruction of the family and of witchcraft, and in self-defense Thomasin kills her. Ultimately, Thomasin comes to the conclusion that Black Philip is indeed, the devil, and urges him to reveal himself to her. He begins to speak in a man's voice, and asks if she would like to "live deliciously." At this point, she signs his book, and she follows the goat into the forest, finding a coven of witches worshipping Satan at a bonfire, levitating, which she joins, laughing.
Birthplace(s) of Monstrosity
In The VVitch, the monstrous manifests and reproduces in the domestic, in the family. The seclusion of Thomasin's family, banished from a settlement for religious disagreement, constructs a claustrophobic, colorless environment conducive to paranoia and repression. Thomasin's family subscribe to Calvinism, thus to a fundamental belief in predetermination and predestination. The tightly wound Puritanism of the film, in its seclusion and setting, its bleak color scheme of neutral, grey tones and gloomy weather, arise as the true site of monstrosity for Eggers. As Kristeva writes, “The abject is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence" (Kristeva 9). Indeed, the abject—in this case, Thomasin's "unruliness," in her female body and self-determination—only emerges, only exists because of the religious doctrine that defines it. The chokehold of religion within the family births a frontier, malleable and treacherous. In the beginning of the film, Thomasin prays, admitting her disobediences. She says: "I here confess I’ve lived in sin. I’ve been idle of my work, disobedient to my parents, neglectful of my prayer. I have, in secret, played upon my Sabbath. And broken every one of thy commandments in thought. Followed the desires of mine own will, and not the Holy Spirit." Thomasin believes her supposed sinfulness to be the initial seed, perpetrator, pressure point, for the misfortune spreading through her family. The toxic nature of the zealots' beliefs, however, clearly exists as a fertile soil for imaginary monstrosity to occur, as a site to measure one's own religiosity and virtue against. Even within a limited, cramped, group of relatives, the "repulsive gift" of the imagined "Other" manifests.
Visible and Invisible Monsters
The witch is a uniquely alluring, terrifying, and culturally revealing archetype. The word has become synonymous with female monstrosity, in its belittlement, minimization, aesthetics, hypersexualization, and in its terror, violence, and potency. The construct of the witch has its footholds in a deep, violent, rabid history of misogyny, thus the construct itself arrives to us as a fantasy of monsters, as a space against which to define monstrosity so that misogyny itself will not be viewed as the truly monstrous area. The infamous, seminal Malleus Maleficarum, known as the "Hammer of Witches," published in 1487, protrudes as the most blatant and grounding landmark of that misogynistic fear. The text documents and details the common beliefs regarding withcraft in Western Europe at time time, intended to serve as a guide for witch-hunters. The book depicts women, particularly midwives, as the primary source of all witchcraft and its associated evils. Indeed, the text argues that female desire is the seed from which all witchery stems. The processes of identifying witches are gruesome and mostly involve invasive searches of women's bodies as visible sites of deformity and non-normativity. The witch serves the embodiment of the existential threat of women to manmade, violent power structures and in this way the witch is always political. In Silvia Federici's text Witches, Witch-Hunts, and Women, she asserts, "The witch was the communist and terrorist of her time, which required a 'civilizing' drive to produce the new 'subjectivity' and sexual division of labor on which the capitalist work discipline would rely" (Federici 43). Monstrosity is a forceful political and economic tool, utilized to enact social order and to demonize, whilst also requiring, the exploitation of sex work and the unpaid labor of women.
In contemporary American pop culture, the revival of the witch lives in reclamation—of monstrosity, of the word, of the history. The witch as resister, as feminist icon, as healer, as female rage, as marginalized power. The specific threat of language unravels and transforms into a monster; indeed, the word witch may well be considered an ontological monster, a weaponized word meant to conjure an imaginary threat or abnormality, that of female autonomy. The murky etymology of the word, with unclear roots spread through Old English ("sorceress"), Latin (from "necromantia"), and countless other reverberations, presents a complex, unsettled base, with a fundamentally undefined idea of monstrosity. Thomasin reclaims the label in jest, taunting her younger siblings, as she says "I be the witch of the wood." Ultimately her sarcastic reclamation metastasizes, becoming truth. Monstrosity, conceptually, only exists because of the very notion of non-normativity. The word "witch" functions to legitimize that idea of non-normativity and decisively emboss a "repulsive Other" into the cultural psyche. Yet the word also blooms into a subversion, a claiming, a self-identifying of that moniker, thus becoming a locus of power.
In an interview with The Verge, Eggers describes the singular figure of the witch, in her history and allegorical fullness: "And in this super male-dominated society, the evil witch is also women's fears and ambivalence and fantasies and desire about their own power. It's a tragedy to read about a young girl upsetting someone, and since she didn't think she could have the kind of power to create that reaction, it has to be the devil. And thus, she thinks she's an evil witch. It's chilling."
The family's patriarch clearly favors Thomasin over his other children, even his wife, and this relationship twinges with a slight sexual unease, glimpsed in snatches but always lingering. Thomasin works hard to keep these affections, as the managing and manipulating of her father's love allows her some semblance of safety and power within the patriarchal dynamic. Indeed, the love of men serves as a currency here and also, as a curse, as a volatile and necessary element women must control without appearing to do so, lest they be accused of withcraft. The monstrosity truly manifests as a divine portent in The Witch: when Thomasin eventually begins to lose even her father's affections, in his paranoia and unstable, shame-laced grip on his own masculinity, their fight is a warning sign of the vileness to come. Thomasin eventually kills her mother because of her mother's own misplaced monstrousness, revealing how women are often pushed into their own monstrosity by the forces of hegemonic masculinity and the grueling experience of navigating patriarchy. Here, women can either serve patriarchy, it seems, or be demolished by it. As Creed suggests, the witch represents an unmanageable, lustful and defiant femininity—or rejection of its boundaries—that destabilizes masculinity in all its power and entitlement. Creed writes, "Horror cinema functions as ‘a form of modern defilement rite [that] attempts to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies" (Creed 14).
