To Live Deliciously: Post-Recession Anxiety In THE WITCH

Set in 1630, Robert Eggers’ The Witch follows a family banished from a Puritan community and forced to live, isolated and penniless, in a remote woodlands shack. Soon, malevolent forces begin to molest the kids and infect the goat, and the family is engulfed in a maelstrom of religious hysteria and occultist magic. With its deeply unsettling atmosphere and frenzied performances, The Witch has (not undeservedly) become one of the most acclaimed horror films of the new millennium, with many critics praising its attention to detail and the slow-burning tension of its narrative (as well as its mascot: the incomparable Black Phillip).

But beneath the supernatural overtones of its narrative, a continuous subtext of financial anxiety is at the heart of The Witch’s impact, and it is this that connects the film’s period setting to contemporary cultural fears; it’s the root of what makes the film so terrifying.

The Witch in context

Despite its singular production design and unconventional language, The Witch is arguably part of an on-going cycle of horror cinema that stems from Mulberry Street and Paranormal Activity¹. When those films were produced, the US housing market (and, comparatively, the global economy) was in relatively fine working order. But thanks to festival circuit momentum (Mulberry Street) and virally marketed glory (Paranormal Activity), they stuck around in the spotlight long enough to go from being merely prescient to frighteningly relevant. By the time both films had reached their maximum exposure levels, the housing market had collapsed and sent the world into an economical tailspin known today as the Great Recession¹.

What tied these films so indelibly to the zeitgeist was their settings: Mulberry Street takes place in an impoverished tenement building that is foreclosed shortly before the spread of a deadly virus, while Paranormal Activity sees a middle-class couple, in their middle-class home, experiencing a whole new meaning of the term ‘repossession’. It has been argued that such malignant forces are metaphors for the crushing effects of the recession following the housing market crash², and the recurring focus on the household says it all: The Strangers sees a well-to-do couple attacked in their enormous country abode simply because they were in it, and You’re Next features an entire family being wiped out – in their parents’ rural estate, no less – so that the killers may procure a sizable inheritance.

Many of these films feature characters that are circumstantially broke, and are forced into such dire situations because they’re caught at the losing end of the pecking order. The Innkeepers, for instance, takes place in a haunted hotel that the protagonists work in purely because they can’t afford not to, whereas Starry Eyes features a mentally unstable young actress pursuing the Hollywood dream in order, at least partially, to rise above her systematically patronising day job¹. But regardless of the approach, the fact remains that contemporary horror cinema is beginning to explore these anxieties of finance and foreclosure on an increasing scale, and it’s a trend that is evident globally, from the Spanish shocker Kidnapped to Hong Kong’s devastating Dream Home.

The aesthetics of misery

Besides James Wan’s The Conjuring – set a mere forty-two years before the film’s release – The Witch is unique in this cycle of economic horror because of its 17^th century setting. Not only do the events of the film take place nearly four hundred years before the recession, it’s also set long before ‘The United States of America’ was even a thing.

That should realistically disqualify it from a subtextual reading of recession anxiety, especially seeing as most of its supposed contemporaries take place during the present day. Moreover, setting the film during this period was certainly a question of taste for writer/director Robert Eggers, who has spoken extensively of his fascination for Salem-era witchcraft and folklore. As such, it would be much simpler to argue that The Witch is merely an exercise in style and genre, a muscle-flexing scare-fest designed as a feature-length LinkedIn profile from a production designer campaigning for better funding. But the emphasis on newfound poverty in The Witch cannot be ignored.

In dealing with the anxieties that arise from dire financial circumstances, The Witch picks up where the more supernatural films such as Paranormal Activity, The House of the Devil, and Insidious leave off. But where those examples see their protagonists tormented by malignant spirits in reasonably affluent housing (or unreasonably affluent in the case of The House of the Devil), the characters in The Witch live in a house that looks as though it may not survive the winter. It’s a damp-ridden, poorly lit cottage situated in the clearing of a Gothic forest, propped up by hastily assembled woodwork and straw roofing. Inside, the film’s murky, colourless hues become even dimmer, and the inefficiency of the candlelight only exacerbates its depressive, lifeless atmosphere.

It’s an aesthetic that drives home the increasing hopelessness of the family’s situation, and is absolutely essential to its morbid commentary on destitute poverty. For instance, the blanketing darkness heightens the smouldering tension as William confesses to selling Katherine’s family heirloom in exchange for a hunting rifle. Within that conflict is an interesting (and relatable) tug of war between niceties and essentials. Katherine is angry about the sale of the heirloom because it belonged to her father, and it represents her ancestry and identity; William’s angle is that you can’t hunt for food with a plate.

This is an especially pertinent observation on sharp financial downturns, wherein earthly possessions begin to lose their sacred value, and luxuries and decorations must often be surrendered in order to support a continued survival. But the notion is deepened further when William and his son Caleb prove to be largely useless with the gun, which sadly presents the family as fish out of water; it’s obvious that, before the events of the film, they’ve rarely been faced with a situation that required them to fully fend for themselves.

Pride and (religious) prejudice

The characters in The Witch are not descended from royalty, exactly, but it’s clear that they have never had it quite so bad as they do now. That said, however, there are hints that Katherine, at least, comes from a reasonably well-off background, hence the ceramics and expensive pottery that incongruously adorn their crumbling household. This is evidently what draws the devil to the family in the first place, following Katherine and William’s “prideful conceit” which leads to their excommunication from the local plantation. The arrival of the devil on their land – occupying the body of their goat, Black Phillip – is thus explainable through their failure in a pledge to God; he’s targeting them because their faith is weakened by sin and, consequently, by poverty. His temptation is a life lived deliciously, and all he asks of them is to commit to a life of sin.

The devil in The Witch is different from the evil forces in films such as Paranormal Activity and Insidious because he isn’t actively trying to kill them, but merely to tempt them. Those who resist, or who cannot pledge themselves to his path – even the unbaptized baby Samuel – are left to die in their impoverished stasis; in financial purgatory, the film argues, action is the only way forward.

Speaking in terms of sin (or metaphorical sin at least), it’s possible to draw similar links from this aspect of The Witch to other economic horror films in the current cycle. In You’re Next and Cheap Thrills, characters attempt to cheat the Great Recession through various transgressions, and in Starry Eyes, a starving actress can only succeed in Hollywood by giving herself over to a murderous cult¹. In consolidating these readings, it’s arguable that these post-recession films are suggesting that the conventional American systems have failed, and a better chance of survival is available through different, albeit equally damning methods.

Conclusion

What unites the The Witch’s argument is, ultimately, style.

Traditionally, the Terrible Place is a location in horror movies where the protagonist must confront the enemy, monster, or killer. From the Universal monster movies of the 1930s to the slasher cycle of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Terrible Place usually looked very terrible indeed; but in the current cycle of economic horror, it’s a mutable location, usually a home, that is transformed from a respectable, attractively kept space into a ruinous bloodbath.

The Witch, however, is the first example in the cycle to feature the original incarnation of the trope from the very beginning, and part of this is due to its period setting, the same period setting that ostensibly separates it from all talk of modern financial crises. Furthermore, it uses the ideology of the era – witch hunting and religious mania were both commonplace in 17^th century New England – to illustrate the central conflict of post-recession horror. Arguably, these aspects allow The Witch to reduce such issues to their fundamental concerns, allowing it to explore and construct its argument from there. To reiterate, the characters can be faithful to either God or Satan, and fence sitters are condemned; translating this into modern terms, it means standing by a system that has broken, choosing an alternate path, or doing nothing.

But far from playing devil’s advocate, so to speak, The Witch never once lifts the shroud of evil from Black Phillip’s enticements, and it presents either choice – sin or sink – as an unfavourable and unwise move to make. The Great Recession, it implies, is a lose-lose situation for working men and women everywhere.

Question: What truly frightens you about The Witch?

References

¹ Craig Ian Mann. (2015). “Death and Dead End Jobs: American Horror and the Great Recession”.

² Sean Brayton. (2013). “When Commodities Attack: Reading the Narratives of the Great Recession and Late Capitalism in Horror Films”.