2016 • Brazil
Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) takes a Puritan family, removes the safety of community, parks them beside a forest and waits for faith, pride and suspicion to start eating the household alive. Then there is Black Phillip, who remains perhaps the finest argument ever made against trusting a goat with strong opinions.
For this FolknHell episode, Andy, David and Dave are joined by writer Ian Winterton for a discussion that ranges from historical authenticity and religious extremism to patriarchy, ambiguity and whether a film built around Christianity and Satanism can still satisfy a folk horror definition often associated with older pagan belief. The answer is not completely tidy, but the enthusiasm for the film certainly is.
In seventeenth-century New England, William and his family are banished from their Puritan settlement after a religious dispute. They establish a new home beside an isolated forest, believing their faith and labour will be enough to sustain them.
Almost immediately, the family begins to fracture. Their infant son disappears, crops fail and suspicion settles increasingly on eldest daughter Thomasin. William’s pride, Katherine’s grief and the children’s fears turn the household into a closed system in which every misfortune becomes evidence of sin.
Beyond the family’s religious explanations, something may genuinely be moving in the woods. The film gradually narrows the distance between feared witchcraft and actual witchcraft until Thomasin is forced to choose between the collapsing world that has condemned her and the darker freedom waiting outside it.
Yes. Very much so, even if the route there is more complicated than the label suggests.
The episode’s debate centres on one awkward question: if the film’s supernatural framework is Christian and Satanic rather than explicitly pagan, does it still represent the sort of older belief system FolknHell usually looks for?
David Hall strongly argues that it does. The family is isolated, expelled from its wider community and trapped inside a severe inherited belief system that shapes every interpretation of what happens. Their religion does not merely colour the story. It governs fear, gender, punishment and the family’s inability to respond rationally to crisis.
Ian also raises the possibility that some supernatural events could be read through hallucination or ergot poisoning, which keeps the film’s certainty productively unstable. But folk horror does not require a demon to provide identification papers at the door. Human belief, communal exclusion and inherited superstition are enough to do serious damage on their own.
By the end, the FolknHell position is clear: The Witch is folk horror and a modern landmark of it.
Isolation as self-inflicted doom The family’s banishment is not incidental. William’s pride helps create the physical and social isolation that makes everything worse. Removed from a functioning community, the family becomes a pressure cooker in which suspicion cannot escape.
Faith as both shelter and weapon Religion gives the family a language for understanding the world, but that same language turns on them. Sin, damnation and divine punishment become explanations for grief, sexuality and disobedience.
Thomasin and the patriarchy Ian and the hosts read Thomasin’s journey as a movement from oppression towards a deeply compromised kind of freedom. She is blamed, watched and constrained by a family structure that gives her little agency.
When does Thomasin become the witch? A particularly good strand of the discussion asks whether the title refers to Thomasin at all for most of the film. Dave questions the assumption, David asks when the transformation actually happens, and Ian places it at the end as a form of initiation.
Historical detail without museum glass The production’s period language, research and design are repeatedly praised. Eggers builds a world that feels inhabited rather than displayed, and Ralph Ineson’s gravity helps sell the family’s beliefs as lived reality.
Slow horror, deep roots The film avoids turning itself into a parade of shocks. Its dread comes from accumulation: glances, accusations, failed crops, sounds from the woods and increasingly impossible events.
FolknHell’s enthusiasm for The Witch is about as subtle as Black Phillip standing in a kitchen.
The film scores 28.5 out of 30, with individual ratings ranging from 9 to 10, making it the highest-rated film in the podcast series at that point. Ian’s enthusiasm matches the panel’s, and the discussion treats the film not merely as a successful modern horror but as something close to a new benchmark for folk horror.
There are small reservations. The precise reason for the family’s banishment can feel fuzzy, the period dialogue asks viewers to pay attention, and the film’s deliberate pace will always lose some people.
But as a piece of folk horror, it is extraordinarily complete. Isolation, inherited belief, fear of the wilderness, social exclusion, superstition and the destruction of a family all work together rather than taking turns.
Worth watching? Very much so. Especially if you like your folk horror meticulous, merciless and willing to make a goat the most persuasive character in the room.
How each host rated this film