A decade ago, Robert Eggers unleashed The Witch on unsuspecting audiences at Sundance, and horror cinema hasn't been the same since.
The film—technically The VVitch: A New-England Folktale, because Eggers is extra like that—felt like a provocation from the start. Here was a slow-burn period piece about Puritan paranoia, shot in natural light, performed in period-accurate dialect so thick that A24 briefly considered adding subtitles. It was everything modern horror supposedly wasn't supposed to be: patient, ambiguous, more concerned with dread than jump scares.
And it worked. Brilliantly.
The Witch became the foundational text for what we now call "elevated horror"—a term I hate but can't escape. It proved that audiences hungry for intelligent, atmospheric horror would show up for films that treated them like adults. The movie grossed over $40 million on a $4 million budget, launching both Eggers' career and A24's reputation as the premium label for art-house genre filmmaking.
The influence is everywhere now. You can draw a direct line from The Witch to Hereditary, Midsommar, The Lighthouse, and dozens of other films that prioritize atmosphere and existential dread over conventional scares. Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Ti West—they all owe a debt to what Eggers accomplished here.
What makes The Witch so effective is its commitment to its own reality. Eggers researched Puritan beliefs obsessively, understanding that to this family, the Devil is as real as the wolves in the forest. The horror doesn't come from supernatural jump scares—it comes from watching religious faith become a weapon families use to destroy each other.
Anya Taylor-Joy gives a star-making performance as Thomasin, the teenage daughter whose burgeoning womanhood becomes a target for her family's paranoia. Watch her eyes in the final scene—there's liberation in her corruption, freedom in her damnation. It's genuinely subversive stuff, wrapped in the trappings of a folk horror nightmare.
