After dazzling Sundance audiences and earning Robert Eggers the Best Director prize, The Witch is finally kicking off its marketing campaign, with one of the scariest trailers in years.
Writer/director Robert Eggers’ debut feature, which premiered to great acclaim at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival (and won the Best Director Prize in the U.S. Narrative Competition), painstakingly recreates a God-fearing New England decades before the 1692 Salem witch trials, in which religious convictions and pagan folklore famously clashed. Told through the eyes of the adolescent Thomasin — in a star-making turn by newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy — and supported by mesmerizing camera work and a powerful musical score, The Witch is a chilling and groundbreaking new take on the genre.
The plot is something like this…
Set in New England circa 1630, The Witch follows a farmer who get cast out of his colonial plantation and is forced to move his wife and five children to a remote plot of land on the edge of an ominous forest rumored to be controlled by witches. Almost immediately, strange and unsettling things begin to happen—the animals turn malevolent, the crops fail, and one child disappears while another becomes seemingly possessed by an evil spirit. As suspicion and paranoia mount, everyone begins to point the finger at teenage daughter Thomasin. They accuse her of witchcraft, which she adamantly denies…but as circumstances become more and more treacherous, each family member’s faith, loyalty, and love will be tested in shocking and unforgettable ways.
