Pilgrims Going Bonkers

Rating: 8/10 (18 October 2016)

Up until its hard sell, literal ending, "The Witch" proves that it knows better than most horror offerings these days how much scarier stories are when audiences are left to fill in the blanks with their own imaginations. It creates and builds a creepy sense of foreboding and dread, and is precisely scary because it creates horror out of happenings that anyone could relate to: loneliness, isolation, male inadequacy, religious extremism, disintegrating family dynamics, mental illness, the death of a child. You don't need supernatural oogie boogies to make any of these things scary. Up to a certain point in the film, and despite the fact that we see the witch herself, the film allows its audience to interpret the story as not having a supernatural element at all, and instead be the physical manifestations of the internal mental anguish of its characters. But not content with that, the filmmakers have to make the Satanic spin literal, which immediately makes the film less scary, since I don't believe in God, Satan, Heaven, or Hell, so there's very little in any of that mumbo jumbo for me to be afraid of.
What does scare me is religious fanaticism, and that's where I think this film is most effective. It shows what happens when a group of people who have nothing but faith on which to rely begin to lose that faith, and the lengths people will go to to explain random events as not being random at all but rather the conscious design of a higher being. The mother and father in this film would rather see their own children branded as witches and likely killed than admit that cruel things sometimes just happen, not because humans are being tested or humbled by an all-powerful God, but rather because sh*t just happens. When you've got parents who are willing to offer up their children for sacrifice to prove to themselves that their belief in a fairy tale is justified, you've got an allegory, whether intended by the filmmaker or not, for the kind of religious extremism plaguing the world now, let alone 400 years ago. Now THAT's a horror movie.
Grade: A-