The Witch is a 2015 horror film by Robert Eggers starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Dickie, and Ralph Ineson. The story follows a Puritan family exiled from their community in 1630s New England, who settle at the edge of a forest inhabited by witches. It’s moody and suspenseful, an exercise in paranoia punctuated by long, silent shots of the foreboding woods and a sweeping sense of isolation. Despite their devout religious belief, nobody is coming to save these people, and, indeed, nobody does. Eggers calls his film “an inherited nightmare” [1], and it certainly is an effectively nightmarish presentation of a fear so classic that it might even be considered cliche. But the word “inherited” bears considerable weight when discussing a period piece, so the question becomes: entertaining or not, frightening or not, is this portrayal of seventeenth-century Puritans accurate to reality?

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[1] Stephen Saito, “Persistence of Vision: Inside the Making of the Witch, a Horror Classic for the Ages – Moviemaker Magazine.” MovieMaker, January 31, 2023.