By Keri O’Shea
Editor’s note: this article discusses The Witch in detail, and as such contains some spoilers. Please read it after you’ve seen the film. For a spoiler-free review, click here.
One of the most unusual and atmospheric films to hit the festival circuit late last year, The Witch – a claustrophobic tale of isolation, privation and the possibility of malignant supernatural forces in the New World – is about to get its general release. There’s been a sizeable promotional campaign behind the film so far, and it seems that the distributors have high hopes that it will make something of a breakthrough into the mainstream. We’ve already commented that we think some of the choices behind this promotion have been questionable and may even risk misrepresenting the film to a potential audience who expect something different; I certainly hope that isn’t the case, and that those who go and see it properly appreciate this rather understated historical thriller. Misleading poster campaigns are, after all, par-for-the-course these days; that isn’t really the topic of discussion here. Rather more relevantly, many hundreds of films have boasted that they are ‘based on true events’, and The Witch is fascinating because it, too, declares that it is based on a number of alleged real-life accounts from the 17th Century – it’s the nature of those accounts which gives this film both a unique perspective and an otherworldliness which reaches right back to the real New World settlers of the time.
“If ever there were witches, men and women in covenant with the Devil, here are multitudes in New England.”
The Rev. Samuel Parris (1692)
Those who set off from England seeking to build their ‘City on the Hill’ – their Christian utopia, unfettered by what they saw as the corruption of Europe – nonetheless took with them many of the anxieties which had plagued them in the Old World. Frequently, these anxieties concerned witchcraft. In making the claim, therefore, that The Witch is uniquely closely based on the accounts of settlers who found themselves threatened by magic in their new communities, these ‘true-life events’ are poised at an intriguing intersection between real and unreal, natural and supernatural, Christianity and its dark, persistent underbelly. Names, places, dates, ages – many of these things were meticulously recorded by the Puritans and are verifiably true; they just happen to occur in these meticulous narratives alongside descriptions of malevolent curses, plagues, blights, possessions, shape-shifting and unholy covenants with the Devil. Many early American settlers adamantly believed in the phenomena which scares Thomasin, her parents and siblings, and adjudicated against it accordingly. This article takes a closer look at some of the accounts which may have influenced the filmmakers, showing how they intersect with a sensitive and accurate exploration of these themes in the film and how The Witch captures this (to us) incongruous state very well, forcing us to peer between the lines of its narrative and wonder just what, if any, evil influence is holding sway over the family.
THE HAMMER OF THE WITCHES
In order to look at the society of the 17th Century, however, we need to look back further and to understand more about the belief in witchcraft which the Puritans first inherited, then exported. Times of unrest have long given way to periods of panic and unreason, and despite the Renaissance being known for great leaps forward in science and the arts, throughout the Late Medieval and Renaissance years various calamities were more and more often explained away as malignant interference caused by witchcraft. Whilst certainly not the only word on the subject, one book in particular encapsulated much of the paranoia about witches, whilst also exerting a surprising amount of influence in Europe (as well as taking advantage of new technology such as the Gutenberg Press, thus neatly representing how the shock of the new doesn’t necessarily dispense with the old). This strange nexus of officialdom and folk belief, peppered with unsubstantiated anecdote and meticulous rule of law, was a tome entitled the Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of the Witches’) which appeared in the late 1480s and came to act as something of a ‘witch-hunter’s manual’, repetitively dismissing all cynicism on the subject in order to advise on how to detect, arrest, try and punish witches. Gaining credence and influence in the following decades, the MM thereafter turned up in the royal courts of Europe and the higher strata of the law, excusing and bestowing jurisdiction on the subject of witchcraft.
We shouldn’t underestimate how important something like the Malleus Maleficarum was; it set the bar for the treatment of witches for all of the subsequent ‘witch crazes’ which followed, and its words on what witches did (and why they did it) can certainly be seen in 17th Century New England. For instance, the book relates the words of an alleged witch and child murderer, who told her accuser “with our spells we kill them in their cradles or even when they are sleeping by their parents’ side…then we secretly take them from their graves, and cook them in a cauldron, until the whole flesh comes away from the bones to make a soup which may easily be drunk. Of the more solid matter we make an unguent which is of virtue to help us in our arts and pleasures and our transportations.” This unguent, then, was applied to the broomsticks of legend (the same witch also mentions enchanting chairs in the same way) and used for flight. It’s an idea about witchcraft which has lasted over five hundred years so far, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it makes sense within the remit of Puritan society too, and is referenced shortly after the baby disappears in our film. The Devil and his followers couldn’t create matter (only God had that power) but he could certainly help his practitioners to break the rules of the natural world, and – in keeping with a subtext of witchcraft belief that witches abhorred conventional gender roles, including motherhood and child-rearing – dispatching an infant would have been little concern to them, but monstrous to mainstream society.
Likewise, witches were believed to have the ability to shape-shift, taking on animal form; they were also frequently linked with ‘familiars’, animals which usually lived with the witches and worked on their behalf for the fee of suckling from them (and there’s that monstrous spin on motherhood again, folks). In The Witch, the family first hunt a hare which seems to have some sort of supernatural significance; they fail to catch it, and it lures father and son deeper into the unfamiliar woods near which they have settled, whilst also later re-appearing near the farmstead, inevitably a portent of far worse things to come. An association between witches and creatures such as rats, cats and hares (as well as alleged hybrid species, unrecognisable to witnesses) has been of longer duration, and the Malleus Maleficarum describes “a workman [who] was one day chopping some wood to burn in his house. A large cat suddenly appeared and began to attack him, and when he was driving it off, another even larger one came and attacked him with the first more fiercely. And when he again tried to drive them away, behold, three of them together attacked him, jumping up at his face, and biting and scratching his legs. In great fright and, as he said, more panic-stricken than he had ever been, he crossed himself and, leaving his work, fell upon the cats, which were swarming over the wood and again leaping at his face and throat, and with difficulty drove them away by beating one on the head, another on the legs, and another on the back. After the space of an hour, while he was again engaged upon his task, two servants of the town magistrates came and took him as a malefactor and led him into the presence of the bailiff or judge…the judge broke into these words: ‘You most wicked of men, how can you not acknowledge your crime? At such a time on such a day you beat three respected matrons of this town, so that they lie in their beds unable to rise or to move!'” Eventually, the hapless man is able to prove that the ‘respected matrons’ and the animals are one and the same. Ideas about animal familiars certainly persist into the Hopkins days in England, and cross the Atlantic too (as late as the 19th Century, the infamous story of the Bell Witch hauntings tell of a strange, large hare on his property which farmer John Bell initially attempted to shoot. This creature seemed to herald a widespread array of supernatural phenomena at the Bell family home, much of which later centred upon alleged visitations by a malign witch, often called ‘Kate’.)
So, from the time of the Hammer of the Witches and beyond, a rich seam of fear and accusation had frequently placed women in particular under suspicion of covert attempts to subvert and destroy Christian society via magic. It’s little surprise that, labouring under the dual weights of expectation and persecution which drove them to seek the New World in the first place, the Puritans would end up taking the old and deep-rooted belief in witchcraft with them, where it often became intensely magnified and distorted by their extraordinary, often challenging circumstances.
In the second part of Decoding The Witch, I’ll look more closely at contemporary accounts of witchcraft in 17th Century America, identifying further aspects which overlap with the narrative of the movie: assaults on crops, livestock, children – and the particular enticements offered by Old Scratch. To quote the Malleus Maleficarum one last time, we’ll look at the ways “witches can with the help of the devil bring harm upon men and their affairs in all the ways in which the devil alone can injure or deceive, namely, in their affairs, their reputation, their body, their reason, and their life” – a definite focus for the events in the film, not forgetting that level of uncertainty it’s able to maintain.
Click here for Part 2…