Robert Eggers's directorial debut. A 1630s New England Puritan family disintegrates after exile from their colony. The film that established the contemporary folk-horror revival.
New England, 1630s. A Puritan family — father William, mother Katherine, eldest daughter Thomasin, twin children Mercy and Jonas, and infant Samuel — is exiled from their colonial settlement after William refuses to accept the colony's religious authority. They establish a small farm at the edge of the wilderness. Samuel disappears mysteriously during a moment of distraction by Thomasin; the family begins to suspect that a witch in the surrounding forest has taken the child. The family's relationships deteriorate as the harvest fails, Mercy and Jonas accuse Thomasin of witchcraft, and small supernatural manifestations accumulate.
The film closes with the deaths of William, Katherine, and the twins, and with Thomasin — alone and starving — signing her name in Black Phillip's book (the goat being a Devil-figure that has been progressively revealing himself across the film) and joining the witches in the forest. The final sequence depicts Thomasin laughing in a state of grace as she rises naked into the night sky with the coven.
The Witch was Robert Eggers's first feature film. Eggers had previously worked as a production designer; his specific visual training shaped the film's approach to historical period accuracy. The film's settings, props, costumes, and dialogue were developed from primary-source 17th-century documents to a degree that very few historical-period films have attempted.
The film's dialogue is delivered in archaic English drawn from primary sources of the period. The Puritan family's speech is, on first viewing, occasionally difficult to follow — and the difficulty is the point. Eggers's argument was that the family's specific religious-linguistic framework is the substance of the film, not just background atmosphere. The accuracy gives the film a documentary register that contrasts sharply with the increasing supernatural content of its third act.
Anya Taylor-Joy was 18 during production. The Witch was her first major role. She has subsequently established herself as one of the most-significant working actresses of her generation, with leads in Split (2016), The Queen's Gambit (2020 TV), The Northman (2022, also Eggers), and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). The Witch was the structural launch of her career.
The performance is calibrated against the difficulty of the character's situation. Thomasin is, throughout the film, a young woman whose family is progressively turning against her and whose own internal religious framework provides no defence against the family's accusations. Taylor-Joy plays the character with the specific period-religious register Eggers required (the verbal cadence, the physical comportment of a 1630s Puritan adolescent) while also conveying the contemporary audience's recognition of the structural injustice of Thomasin's position. The performance does both jobs simultaneously.
The Witch is, by general critical consensus, the foundational text of the contemporary folk-horror revival. The sub-genre — horror rooted in pre-modern rural settings, religious and folk traditions, and the specific anxiety of isolation from broader society — had been dormant in mainstream cinema since The Wicker Man (1973) and The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971). The Witch's commercial and critical success (acquired by A24 at Sundance 2015, grossing $40m on a $4m budget) opened the door to subsequent folk-horror entries.
The sub-genre's contemporary peak includes Midsommar (2019, Ari Aster), The Wailing (2016, Na Hong-jin), Apostle (2018, Gareth Evans), Saint Maud (2019, Rose Glass), and various others. See our folk horror sub-genre page for the broader tradition. The Witch is the contemporary precedent that made subsequent folk-horror production commercially viable.