Film

The Witch

Name: The Witch
Genre: Horror, Drama, Mystery, Fantasy, Thriller
Released: 2016
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger

Robert Eggers' 1630s Puritan nightmare is less jump-scare horror than slow theological suffocation: a banished family starves on the edge of a forest while something unseen picks them off one by one. Every line of dialogue is lifted from period sources, every frame lit like a Dutch painting. It's patient, austere, and genuinely unsettling — for people who want dread, not shocks.

TMDb rating

7.0

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Another family destroyed from the inside by inherited belief and grief, with the same slow-building dread and refusal to let you know what's real until it's far too late.

But Even more punishing in its final act — some find it traumatic rather than scary.

The Lighthouse2019

Eggers again, with the same commitment to archaic dialect and slow psychological unraveling, this time between two men going mad in isolation instead of a family in the woods.

But Deliberately claustrophobic and increasingly deranged — funnier and stranger, but less of a straight scare.

Midsommar2019

Folk horror in broad daylight — a grieving woman drawn into a cult with its own ancient logic, unfolding with the same unhurried dread and ambiguous belief systems as Eggers' film.

But Nearly two and a half hours, and the horror is emotional and grotesque rather than frightening in a conventional way.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Day of Wrath1943

The same Puritan-adjacent religious dread and the same central question — is this woman a witch, or is her community simply looking for one — filmed seventy years before Eggers, with the same unbearable patience.

Dreyer's austere Danish masterpiece, made under Nazi occupation, about an old woman accused of witchcraft and the pastor's household whose faith and desire quietly poison each other.

But Black and white, stately, subtitled, and built on stillness rather than incident — a demanding watch by design.

Rosemary's Baby1968

The original slow-burn paranoia film: a woman isolated by the people meant to protect her, gaslit until she can't tell faith from delusion — the template for domestic occult dread.

But Its pacing and gender politics feel very much of 1968; nothing here will shock a modern horror audience.

Apostle2018

A man infiltrates an isolated religious community on a remote island where the old gods want their due — similar rot-beneath-the-piety atmosphere with more overt violence.

But Gorier and more plot-driven than atmospheric; the mystery unravels faster than Eggers ever lets his.

The Village2004

An isolated 19th-century community lives in fear of creatures in the surrounding woods, held together by rules and secrets — same claustrophobic terror of the treeline.

But M. Night Shyamalan's twist-reliant structure plays very differently than Eggers' commitment to ambiguity.

It Comes at Night2017

A family barricaded against an unseen threat slowly turns on itself through suspicion rather than monsters — nearly all dread, almost no release.

But Extremely withholding; if you need answers by the credits, this will frustrate you.

The Crucible1996

Arthur Miller's Salem witch trials dramatized straight, showing how accusation and hysteria — not the supernatural — can dismantle a Puritan community from within.

But Stagey and dialogue-heavy, closer to courtroom drama than horror; no atmosphere of the uncanny at all.

The Others2001

A mother and her children sealed inside a fog-bound house, convinced something malevolent shares it with them — a gentler, more classical ghost story with the same slow dread of belief unraveling.

But Its twist is now widely known, which blunts a film built almost entirely around one reveal.

Häxan1922

It's the direct historical record behind everything Eggers dramatizes: the same trials, confessions and imagery of witches and goats, presented as scholarship that keeps sliding into nightmare.

A wild silent-era hybrid of documentary and dramatized reenactment tracing the history of witchcraft persecution, from confessions extracted under torture to hallucinatory visions of the devil's sabbath.

But Silent, nearly a century old, and structurally strange — part lecture, part fever dream — with no single story to follow.

Carrie1976

Swap the Puritan farmhouse for a 1970s American high school and it's the same engine: a devout mother who fears her daughter's power, and a girl who eventually stops apologizing for it.

A teenage girl with unexplained power, raised by a mother whose religious fanaticism curdles into abuse, pushed toward a bloody reckoning that the whole film has been quietly building.

But Campier and more overtly pulpy — De Palma's split-screen theatrics are a world away from Eggers' restraint.