Movie Yelling: Things About The Witch That Got My Dander Right Up, Like The Ending And All The Stuff That Came Before It -The Toast

So everyone’s talking about how mad The Witch made us, the American moviegoing dum-dum, and it did make me mad, and I am one of those dum-dums, and I am not going to let the conversation turn into “why can’t these audiences desperate for gore and mindless knife-thrusting sit back and enjoy a really period-accurate movie about people saying “thee” to each other and shucking rotted corn for like seven hours?” Not on my fucking watch, pal.

A of all, I’ve seen The White Ribbon and The Babadook, so you’re not going to get me to feel bad about my dumb lizard-brain; I get that not all horror movies are going to be Black Christmas or Mannequin or Martyrs and I don’t even want them to be! What I do want them to have: SOME HORROR.

Here’s what I will concede is boss as hell about The Witch

the trailer
the woods
those creepy stalks of corn in their garden
that bananas scene where the raven is like pluck-plucking its beak on the mom’s breast and it’s like that super-freaky tableau of THE DEVIL’S BREASTFEEDING, that got me but good
my friend Jos said afterwards that it wasn’t a raven, it was a crow (or vice versa, my friend Jos says a lot of things and I don’t always pay attention, not because he’s not interesting but because I’m not always interested in learning things, which is really more about me than it is about him) and he said something like “if it’s by itself, it’s a raven; if it’s in a flock, it’s a crow,” by which he meant that one is solitary and one travels in packs but which I took to mean as “a raven by itself will turn into a crow if it meets another raven” which I thought was really fascinating until he gently corrected me, I should really listen to Jos more
They definitely all acted up a storm, especially the dad and the little dude who played Caleb, they were for sure Acting the hell up and I respect that
END OF LIST

I don’t know, man, there were some really great moments in the movie but they were punctuated by eight hours of just filming the back of some kid’s head and a lot of dialogue that felt like it was super impressed with itself. “Tither gone the mickle prayn’t, Motherling?” Like, yes, those words are VERY old, okay??

Here’s my real problem: there is about four minutes all told of the blood-milk and the creepy baby-smashing and in between there’s just not a lot going on. Like, at one point the dad says “We have no crops! We’re definitely not going to last the winter,” and it would be great, at that point, to start seeing some consequences of what he just said, but nope, next scene they’re at dinner and we literally never see them go hungry. I WANNA SEE EM GET GAUNT AND WORRIED. Give me some consequences! Like: the horse goes missing and they lose all the animals they trapped, but everyone’s dead before they get a chance to miss them. Let ’em swing before you cut ’em down, The Witch!

I also super appreciated that they had the baby disappear within the first five minutes, rad choice, but then follow it up with some creepy shit! You have a farm full of animals and none of them mysteriously dies! A field full of creepy-ass corn stalks and none of them get rearranged in a freaky-ass pattern or like, I dunno, hides a hornet’s nest in it, only the hornets are more witches. Look, I’m not a writer. I just like slow but steady escalation of the stakes in my scary movies.

I also REFUSE TO BELIEVE what this movie asks of us, which is that after like [checks watch] three weeks in the woods, ten-year-old Caleb (he’s MAYBE eleven, but he’s definitely ten) is already surreptitiously (heh) checking out his older sister’s rack of breasts? That is SO FAST! I feel like you need to establish a longer pattern of isolation before some little dude is like, “Welp, time to gaze upon the breasts of my sister, verily and sirrah.”