The Devil isn't the scariest thing about The Witch

Writer/director Robert Eggers came out swinging onto the horror scene with his debut film The Witch (famously stylized as The VVitch), which debuted at Sundance in 2015 before getting a wide release in 2016. Critics ate the movie up, earning it a 91 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (including a Golden Tomato Award for Best Horror Movie 2016) and an 83 Metascore. It scooped up an impressive number of award wins and even more nominations at film festivals all over. Sure, general audience reaction was a little more mixed, but that's to be expected for a movie whose terror is more insidious, creepy, and slow than loud and crowd-pleasing. For horror fans, though, the film is rightly considered a modern classic.

The plot of The Witch focuses on the trials and tribulations of a family of Puritan separatists who find themselves removed from their community following an unspecified religious dispute. They make a new home on the edge of the wilderness, within which dwells their greatest fear: a witch, and with her, presumably the capital-D Devil. Eldest daughter Thomasin loses her infant sibling in a game of peekaboo gone about as catastrophically wrong as possible, and everything is downhill from there. But if the Devil is the Puritans' greatest fear, should he be ours? Is it the goat? Okay, but what about that bird? Or something else? (The rabbit?)

Wouldst thou like to live spoiler-free? Then proceed with caution because what follows is a discussion of the entirety of The Witch, delicious end and all.