Eggers, a longtime costume, set, and production designer making his first feature, put five years of research into his 1600s New England setting. His film is obsessively concerned with authenticity, from the period dialogue filled with thees, thous, and Puritan catechism to the hand-hewn boards that make up the remote cabin on a wilderness farm where most of the action takes place. It's also strikingly beautiful, shot with natural lighting and embracing the dark of the wilderness surrounding the characters. Eggers won the Best Director film at Sundance, and it's easy to see why: The Witch is a tremendous debut, a work of love and craft where the effort shows clearly on the screen. I recently sat down with Eggers in Chicago to talk about how he got the look of the film, where he got the idea, and what the film did for his lifelong nightmares about witches.

One of the party lines on Robert Eggers' stunning debut film The Witch is that it's "the scariest film out of Sundance," the next terrifying horror film to build up whispered, fearful word of mouth until it sounds more like an urban legend than a movie. That kind of reputation is great for business — it's helped boost horror features from The Blair Witch Project to It Follows . But it may be counterproductive in the case of The Witch , which is more beautifully realized psychological and historical piece than tremble-inducing terror-fest. The film follows a family of Puritan dissenters who retreat to the Massachusetts wilds to be closer to God, and wind up closer to something much darker. It's frightening, but not in a familiar, modern horror-movie sense, full of jump-scares and a dwindling cast. It's about dread and about the human capacity for blame, judgment, and division in the face of the unknown.

Tasha Robinson: You've talked a lot about planning and researching this film, but few people seem to be asking why you made it. What interested you about this period? Robert Eggers: Basically, with authenticity for authenticity's sake, there's nothing really important about it. I mean, who cares? But for the designers, for the key crew members, having a golden fish so you all know what you're fishing for, that's exciting. And that made a very high bar for everyone. Everyone was super-pumped to live up to that standard, especially since we knew how demanding it would be, making a movie on this scale. "We have to go back to this time if we're going to believe in a witch." But the reason we did the research for the film was that [the contemporary idea of a] "witch" is a silly plastic Halloween decoration. It doesn't mean much. It isn't scary today. But in the early modern period, witches were such terrifying figures that women were being murdered over accusations of being witches, on a grand scale in Europe, and a pretty [large] one here. So I thought, "What the hell was going on? What was that?" When I discovered what the idea of the evil witch was — that the fairy tale world and the real world were the same thing in the early modern period; people really thought these women were fairy tale ogresses, and they needed to be exterminated — I thought, "Well, hell, we've got to get back to this time if we're going to believe in a witch. We have to be in their minds, and this has to be a Puritan's nightmare. It's an inherited nightmare." And if I'm going to articulate this to an audience, this has to be so personal to me. This has to be my memory of childhood when I was a Puritan, the way my dad smelled in the cornfield that day. And thus begins the obsession to recreate the era. But where did the idea come from in the first place? Honestly, I have my own ideas about my own psychological makeup that I don't want to get into. But certainly, I've had nightmares about witches ever since I was a kid. The figure of the witch was interesting to me, because of the primal, archetypical witch nightmares I had, even as an adult. But as a kid, it started with Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard Of Oz as this inescapable horror. This sounds like I exorcised it, but I haven't had witch nightmares since I finished this movie. There was something about it that was intense for me. I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past. I was very interested in Salem, and I went to Salem every Halloween. I was interested in witches and the witch trials, though I was disappointed as a kid that the witches weren't real. Also, in Salem, people were just so over-the-top at Halloween. But it's just the way they talked about the trials in school — you just couldn't understand what the hell was going on. It wasn't until I did the research that I really understood how this could happen. In school, it just seemed like, "Oh, superstitious people were stupid and backward, and how terrible is that?" But it's much more interesting than that. You're exploring this superstition of the past in really close detail, but do you see the film as having a modern resonance in the way people are reacting to superstition, or religion, or religious leadership, or female empowerment now? "Feminism rises to the top in the story." What's so interesting to me about history is — what's interesting to anyone — is how humans are the same. Their belief systems were so different. They had different metaphysical truths than we do. And yet we're the same. How wild is that? I like to look into the past to understand us today: religions, myth, folk tales, fairy tales, that's what rings my bell. I wanted this to be presented without judgment, to just tell this particular story. But it's so blatant how feminism rises to the top. It just does. From a contemporary perspective, looking back, it's clear that in the early modern period, the evil witch [represents] men's fears and ambivalence and fantasies about female power. And in this super male-dominated society, the evil witch is also women's fears and ambivalence and fantasies and desire about their own power. It's a tragedy to read about a young girl upsetting someone, and since she didn't think she could have the kind of power to create that reaction, it has to be the devil. And thus, she thinks she's an evil witch. It's chilling. So feminism rises to the top in the story. And while we're not living in a Puritan society — or are we? — the shadows of the past live on today. And I think it's fucking great that Daisy Ridley [in Star Wars: The Force Awakens] is the new Christ of our most popular contemporary religion. I think that's really important.

Did your history as a set and costume designer affect the interest in creating something that was so connected to this elaborate set and very specific costumes? Would you have been as interested in creating something contemporary? The thing is, I wanted to be a director. I never wanted to be a designer. I've been a designer for money. I mean, I enjoyed it. It's fun to make shit with your hands. And I acted earlier on. But acting, if I wasn't in love with the piece and the role, I could not do it. I could not let myself be doing this dumb shit. Designing was different — it was like, "You want some ugly green curtains? I'm going to make the best ugly green curtains you've ever seen in your life." That's just craft, where acting is more personal. So certainly [in making The Witch], I was able to better articulate myself with the set and design departments because of my experience. And I knew how to work with a DP, because when I was collaborating with set and design on other films, I worked closely with DPs also. The post-production stuff was more of a learning curve, apart from what I'd learned making my short films. "We were going to deep, dark places, and we had to create a safe environment." The Witch wasn't really about the design — if I'd never had to be a designer to make a living, if in my early 20s I'd gotten the opportunity to direct my own feature, it would have been along the same lines as this film. It would have sucked, because I wouldn't have had the experience I needed to make it good, but it would have been along the same lines. But I think hiring [production designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir] — hiring the right people, my experience as a designer helped with that, knowing these would be people who could do what I wanted on this budget. Doing what I wanted on the budget was really what my experience gave me. That opening scene in the meeting house, I knew we were never in a billion years going to be able to afford period shoes for every single one of those people. I wouldn't shoot that scene any differently if I was going to reshoot it today, I wouldn't shoot it to include shoes — but it was clear that we couldn't have a wide shot of the whole congregation up front, with their feet visible. There couldn't be a moment where we needed to see that, because we couldn't afford it. What was it like getting the actors to a place where they could speak this convoluted, arcane dialogue so naturally? I have a background in Shakespeare. When I was acting in New York, I was mostly doing classical theater, even if it was street theater or weird avant-garde crap, I played a lot of Shakespearean bad guys. (I can't believe I'm revealing that.) So I was used to it. And frankly, because we finally found investors who understood what I was trying to do, and gave me the support to do it, I got to hire whoever I wanted for the actors. So I wasn't in a situation where I was trying to work with a big name who was hired to help out the desperate indie movie maker, where I was trying to teach a big name how to talk this way. Every single person who got a role, the first thing I made sure of was that they could speak this language without problems. So there was never an issue with that, with any of them. Even with Harvey Scrimshaw (Caleb)? He's so young, and he's carrying so much of the weight of the film with his role, and his dialogue is so complicated. But he could speak it! It was not a problem. What was hard was with the adults and Anya [Taylor-Joy], we were going into deep, dark, horrific psychological places, and we had to create a safe environment to crawl out of that stuff. With the little children, they had to be protected. They couldn't be going into deep, dark places. These are places that they should not be going! So they had to have a Disneyfied understanding of what the film was. And for Harvey, it's like a dance. We worked on the possession scene more than any other scene, and the parents, particularly Ralph [Ineson], were so damn helpful. And Harvey's father was too. They really worked with him, just drilling and drilling and drilling, because I knew if that scene didn't work, the film wouldn't work. So I'm so grateful to everyone for being so collaborative in that scene, and really supporting Harvey and keeping him safe psychologically while bringing that to the screen.

I've read that you largely shot without make-up, and using natural light and candlelight. What was your process like of developing the film's look while simultaneously raising the difficulty factor like that? I knew what I wanted. It's been such a long road that I don't even remember when there were question marks about things. Thank God for Russian silent films and Carl Dreyer, for early on saying, "No make-up!" I mean, there's make-up in the movie, but it's to make people look worse. [Make-up head] Traci Loader did a great job on the grime, and she did stuff to make people look more haggard and so forth, but no foundation or whatever. And natural lighting is something I did with [cinematographer Jarin Blaschke] in all my shorts. Jarin is a real artist — and I don't like saying that about people. He shot all my shorts that are any good, and we worked together on other people's films where I was the designer, so we formed this relationship as we were going throughout the years. We were very united in what the look of the film was. We didn't have to reference a lot of stuff for ourselves. It was just communicating to the crew what is this. Natural light — Jarin said this in an article, so I'll just steal it — What are you going to do, put up a Kino Flo in that farmhouse, with these costumes? It's a joke. You have to use natural light and its complexities to honor what that world would be like. But you do still have to have a camera in the middle of that setting. How did you go about selecting a camera that would work with those low-light conditions and give you those deep blacks you wanted? We would have shot on film if we could afford it, but we spent too much money on hand-hewn clapboards [for the cabin exterior] and cloth and whatever else, and getting the UK actors to North America, and casting all the kids, searching around Yorkshire for them and all that. So we shot digitally. For Jarin and I, it was like, "Alexa Plus, and that's the end of the story." It did help us out in some of the low-light situations. And because of the native aspect ratio of 4:3, he could shoot anamorphic. The shorts I shot with Jarin are all 1:33, and I really like that aspect ratio. Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would. It's not suitable for every story. But I just fucking love it. A close-up in 1:33 is my favorite thing in the world. I watched Klimov's Come And See yet again a couple of weeks ago, much to my wife's dismay, and I'm just like, "Damnation. God, you just can't get any better than that." "You have to use natural light to honor what that world would be like." But it had to have been Jarin who suggested 1:66 for this film. Which really made sense, because it gave it a little more scope. It would have been this weird, too-arty movie in 1:33, but with 1:66, we had a little more height for the trees. But it was intimate with the family. And additionally, because of the native aspect of the Alexa, we got more resolution by shooting in its native aspect ratio. And we were shooting with these re-housed Cooke lenses from the 1940s that Jarin liked to say was like looking through a crystal ball. They were dope. And we were actually using more of the lens characteristic by using that frame. You've compared The Witch to The Shining, which makes sense in terms of this claustrophobic environment, and a family coming apart, and the supernatural, and this amazing performance from a young boy. But one of the most memorable things about The Shining is how that final shot throws everything into question about what really happened in the story, what it means. You do something like that here, with an ending that could be taken literally, or as metaphor or fantasy or something else. Did you want to tap into The Shining's ambiguity, and start debates in the same kind of way? I didn't think about that relationship! I said to Jay Van Hoy, one of the producers, "If someone wants to go in and watch this and think it's about a real witch, that's the surface read. But if you want to go in for more, there's a lot more ways to look at it." I'm not an alchemist in my cell, doing this just for me. I am doing it for me, but I'm trying to communicate with other people. It's hard to be a human being over here, trying to communicate. I think by giving the surface read [that it's] a real witch — which is also interesting intellectually, because that's not how we think about the Salem Witch Trials based on what we learned in school — we can potentially reach more people. But then smarty-pants like you can also think on't.



