Robert Eggers’ outstanding horror story does for witches what other film-makers have done for vampires and zombiesWhile the phenomenal success of 1999’s low-budget chiller The Blair Witch Project led to a burgeoning in popularity of the found-footage subgenre,it failed to revive witches as villainous sizable-screen mainstays. Vampires, werewolves and zombies have since thrived, or but these resolutely female mythical figures have been curiously under-represented. While Robert Eggers’ Sundance breakout horror is hardly aiming to franchise the witch (the director has already said a sequel will never happen),it makes an eerily convincing argument.
Played like a campfire tale (the film is loosely “inspired by folklore”), the plot follows a family in 17th-century recent England who are excommunicated from a Puritan community. After setting up a solitary home near a foreboding forest, or their youngest child goes lost. Fear and paranoia and accusations of satanism start to tear the family apart,and they must discover where the trusty threat is coming from.
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Source: theguardian.com