Eggers conjures a cult hit with ‘The Witch’
Great things have been happening to Robert Eggers since the New Hampshire native won the top directing prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival for his Puritan horror tale, “The Witch.” But it might not have ever happened if it weren’t for the folks at Plimoth Plantation, who provided Eggers with the invaluable technical assistance he needed to ensure his sets and screenplay were historically accurate.
“The film would not have been possible without spending a lot of time in Plymouth,” Eggers said during a phone interview this week. “Plimoth Plantation is certainly the best resource for this period. It took copious field trips there and many, many photos.”
It’s hard to argue with the results. The film, which is drawing rave reviews (it has an aggregate score of 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), is a masterwork of highbrow horror, telling a Shakespearean tale of death and destruction wreaked upon a family of Massachusetts settlers convinced they are being targeted by witchcraft. The year is 1630, a time when people still believed the New England woods were brimming with conjurers. It’s also when the vernacular was thick with the pronouns thee and thou, and Eggers wanted to use them exactly the way the Puritans did.
His research took him to the Plantation’s archives, where Eggers did extensive studies of writings and speech unique to common agricultural people. He read everything from diaries to prayer books written in the Jacobean style of the day.
“It’s places like Plimoth Plantation and people in the living-history community that helped me immeasurably in replicating how the agricultural lifestyle was,” Eggers said. “We ended up shooting the film in Canada for financial reasons, but there wasn’t anyone there who knew how to recreate the buildings of the period. So we ended up going back to Massachusetts a lot for guidance.”
Eggers, who now lives in New York, was stirred back to his old stomping grounds by the film’s producers, Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy. But it wasn’t his first visit to Plymouth.
“I went there a lot as a kid and I really loved it,” Eggers said of the Plantation. “I think this film owes a lot to what I experienced in Plymouth when I was a kid. It really felt like a time machine. Even when I took my first trip there six years ago to begin research on this project, I remember driving down the highway and seeing the thatch roofs peeking out from the palisade. It was a very gloomy day and you could smell the smoke in the air. I was as giddy as I was as a little kid going there on those school field trips.”
He said those excursions were just a few of the many reasons he grew up a major history buff. And “The Witch” reflects that love of the past. It’s as much a history lesson as it is a terrifying dive into the occult. But what’s been scaring the socks off moviegoers is the film’s eerie look, which can best be described as a Rembrandt painting sprung to life. The mood is requisitely dreary, but it’s also alive with menace, most of it emanating from the unsettling images Eggers stirs in your mind.
It’s a stimulating mash-up of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman that stresses brains over blood. But getting people to buy into his unique vision was even more arduous than the actual filming, which largely took place in a remote forest in northern Ontario.
“Doing a film in early modern English with a first-time director, elicited more raised more eyebrows than open checkbooks,” Eggers said with a laugh. “It took four years to find the financiers who wanted to do this. But the upside is that it gave me more time to do research.”
It’s also taken a long time for “The Witch” to hit theaters. Despite Eggers winning Best Director at the 2015 Sundance fest, his film has sat on a shelf for 13 months.
“I really wanted a Halloween release, but I trusted A24 (the film’s distributor) knew what they were doing and needed the time to build a really strong promotional campaign,” Eggers said. “Still, I’m so fortunate to have a wide release with this film. When I made it two years ago, I thought if we would be lucky to play on four screens and go directly to Netflix. If that happened, I would be clicking my heels. But to have this go wide and be seen by so many people is really incredible.”
