Skip to content
Entertainment
Link copied to clipboard

Director Robert Eggers on his eerie, buzzy movie "The Witch"

Robert Eggers is in a weird position for a first-time filmmaker: People like his movie. As in, they really like his movie.

Robert Eggers is in a weird position for a first-time filmmaker: People like his movie.

As in, they really like his movie.

His "New England folktale" The Witch, in theaters Friday, came out of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival on waves of good buzz. But there are downsides to the hype machine, as evidenced by how often "early buzz" is cited in the eulogy of a cinematic flop.

Eggers said he was wary of it. "If I saw this movie after hearing all the hype, I would say, 'Eh, it's fine.'

"But the hype machine has to do its thing," he said. There's not really anything Eggers can do about it.

The Witch is a movie that earns its buzz, though. Eggers' debut, a horror film, is about a religious family in 17th-century New England who are banished from their settlement. The patriarch (Ralph Ineson) refuses to bow to the will of community. Living on an isolated farmstead, the family start to experience eerie events.

Eggers hails from New England, and the setting is an important part of his film, which is buoyed by creepy atmospherics and a fantastic cast.

The region's puritanical past and its austerity are part of its very being, Eggers said. The "old stuff," as he jokingly calls the area's abundant history, doesn't hurt either.

"New England's past is part of my consciousness," he said.

He started looking into his home turf's past in archives and diaries of early settlers to learn about their everyday lives and, more important, their everyday fears. "I've had a lot of witch nightmares since childhood, so I thought I could make a horror film that was in genre and was personal to me.

"I went to research and saw that the real world and the fairy-tale world weren't that far off. These horrible ogres and anti-mothers weren't fantasy but reality."

Eggers said his research "was all about trying to recreate an accurate portrayal of the 17th century so I could transport people back to their mind-set."

Now, after five years of rewrites and repeated bids to get his "personal" film financed, Eggers has to take it and release it to the masses.

"It's weird," he said. "I'm 32 and married and went through the meat grinder. I'm glad that it took five years to make this movie. If I had gotten financed after I finished the first draft, it wouldn't have been as good. It might have been harder to handle all this insanity."

meichel@phillynews.com

215-854-5909 @mollyeichel