The VVitch: Choose To Live Deliciously By Throwing Away Expectation

With genre comes expectation. We expect the girl and the guy she despises to end up together in the Rom-Com. We expect the superhero to save the day and a new villain to pop up at the end, hinting at a sequel ( or prequel or whatever).But it seems that when people go to see a horror film they expect it to be so terrifying that they defecate themselves. And for some reason when a horror film doesn’t adhere to that expectation it can provoke strong, immature emotions from the audience. Why is that a horror film’s worth is based on whether it’s scary or not? Cant it be more than that?

Robert Eggers debut film The VVitch (2015) has generated a lot of discourse from critics with comparisons not only other to “artful” horror films like The Babadook and It Follows, but to Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer as well. It’s understandable if those comparisons mean nothing to you or if you don’t care what critics think, but you can’t say that The VVitch is a typical horror film.

A woman stealing an infant, killing it, and rubbing its blood all over her body about ten minutes into the film is pretty bold foreshadowing. The audience knows right off the bat that there actually is a witch, and we spend the rest of the film wondering how she’s going to prey on this Puritan family. You wont find any of those notorious jump scares in The VVitch either. Instead, Eggers gives you a sinister music cue ( from Mark Koven’s wicked score), the witch appears, and the camera stays on her for what feels like eons, causing you to squirm in your seat. Before it becomes too much Eggers smash cuts to the next scene.

The VVitch is not defecate yourself scary ( honestly, what is?), but it brings up different internal fears that are deeper than witches and deals with the devil. Like man’s primal fear of the dark and the unknown. Or how one deals with the paranoia that comes with isolation. Like Bergman’s The Virgin Spring the film also asks why God, if there is a God, would punish those that are faithful to Him. And of course the patriarchal fear of the (sexually) liberated woman, which is very timely in 2016.

We must change our expectations of the horror genre. Would you rather watch a film that defied your expectations at every turn, made you extremely uncomfortable, while leaving you to think (even a little) about what we’re afraid of and how we handle it or turn into piss baby because the movie didn’t make you shit your pants?