Next weekend, over a year since it first debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, director Robert Eggers will see his feature directorial debut, “The Witch,” hit the big screen across the country. The horror film has conjured a tremendous amount of buzz, and equally admirable to the praise the picture has received was Eggers’ approach in conceiving his movie, knowing he wanted to create something that could feasibly be marketed and get made, and yet retain his own unique vision.
“I had finally made a short film that wasn’t a total disaster and there was interest from some people to possibly develop a feature,” he told The New York Times about the genesis of “The Witch.” “I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange. I realized that I had to do something in an identifiable genre, but I knew it had to be really personal to me to be good. I decided to go back to New England where I’m from and make an archetypal New England horror story. Therefore it had to be about witches.”
The result stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, and Lucas Dawson in the tale of a family living on the edge of the New England wilderness in 1630, who are soon beset by a series of sinister occurrences. And today, we have an exclusive clip which gives a terrific sense of the goosebumps the film raises and the atmosphere of dread it evokes.
“The Witch” opens this Friday. Check out the clip below.
