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“The Witch” is being billed as one of this year’s most terrifying horror films, yet it will also possibly be one of the year’s best researched and most historically accurate offerings. The idea of the supernatural and historical accuracy may on the surface seem incongruous, but for writer/director, Robert Eggers the mix was essential.
Eggers built a library of primary source material with a specific focus on accounts of demon possession. He found numerous detailed descriptions of what would happen to people when their bodies were overtaken by the supernatural. “I wasn’t in some rare archive in some small town in Massachusetts with white gloves on looking a parchment paper,” clarified Eggers. “‘The Diary of Samuel Sewall’, ‘The Diary of John Winthrop,’ these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there’s tons of cases of demon possession. I read through the books looking for good images and moments, and then as I’d go along with the script I would think, ‘How can I make that work?'”
Eggers does not view this scapegoating of women as a relic of a different era and sees direct parallels between the themes of his movie and modern society. Yet for all his historical research and wanting to show how the innocent were falsely accused, Eggers knew from the start that his film would treat the supernatural as real and embrace the genre elements.
“The witch was a huge reality in the minds of the people in the early modern period and the reality they had, true or not, shapes modern culture and exists in the unconscious of today.”
“[Doing research] is super inspiring and fun,” Eggers said. “I have a big old portion of a bookcase dedicated to witch books and on the thing I’m writing now, it has a couple bookcases just devoted to that stuff. What I love about research is when I’m having a bad day and I can’t write, I’ll just research some more, I’ll learn some more and I’ll have better command of the world of the film.”
“The Witch” is in theaters today.
READ MORE: I Survived the Most Terrifying Experience at Sundance 2016
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