Eggers 2.0: Dreher on doctrines in "The Witch"

Yes, a serious artist has asked serious questions about serious issues. Art for art's sake?

Please consider this Part II of my recent post “Dreher dissects the doctrines in "Nosferatu."

Once again, we are dealing with a bloody, but some would say brilliant, effort by a skilled horror filmmaker. Once again, we are talking about an artsy niche-market movie — “The Witch” — created by director Robert Eggers in an attempt (hang on for Rod Dreher commentary on this) to raise theological questions about supernatural good and evil and what it means to be human.

Now, I admit that I have no intention of watching “The Witch” and, strangely enough, Eggers appears, in hindsight, to have made a similar decision. Check out the overture from a 2022 IndieWire report with this headline: “Robert Eggers 'Can't Stand' Watching 'The Witch.’ ”

Robert Eggers is three-for-three with the critically acclaimed films “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse,” and “The Northman,” but there’s one he just can’t rewatch.

“Honestly, I can’t stand watching ‘The Witch’ now,” Eggers told The Guardian. Eggers made his feature debut with the folk-horror period piece, launching at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 — where it was acquired by A24 — and introducing Anya Taylor-Joy to the world. It also became one of A24’s most successful films, grossing more than $40 million worldwide off a $4 million budget.

“It’s not that it’s bad, and the performances are great, but I was not skilled enough as a filmmaker to get what was in my brain onto the screen,” he said.

OK, what was in the director’s brain? That’s an artistic question, I guess, or even a spiritual question. At the very least, the implication is that Eggers was trying to make some kind of statement to horror-film lovers and he failed to get the job done.

After dissecting “Nosferatu,” the current Eggers offering, Dreher flashed back to “The Witch” — TWICE — seeking more insights into the director’s questions and insights about an enchanted world that is bigger than the materialistic world of modernity.

So, Part I of this Dreher flashback opened with this:

As I’ve said here recently, I don’t like horror as a genre, and I especially don’t like supernatural horror, mostly because I believe this stuff is real. But I like the films of Robert Eggers, in part because he doesn’t ironicize supernatural horror. No, vampires do not exist, but the demonic world out of which the vampire character arises in his Nosferatu really does, and the way Eggers shows how the demonic works resonates deeply with what I know from studying the subject and interviewing exorcists. You don’t have to believe in vampires to see a lot of truth-telling in Nosferatu, about how the real world works.

Once again, my question is blunt: Who is the audience for this truth-telling and what is the director’s point, other than making an artistic statement?

I guess I am frustrated with myself, in this case.

One of the goals of Rational Sheep — and my old Exegete the Culture seminar — is to help Christian leaders discern the theological questions woven into high-quality “signals” found in popular culture. The goal is to understand how the contents of mass media affect how millions of people think about issues in this life and the life to come.

At the end of the “Nosferatu” post, I asked a series of questions (thank you to readers who offered feedback). Once again, here is that material:

… My question: Can anyone imagine a setting in which a pastor or a religious educator could, in effect, DEBATE the contents of this movie, knowing that souls are at risk? What if “Nosferatu” becomes highly popular and, perhaps, triggers a wave of movies on this topic?

Thus, I will ask. …

(1) Where do you go for input on movies of this kind, for insights into the impact of these kinds of films in the lives of the churched and unchurched? What websites? What academic voices, even?

(2) Do you think that a film of this kind is a valid hook for apologetics? Are there Christian thinkers and shepherds who are called to this kind of ministry? …

Again, I still believe that people need to be careful about making decisions to view movies of this kind. Dreher is very clear about that.

But when is the risk worthwhile? When do Christian leaders need to exegete and then debate the spirits of the age in which they live?

As a rule, I focus on mass-media products that I believe have the potential to shape the lives and beliefs of large numbers of people. Often, we are dealing with “signals” in which artists ask important questions, but offer answers that — from the viewpoint of traditional forms of faith — are either wrong, warped or incomplete.

So what am I supposed to do with a movie like “The Witch”? Should I simply admit, right up front, that I have next to zero ability to parse the contents of horror movies and long-form horror series? Do I simply write off that audience?

By the way, I said “next to zero ability” because there have been very scary, but high quality, movies that made sense to me and I think they are worthy of serious attention. I am, for example, talking about classics such as “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Exorcism of Emily Rose.”

I don’t want to focus on Dreher’s detailed dissection of the plot in “The Witch.” By all means, dig into the details in the sequel posts — first here and then here — he has written in recent days. But here is a chunk of Part I of his “The Witch” meditations that intrigued me. I hope that the references to plot elements still make some sense in this context:

What stayed with me about the film is its theological message. This family are hardcore Puritans, and very faithful. They pray constantly. The children memorize the harsh Calvinist catechism. Yet Eggers does not demonize them; in fact, it’s easy to see them as hardy people whose rigid, rough faith gives them the internal wherewithal to suffer all kinds of hardships as pioneers.

Why isn’t their faith enough to drive off the forces of evil represented by the witch? Could it be that its starkness made little room for grace, and suppressed human feeling? Maybe so, but that doesn’t seem to account for their vulnerability to the witch. Remember, unlike the Enlightened city folk in Nosferatu, this family really does believe in supernatural evil. Why aren’t their prayers availing, then?

The problem, notes Dreher, appears to be the protagonist’s sin of pride.

That’s a serious issue. Eggers focuses on that spiritual issue, rather than turning his movie into a commentary on politics or some other topic that matters to Hollywood. More from Dreher:

In his film, supernatural evil really does exist, and it exploits the sins and failings of this faithful family to its own ends — including annihilating them. Evil is subtle, and it turns out that the harsh simplicity of their Puritan faith cannot fathom its workings. When the demonic appears to the characters, it does so by giving them the illusion that they can have whatever they most desire, if only they will submit. It seems to me that the asceticism of frontier Puritanism, which denies sensual desire, has left these people particularly vulnerable to evil. It’s as if these Puritans have built a psychological citadel of faith within which to live, and have forbidden going into the woods, all to protect themselves from evil. But what happens when the woods comes to you? What happens when the forest lives inside you? …

What’s interesting here is that being Calvinists, this family believes that they may be damned, and there’s nothing they can do about it (they talk about this). I found myself wondering if in some sense they believed that the devil’s tormenting them was their divinely ordained fate. And yet, they pray all the time for protection against the devil. Why doesn’t God intervene? … Might it be that The Witch tells a story about the dangers of separating yourself from community and tradition?

Once again, is there a message here that pastors, parents, teachers and counselors need to heed? It would appear that the answer is “yes.”

There is … a direct line to Nosferatu, where the ideology of Enlightenment, and of commercial bourgeois society, could not bear sustained contact with the dark realities of life in deepest Transylvania, which it invited into itself through acts of hubris. I do not know what Robert Eggers believes about the occult (though he told The New Yorker that one of his greatest fears is succumbing to it):

“I have met a lot of, like, occultists and witches and hippies who have a way of thinking that, like, I would want to be able to go there but would be afraid to,” he told me. His films function as a cage, a form of protection from himself. “I can explore it in my work fully and fully commit to being, like, inside it, without getting lost to it and never being able to come back.”

The way Eggers blurs the lines between reality and the supernatural suggests that he really does think that these occultists are in touch with another reality, not just something imagined. And he knows that it’s dark, and not a place one wants to be. In both The Witch and Nosferatu, Eggers explores how ordinary people could end up in the occult’s jaws, because their respective ideologies — Puritanism, Enlightenment rationalism — lacked the power to comprehend and resist the subtleties of the demonic.

What’s the message?

Robert Eggers’ movies ask, in some form or another: What if the pre-moderns knew better than we do? What if myths and folktales and pre-modern Christianity are more accurate guides to reality than we think?

In his second look at “The Witch,” Dreher goes deeper — with the help of insights from the René Girard book “I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.”

This is serious material. I can see that.

It’s also clear that Eggers is asking serious questions about the dark side of the supernatural (or the world of “enchantment”), questions that are worthy of serious thought by serious Christian thinkers.

But what does the director BELIEVE? That isn’t clear.

Let’s wrap this up. As I said earlier, what’s the point here, other than making artistic statements about important issues that are truly spiritual and theological?

Here’s another question, one that I hope clergy who read Rational Sheep will address: Do horror films of this kind truly matter? Are they having an impact on spiritual seekers who enter church doors today?

I understand that millions of people, in the past decade or so, have consumed “The Walking Dead” and the many, many products influenced by it. I can see the numbers linked to a phenomenon like that. I heard plenty of people asking Big Questions about the “signals” buried in that zombie wave of pop-culture content.

But what are we supposed to do with niche movies like “The Witch” and “Nosferatu”? Call attention to them? Ignore them? Hope that they go away?