WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

In some ways, The Witch is a throwback. At least since Marion L. Starkey's 1949 study The Devil in Massachusetts (an inspiration for Arthur Miller's The Crucible), pop culture has taken a more Freudian view of Puritan-era witchcraft sagas, putting the blame on patriarchs whose fear of women's sexuality becomes rage against female self-expression (or, with Miller, McCarthyist hysteria). There's a tinge of Freudianism -- the "return of the repressed" -- in The Witch. The patriarch compensates for his loss of power over women and the natural world by frantically chopping wood. And when Thomasin's bold, freckle-faced younger brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) attempts an Oedipal assertion of his own manhood, he's lured from his path by a lush female in a red cloak. But at the end of the day -- i.e., the witching hour -- The Witch is surprisingly straightforward. In its Puritan framework, a woman expiates her original sin through harsh self-denial or she dances with the devil. It's either mean deprivation or obscene engorgement.

In a concluding title, Eggers says he based The Witch closely on historical accounts of witchcraft and even used some of the original, antiquated dialogue. He went with the myths, from eras in which most people believed that there was an actual devil with whom to dance. So you're watching the thing itself, stripped of its postmodern political and cultural accretions.

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