For this week of my Halloween double feature marathon, having watched many a movie with the modern charismatic witch, I decided to go back to the older stories. The kind where “witchcraft” meant deals with the Devil and witches were the stuff of nightmares.
The first film on my list was a Nietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree.
After their mother is stoned to death on suspicion of witchcraft. Two sisters leave town as quickly as possible. The older sister, Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir) enchants a young widower Jóhann (Valdimar Örn Flygenring), to love her and marry her. But the problem is but his young son, Jónas (Geirlaug Sunna Þormar), becomes suspicious about her and something has to be done. Meanwhile, the younger sister, Margit (Björk Guðmundsdóttir) is seeing visions, of her mother as well as befriending Jónas and finds herself torn between her loyalty to her sister and her new family.
Loosely based on the Brother’s Grimm story, this film is slow and quiet, but still quite lyrical doing a wonderful job of showing the isolation of a family in the gorgeous but desolate Norwegian countryside
Next film on my list, Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New England Folktale, tells the story of a family in 1600s Puritan New England who are ostracized from their community for religious extremism. The set up a farm in the deep woods of Massachusetts, but things begin to go wrong almost immediately and there is something out in the woods who begins to eat away at them literally and figuratively.
This is another one of those films that I heard really good things about back when it first came out but I never got around to seeing it. Since it’s definitely part of my Yankee heritage I’d always been interested in this period of history, and Eggers does a wonderful job of recreating it, worts and all. Solid performances from everybody makes the immersion in this alien world nearly complete.
Also, the goat is awesome.
