Aidan Kelly
Deep within a 17th-century New England forest, illuminated only by the glow of a bonfire, we come across a clearing, in which a number of bloodsoaked young women dance. Their gyrations are accompanied only by the sounds of their jubilant yelps and hollers, along with a foreboding musical score befitting the animalistic, almost tribal event now occurring. Thomasin (Anya-Taylor Joy) has arrived, and at her hip is Black Phillip, the orchestrator of this celebration. As we get a wide view of the scene with Thomasin in the foreground, her fellow women begin rising into the air, no longer tethered to the puritanical restrictions of their former lives. The camera lingers on Thomasin’s face as she too begins to rise into the air, a look of exhilaration developing on her face as she laughs. The music intensifies as she rises higher and higher until she and the music stops, with the screen going to black, and one last emotion being expressed in this film’s final scene; relief, and a sense of freedom in sin.
Within this scene in The Witch (2015), director Robert Eggers is able to craft a climax which almost perfectly embodies the elements of “art-dread” explored by Noel Carroll in his The Philosophy of Horror. While Carroll focuses most of the discussion within his chapter “The Nature of Horror” on what he refers to as art-horror, he views art-dread as not wholly distinct, yet something different nonetheless. As he explains, “…the emotional response they elicit seems to be quite different than that engendered by art-horror. The uncanny event which tops off such stories causes a sense of unease and awe, perhaps of momentary anxiety and foreboding. These events are constructed to move the audience rhetorically to the point that one entertains the idea that unavowed, unknown, and perhaps concealed and inexplicable forces rule the universe1”(Carroll 42). With this in mind, I am comparing The Witch to another Eggers film, The Lighthouse (2019), to prove that what Carroll refers to as art-dread can be just as unnerving, if not more so, than art-horror, despite not eliciting the feelings of disgust implicit within art-horror.
The symmetry between the scenes analyzed for The Witch and The Lighthouse is what drew me to this comparison, and to me they both perfectly embody the feelings that are central to art-dread according to Carroll. Atop a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean, we witness Thomas (Robert Pattinson), one of only two men tasked with maintaining the light, at his most unhinged. Having done away with his companion, who had selfishly kept the light to himself, he stares into it, the black and white color palette making the audience unclear of whether he’s covered in blood, oil, dirt, or some mixture of all three. Finally in the presence of what he coveted for so long, he seems relieved, and then jubilant, releasing what seems to be a mixture of maniacal laughs and screams. These sounds are immensely distorted, making it unclear whether we are hearing Thomas’ screams, or the blares of the omnipresent foghorn which has berated our characters from the start. We never see what Thomas sees, and it is a secret that he takes with him to his grave.
These scenes, in my view, are the perfect example of the uncanny event that Carroll refers to in the above quote. Despite not eliciting feelings of disgust, or perhaps not featuring a viewer’s average conception of a monster, I view these examples of art-dread as more unnerving than any example of art-horror that I’ve consumed, because these scene are able to convey a lot with a little, they utilize elements of the uncanny to great effect, and they provide a very real, and potentially relatable, basis for our character’s descent into madness which coincides with the film’s climax.
A central feature of both of my chosen scenes is that, for the most part, these scenes simply linger on the faces of the two characters in question, Thomasin in The Witch and Thomas in The Lighthouse. There is no otherworldly monster wielding a bloodstained weapon, or grotesque depiction of the human form. Rather, these scenes rely on great acting, a potent sound design/film score, and elements of the mise-en-scene to craft a deeply unsettling, oddly climactic moment using very little. In both scenes, the acting is superb. In The Witch, Anya-Taylor Joy is able to convey a sense of release simply through her character’s facial expressions, perfectly befitting someone who had just succumbed to sin after a life of religious zealotry, and only now was feeling true freedom for the first time. Similarly, Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse is able to convincingly portray a man who has found solace in something that the viewer cannot fully understand after months of isolation has taken its toll on his mind, driving him mad. We are unable to tell whether he’s jubilant or despairing as he wails into the light, but one thing is for certain; he is consumed by it, as was it’s keeper before him. Couple this with the eerie, swelling score accompanying Thomasin’s rise into the air, and the offputting distortion of Thomas’ screaming, as well as elements of the mise-en-scene like the lighting and the makeup/costume design, and you get two immensely unnerving scenes in which very little actually occurs. The ability for these scenes to cultivate a feeling of dread and uncertainty within myself is something that has remained unique to these films to this day, and makes them worthy foes to any example of art-horror.
As I touched on above, both of these scenes have the ability to make the viewer extremely uneasy, if not uncertain or even confused, especially in the case of The Lighthouse. We are never privy to what Thomas sees when he looks into the light, which to some viewers may be unsatisfying. But this ambiguity seems to be purposeful, as is expressed by Eggers in an interview, in which he states when discussing the light that, “I think that the lens is actually dual-gendered. It’s cosmic egg, right?2” By cosmic egg, Eggers is referring to a common mythological motif in which the universe or something beyond our ability to comprehend is hatched from an egg of sorts, which I view as an almost perfect encapsulation of Carroll’s “concealed or inexplicable forces” quotation included earlier. What creates a sense of unease, beyond viewing an insane man screaming into a light, is that we are left in the dark concerning what the light really signifies, and what Thomas is actually seeing. Similarly, viewing women begin to float in The Witch is an element of the uncanny that is hard to ignore. Yet, we are left in the dark concerning how this is happening, or whether it is at all. Is this all perhaps a delusion of Thomasin’s own creation following the events which led to her being accused of witchcraft by her own family? Is their floating symbolic for their freedom from restraint following their capitulation to sin? Or is Satan, in the form of Black Phillip, really causing the women he’s possessed to rise from the ground? Carroll makes clear in his discussion of art-dread that, “Where art-horror involves disgust as a central feature, what might be called art-dread does not” (Carroll 42), and these scenes leave the viewer far more confused and uneasy than they do disgusted, and this fear of what we can’t understand is perhaps more potent than fear of something that disgusts us because it violates the natural order.
Finally, and I think most integral to my argument, is how these films deal with very real psychological afflictions as the basis for our character’s descent into madness, and how this can be very relatable for a viewer of these films. The Witch is a film deeply rooted in religion, and both the fears and restrictions implicit within living as such a devout individual. For each of our characters, fear of sin and temptation is overwhelming, consuming their every waking thought and action. Therefore, when bad things begin to happen to their family, their only explanation is that one of them has sinned, with the blame eventually being placed on Thomasin and her perceived witchcraft. The idea that the fear of sin and the repercussions of committing them could cause a mother to attempt to kill her own daughter is extremely unsettling, and even more so when you realize that this isn’t all that implausible. Although most devout individuals do not practice such an all-encompassing form of religious observance in the present day, fear of sin or temptation is something very real which could affect any one of us. In the end, it is precisely this restrictive lifestyle which Thomasin has grown up in which leads her down a path to sin; when her faith brings her nothing but despair and death, she is left with nowhere else to turn. Meanwhile, The Lighthouse deals in themes of isolation, and how our own mind can become our worst enemy. Within this film, there is no clear cut antagonist or monster. Rather, we witness our characters, Thomas especially, deteriorate under the weight of their isolation, their minds beginning to concoct false realities and irrational fears. In my view, this is far more terrifying than any monster could be, because we witness Thomas become a mere shell of himself, a servant to the delusions created by months of isolation and despair. And what makes it worse is that this is something that could happen to anyone. Although none of us will likely find ourselves marooned on a rock in the middle of the ocean, the effects that feelings like loneliness, despair, or guilt can have on our minds can be severely detrimental, and although The Lighthouse is a representation of this to the extreme, it’s a reminder of how potent these feelings can be. These films unsettle because the horror is far more subtle and perhaps relatable to the audience, whereas it can be hard to relate to the fear induced by fighting an otherworldly beast we’ll never encounter.
Whereas art-horror relies on feelings of disgust, and monsters which imbue in us a sense of utter repugnance, art-dread is so unnerving because it makes us feel uncertain; it makes us question our own conceptions of reality. Fear of the unknown is something very powerful. Just as I experience anxiety when I look to the future, and the many uncertainties that lay before me, art-dread makes the viewer question what they are viewing, and whether, in a less extreme manner, the same thing that befalls our characters could happen to them. Robert Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse possess this quality, which is why I view these examples of art-dread as equally unnerving, if not more so, to any example of art-horror that I’ve consumed.
Works cited
Carrol, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990.
Eggers, Robert, director. The Witch. A24, 2015.
—. The Lighthouse. A24, 2015.
Wilkinson, Alissa. (2019). The Witch director Robert Eggers spills his beans about The Lighthouse. Vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/15/20914097/robert-eggers-lighthouse-interview-witch
About the Author
Aidan Kelly is a junior political science major set to graduate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst this spring. He intends to continue his education at a graduate level in the near future, likely with a focus on International Relations and Global Governance.
