The Horror Movie That Drove Manhattan Elite Crazy

This artsy witch movie was in fact not a horror movie.

The VVitch. You know a film will engrave its name to the history when it manages to divide people beyond little nuances in artisan taste that makes the difference between four and five-star ratings. Only, the real success is it reveals a scarier problem than the idea of two children living in the woods talking to a black goat: Why did we interpret it as a feminist movie in the first place?

I accept the fact that, even without an agenda, it is indeed a feminist movie, though “feminist” is not a title the movie does anything but exist, to own. With academically perfected technique, it just tells the story of a tortured young girl, an issue that even today nobody seems to care enough to take initiative other than handing out meaningless Nobel awards to clueless little girls every year.

Script doesn’t talk about womens’ right to be and live as humans, dialogue doesn’t take sides, and most of the time characters seem indifferent to the obvious fact masterfully told by the director without turning it into politics that, had she been a boy, the female lead character Thomasin wouldn’t have had to go through the hell her family put her into, thus, the movie wouldn’t have existed. Having these as indisputable facts in both hands, the average viewer still thought it was a feminist movie that stole the $10-entertainment A24 promised in its trailer.

It is clear that we don’t need terminology, labels, or politics to know that deep down we are so misogynistic that whenever a tortured female survives her own hell, we think of feminism. Doing nothing but staying alive, not even saying “stop” to the clinically and clearly sick father while he was beating her to death, the b-slasher fanboy treated Thomasin like she ran the New England branch of Femen in the 1630s.

It’s an excellent movie by every sense, but the real success is the fact-check the movie has done on our society that we can’t even tolerate if a woman dares to escape the cold murderer hands of her religious fanatic parents. Had the family been Muslim and the film taken place in a desert in Middle Eastern, Thomasin would have been an inspiration and a hero to the boring middle-class Manhattan liberal, yet now, being a mainstream American female that survived the male monstrosity just by herself, she is the evil feminist bitch who stole their jump-scares.

It doesn’t come as surprise people have trouble classifying The Witch as a horror movie since the so-called witch in the woods didn’t even come close to the malice of a God-obsessed Christian man in terms of scary. It’s a horror movie by genre, but sheer terror by what it accomplishes to tell in terms of modern sociology.