What You Didn't Understand About "The VVitch"

I finally saw "The VVitch" in theaters yesterday and I thought it was fantastic. Many people did not. Many people have made claims that it "made no sense" and that it "wasn't scary." There are a lot of folkloric (the movie is called "A New England Folktale," people) bits that were indeed believed to be the truth of witches and witchcraft by Puritans. Witches and witchcraft do and always have existed and there's always a disturbing line between truth and fiction when it comes to witches, particularly traditional witches (non-Wiccan) and whether or not we choose to use shadows in our craft. Indeed, at the time, any woman could be deemed a witch for speaking out or having an opinion at all. 

Thomasin is the central character, a teenaged Puritan girl who deeply wants to be loved by God and who has some resentment for her fathers pride casting them into the wilderness. Thomasin doesn't make her own decisions. She is not "the witch" that is causing so many bad things to quickly happen to the family because there is no singular "Witch" in the film, there are many, and they all work in tandem with Lucifer (not someone witches have ever actually revered but were and are still feared to) in hopes of freeing Thomasin from her Puritanical Hell. She does not begin the film as a witch and she loves her family. 

The family infant Samuel was taken under Thomasin's watch during a simple peekaboo game. Anyone who saw the trailer knows this. What follows is actually very disturbing, and many movie-goers did not realize how disturbing his demise actually is. The witch that is shown during this part is older, and blood of an infant was thought to be used to keep witches young (and many women who were pretty or young looking for their age in the times of the film were accused of using baby blood and then burned as witches.) The woman on screen doesn't cut the infant for a little blood for a ritual; she's seen grinding something (him, but not many caught that) up for all of his blood, and probably fat. She is seen rubbing it across herself and what appears to be a staff in front of the Full Moon. 

Why the staff? Well, the idea of witches flying on broomsticks didn't start with a cute beginning. Blood and fat of children and infants were thought to be used as lubricants for witches to vaginally take in certain hallucinogens via masturbating. "Flying high on a broom stick" has never been literal. 

There are many familiars in this movie. A familiar spirit, to witches, is someone who helps them on their path and in their craft and is very real. The rabbit in this movie plays a huge role in the symbolism and actual demise of at least one character. Rabbits do and always have symbolized sex and fertility and the feminine, which are the qualities that scare the shit out of this Puritan family about Thomasin. Her younger brother, Caleb, specifically has issues not leering at Thomasin, and not because he is a pervert, but because he is repressed and around no other young but developed females. The rabbit leads the boy and father deep into the woods, where the father injures himself (a minor injury but hit to the ego) in an attempt to kill it for food. Caleb chases it once more when he and Thomasin are in the woods together, after hearing tales about the red apples his mother and sister desired from back home, and he meets his own desire - a young, beautiful witch who kisses him on the mouth, cursing him. Puritans believed desire and temptation were only harmful to those who were not purse of heart, leaving them open to curses such as these. 

Thomasin's sexuality, and his, lead to his death after regurgitating the apple of the curse. From one side, it's because he was not pure of thought, Thomasin (and the mother) could not let go of the fanciful desires of England, which Caleb doesn't remember, leaving him open to the curse of a witch. From another side, the family desire to rid themselves of Thomasin and her scary sexuality leave them with another dead child.

The Raven doesn't seem to show up quite as much, but is another familiar, or better yet, an omen of death. The main role of the raven in this movie is that grief-stricken Katherine, the mother of the family, seems to hallucinate the return of her youngest and eldest son, but "Caleb" (dead from the curse after purging the apple) tells her not to tell father as the baby begins to cry. The mother did as mothers do, and take the baby to feed at her breast. 

There is no baby. She's breastfeeding a raven or, better yet, the raven is pecking her nipple off, adding perversion to and destroying the very life-sustaining force the mother has. This familiar of death, and this omen, takes the very milk meant for the baby - a life force. If that isn't disturbing and foretelling, not much could ever be. Katherine's mind is officially gone, and in her grief and loss of faith, she's lost every ounce left of her mind. 

The twins are the ones who really take Thomasin's joking threats to their full force by repeating what she had said, and there was very little such nonsense as "playing around" about witches (or anything else as joy was frowned upon) with Puritan families. While Caleb is writhing and then dies, the twins seemingly fake their own possessions, a probable Folie 'a Deaux, or shared madness by the intensity and fear surrounding their brothers supernatural death and Thomasin's backlash accusation of them being the witch in the woods. The father boar the three of them up with two goats and during the night, a woman (presumably one of the many witches of the movie) is seen eating the flesh of the two white goats much as Thomasin threatened to eat the flesh of the twins.

 What really seemed to irk people is that they never see the twins die or know what happened to them. In the morning, the father sees the goats dead and only Thomasin left before his own demise, but where are they? Well, the ending of the movie should tell you it isn't a far cry from what happened to baby Samuel in the beginning. The blood and fat of children was used as part Thomasin's initiation into the coven, burned and used as lubrication to vaginally consume hallucinogenic drugs through masturbation. The witch who ate the gut of the goats took the twins.

I found this fairly obvious.

And finally, Black Phillip. Thomasin is finally in a position where she will make the first real decision in her life, and have agency over her own body and mind. She could stay at the farm and starve, she could try to make it back to the community alive to be tried for murder or witchcraft, and in the off chance she was not tried for such, she could be married off and reproduce, or she could wait for whatever is in the woods to kill her, also. But there was another option, a desperate one, and Thomasin goes to the black goat and only other survivor of the family and commons that he speak to her. 

He does, and he offers her to "live deliciously, taste butter, wear a pretty dress, see the world." These offers are all over the place and rather seductive, because Black Phillip is Lucifer. The Christianized version of Lucifer is a man with goat horns, much like the god Pan, and many other pagan gods that came before Christianity. Pan particularly was fond of hedonism and living for the senses and worldly pleasures, orgies, etc. Things Thomasin has probably never even dreamed of, having started the movie as a faithful girl and, despite her faith losing everything and everyone around her as they used God as a way to demonize her. She signs, removes her shift, and off she goes to dance with the other witches. Black Phillip saw something in Thomasin from the beginning that he liked, and he got his way.

And not only does she join and dance with the various witches, she levitates with them, and her face changes into a smile - a highly sexual one as her twin siblings provide fuel for their fire and a means for their levitation or their "high."

Her siblings blood and fat with hallucinogenic drugs inserted into the vagina while she has some form of an orgasm in the air because this was her most freeing, and arguably safest option in order to stay alive - and no one found this movie terrifying? 

Dizzy