10 Horror Movie Moments More Important Than You Realised
5. The Rotten Corn - The Witch
Robert Eggers' delirious folk horror The Witch is certainly a film that rewards those who pay attention, though you can also be forgiven for failing to appreciate the significance of all that rotten corn.
Early in the film, New England settler William (Ralph Ineson) and his family are shown struggling to grow enough crops to make it through the winter, with their corn appearing to have rotted.
Yet this rot is actually ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and related plants and can cause ergotism in humans who consume it: a form of fungal poisoning which can, among other things, induce psychotic visions.
As such, this might tangibly explain the film's increasingly surreal events, that the family were simply succumbing to ergotism and none of it was actually real.
Given that ergot is often suggested as one of the potential causes of mass hysteria during the Salem witch trials, it's certainly a fitting suggestion, and clearly one purposefully placed in the film by Eggers.
This doesn't mean that The Witch's supernatural happenings are 100% hallucinatory, but it does lend fascinating meaning and context to shots of inedible corn that otherwise seem relatively standard and benign.