10 Movies That Used Your Imagination Against You
8. The Witch
The atmosphere of dread which permeates every frame of director Robert Eggers’ New England occult horror debut was a striking calling card for the filmmaker, and the critical love for the 2015 film saw him net Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe to star in his recent follow up, The Lighthouse.
The Witch follows a doomed family of puritans as their minds slowly unravel. The cause of this depends on your interpretations, with every viewer forced to decide for themselves whether the family’s gradual dissolution is due to madness brought on from isolation, the intervention of some demonic paranormal forces nesting in a nearby forest, or the fact that their matriarch is already mad breastfeeding advocate Lysa Arryn.
This ambiguity extends into the film’s depiction - or lack thereof - of the devil himself, or “Black Philip” as he is known here. The ending sees him represented only by brief glimpses of disembodied hands and feet striding through flickering candlelight, refusing to visualize the demonic presence and instead forcing us to conjure up something far scarier than any number of red-faced horned pitchfork pointers in our mind.