The Witch (2015) — "Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?"

Wearing were. Let us pray we will conque this wilderness will not consume us. It's not saying it's hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Christashi, and I am joined by one good friend and another who I have just been meeting in the last couple of minutes. But you know, hopefully, depending on how this conversation goes, I don't expect it to go poorly.

We'll see. She comes from Texas Tech where she is a lifelong student by her own admission, and she is a colleague of doctor pearl Mutter, who, as you know, if you've listened to this show before, doctor pearl Mutter comes highly regarded, so I think she would come highly regarded as well. Julie Brannon Hi, and also joining us the aforementioned hair professor, I think is what he wanted to be called at one point, all the way from the Swiss Alps, professor of Media and Communication over at Texas Tech, doctor David pearl Mutter. Well again, sir, he required there's me to call him doctor. No boy, wouldn't that be something?

On this episode of the Culture Cast, we're talking about a film that I believe I may have covered in the past on someone else's show, or I may have talked about it on my show. But I know that my opinion on this movie has changed several times since I've watched it the first time many moons ago, when it came out in the pastoral year that was twenty fifteen. Geez, mother, eleven years eleven years ago, feels like a lifetime time. Yeah. On this episode of the Culture Cast, though, we're taking a look at yet another film that doctor Perlmutter is bringing to the plate.

We're talking about twenty fifteen's The Witch or the Witch if you really want to get stylized with it. So. The film is directed and written by Robert Eggers. He has gone on to work on and write such films as The Northman, Nosferatu, The Lighthouse, which, in my opinion, is one of the fartingest, gayest movies you can ever watch. But boy, it's fun.

It is nothing like The Witch. If this movie is is dour and kind of mean spirited, the Lighthouse is just kind of gay and a lot of farting. Yeah. Robert Eggers spent a lot of time researching the topic of The Witch. He spent a lot of time making this historically accurate, and he spent a lot of time casting the main cast.

There's about four people in this movie, Anya Taylor Joy, Ralph Innocent, Kate Dickie, and Harvey Scrimshaw, with Ellie Granger and Lucas Dawson rounding out the children cast. Anya Taylor Joy and Ralph Innoson and Kate Dickey and Harvey Scrimshaw play a family who after being ousted from their community due to Ralph Innoson's religious beliefs, they live out in a secluded forest or a farm that they build near a forest and lo and behold, as they always say, the devil is in the woods. Well, this time they might be right. The devil might actually be in the woods. Or the devil just might be your goat that lives on your property, that stands on two legs and was apparently a real pain in the ass on set.

I am going to kick it to doctor pearl Mutter first because I know he asked questions, and then Julie, you and I will attempt to answer said questions, but I will give you the floor after he has done. But doctor pearl Mutter, you brought this movie to the episode, but I know that this movie did not resonate with you the way I think it. Well, I don't know. Robert Eggers, I think has gone on record saying recently that he's not a big fan of this film. Probably not for the reasons that you weren't, though, So before.

He starts, I just want to go ahead and take the actual blame. I suggested this movie. Well, there's no blame. He went along with it. There's no blame.

I mean, maybe doctor pearl Mutter is blaming somebody, but I'm not. Let's just be clear here, but thank you for hoisting yourself on your own petard as it were. Uh So, doctor Pearlmutter, you have the floor. I I am really I've been waiting now for like a week and a half, two weeks since I got your list. I am so curious what vexed you pun intended about the Witch.

Well, first, I do want to give credit, and it is credit to Julie, who I've worked with before, and she she's a technical logical virtuo so here, but she also has has a lot of deep insights about the culture and from a different perspective, you know, grew up in a different place, different different age, group, and it's always I always enjoy our conversations. And she suggested this movie. I had not watched it, and one of the reasons I had not watched it was that horror is just not my genre. And I find it difficult to talk about in class because often there's some especially modern horror, there's some deeply disturbing things going on, and I feel uncomfortable assigning eighteen year olds to watch something I would not assign.

Ever, I mean there are some classes that would assign it, but probably not yours. Yeah, I mean, I actually I think and maybe both of you would agree that, like if this was a graduate course and like sources of modern horror or something like. That, feminine studies even. Yes, I mean there's all sorts of specialty things. I just wouldn't assign it for a general undergraduate God, no, kids.

I have a professor friend who told me in his film class, he programmed Imama to Tombien and there were students that found it to be too sexual of a film that is the point of the film. Times have changed. I remember when I was in grade school, they put Indiana Jones on a VHS on the projector in class. I don't think they'd be showing even that anymore. Unfortunately or fortunately, but this is pushing the line, I think, more than either of those movies.

Yeah, in defense of modernity. So I want to give a little like three or four minute introduction to my reaction to this film, and then I really want to turn over to you, guys. I have a series of questions and I think you have the answers. I missed something, and I'm sure you will tell me what you saw that I missed, but let me start off with what you just mentioned. So my journey in films started when I was a kid in watching films, and like a lot of kids, I watched films that were specifically targeted for kids, like the original Disney movies when we used to refer to a Disney movie.

I saw those Disney movies opposed to modern Disney movies or Pixar movies or something like that. But I didn't My parents were not a fictionados of the horror genre, so I really it just wasn't my genre. I just didn't go to see them, especially as a kid. And it was only when I became a young adult and it was a rebellious you know, Oh, yeah, let's go see a scary horror movie. That we go see a scary horror movie.

I was a teaching assistant in the late eighties, which seems like a long time ago to the great film scholar Amos Vogel, who wrote a book called Sources Sorry Film as a Subversive Art. That's the title. Everybody should read that book. And the course where I was a teaching assistant was Sources of Modern Cinema and it was about four hundred people in a room, and yeah, he showed some pretty advanced film, so I'll use the word advance like that. They were films where there was body horror and there was you know, mass death and things like that, which I would feel uncomfortable today for different reasons showing to an unknown group.

Just walked in the door thinking this was going to be, you know, a film class, and didn't know what was going to be in it. So I came into this film and Julie recommended it, and I'm glad you recommended it, and I'm glad I saw it. This is a beautiful film. Let's start out that way that like every shot of this film, it reminds me a lot of Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick, like, like, if you just freeze a frame of this film and look at it, you go, that's a painting. It's set in the sixteen thirties.

I think it works to believe, and every frame looks like a colored woodcut. It's very cpish, it's very you know, drowned out tones. It looks like these are almost a documentary of the time. I remember sitting there watching and going like, what a beautifully composed shot. And the barn looks right, and the goat looks right.

The costume you look sometimes their shoulders and the way that they sewed a little flap over the shoulders. And I looked up some of the woodcuts and etchings and a few paintings we have of period costumes, not necessarily always of because you know, a lot of the stuff we have of Pilgrims and that time were made one hundred years later or three hundred years later, and so the costume on some of Victorian, you know, nineteen sixteen, seventeen, nineteen, different times, wasn't exactly right. But but like, this is a beautiful movie, beautifully on the cinematography, the soundtrack, everything blew me away. In awe and appreciation except for the plot. Again a plus for everything.

The acting Anya Taylor Joy deserved an award. The mother, the father, the kids are are a little shaky. Sometimes it's hard for kids to play period with accents, and the accents I thought varied a little bit. Now. I looked this up and because I was sort of curious, you know, these were some of them were British columnists.

I mean, the kids were probably born the colony of Plymouth and such, but the parents were probably born back in England. So you've got to imagine a short of Shakespeare plush, you know, Queen Elizabeth plus accent. So like, everything was great, except I was sitting there watching and I guess we're gonna have to get into it because it is, you know about the movie. In the first couple of minutes of the movie, a baby is murders and I personally, this is one of my stop stops. Is like, gosh, I don't like children being killed in movies or in real life, but I mean, especially in movies.

I just I repel myself from that. I understand plot vies. It has to happen, especially if something's historical, and then it gets darker. That sounds like a ridiculous sentence, doesn't it. A baby is murdered, and then it gets darker.

It does get darker. It gets darker and darker until the last I would say minute and a half where it is this transcendent, truly beautiful movie in a different way. And I'm talking about the last scene. And again we're assuming people have watched this movie where. It's outside of the it's outside of the what are we calling it here, the statute of limitations?

The limitations have passed. We're eleven years now, so yeah, ten years to watch this movie. If in the last ten years. You know away the ending. But of course I need somebody to explain the ending to.

Me, explain it, and then somebody will you you'd say it that somebody will explain it, we promised. In a typical horror plot, either the evil that everybody is worried about is actually true and you know, the monster in the woods turns out to actually be a monster in the woods, maybe with a twist and horror ensued. Or it's the Scooby Doo plot where you know it turns out to be a guy in a costume, or somebody has some other nefarious thing going on. I guess there's a third possibility in this one. All the paranoid ravings of people who come off from our modern sensibility, no matter how religious you are today or how atheistic, they come off as like inordinately like fearful of things.

That probably I mean, there are a lot of things to be worried about in the woods. Just on historical context. This is a time of the first contexts at that time of Native Americans, indigenous peoples, and the English colonists there had already been going on a long colonization by Portugal and Spain, some contact with the English. This is not Jamestown, this is near Plymouth. And he was a time called the Great Dying because there was a massive die off by disease of the Native Americans.

Now I think we only see Indigenous Americans like for a few seconds one time, and leaving we see some native people's first peoples they're called in in Canada. I like that sampeen into the town and then we wonder, right like, because new colonists would have been fearful of the woods. The woods were very scary. I have a good friend from college who wrote a dissertation. His there was Derek Bouse and he wrote about the wilderness in American movies, and the idea from especially the European College is the wilderness was scary.

It was full of danger. You know, there was a bear, there was people who were fighting for their land against them. And of course as the sixteen hundreds evolved, there was a series. There were good it was off and on, like there was a thanksgiving, you know, and they did eat together. On the other hand, there was like terrible wars where lots of people were killed, and there was this great dying from European diseases of the native people.

So a lot was going on. But you don't necessarily think that the ravings about like Satan is about to get us all turn out to be true if we treat this as like factual events and this isn't a dream, and this isn't the occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge where like Ana Taylor Joy died in the first scene and this is all this is all like the minutes before she's dying. It all turns out to be true. So I need some good explanation on a couple of levels. First, is this the filmmaker saying is this filmmaker agreeing with the extreme paranoia of the people that's saying, like, yep, it's all true.

Monster in the Woods really is the monster. There's a scene at the end again where a parent the black goat called Black Philip. There's a whole discussion we can have maybe later about why Black Philip and the meaning of Philip, especially post Armada where the King Philip of Spain tried to invade England with an armada and was defeated by the weather as well as by the English. So Philip was not like a great you know, it was a dangerous name and a name that quannotated the horror in itself. And the goat turns out to be what a beautiful scene where you see the foot and one foot is a goat and the other foot is a man, and then there's yeah, and he's got a blackbeard with a black hat sort of like okay, this is sixteen thirty circa Satan.

And then I love this, like, you know, the devil tries to tempt you, and he's going to give you something to commit yourself to the devil and to sign his book, the Book of Souls. Right the youth, you commit yourself the devil. And in most stories where I've read, people want power, right like I want to be, you know, presidents of the United States. I want to be president of a company. I want a billion dollars, you know, I want all these things.

And the young lady here wants butter and a pretty dress, and I thought, gosh, that is so sixteen thirties, you know, like in terms of like what would be like the most wonderful thing that she could think of? Butter, fresh butter. They've been starving in a pretty dress. And she signs the book and then there's this I don't know how to describe it, except the theeal scene golden lighted of her in the woods with we take to be other witches. We've been introduced to one character who you know is supposedly a witch as well, and she flies up into the air and what a magnificent scene.

I didn't get how we got there, And now I'm going to stop talking. Well, what I really felt like this whole movie was about was how a father pride is actually what tears apart the family and her. So first I want to acknowledge thomasin her name is Thomas, and sin I thought that was interesting. I thought that was fun. Doubting Thomas is one of my favorite figures from the Bible.

But this whole family finds it to be a sin to question those things, to the point where they all get kicked out from the village because they are too rigid, too uncompromising. Like that's what I took from it is that they are far more Puritanical than the other Puritans. So he gets kicked out on all of this, And it's all about his pride and how he will not lean on others for his pride, or how he makes others take responsibility for his sins, like he makes his son Caleb lie to his mother about where they were gone to and why they were gone that one morning, he he lets Thomasin take the blame for the silver cup being gone. He lets all of this happen to his children without speaking up for them, and then makes them and doesn't admit to any hit of his wrongdoing in why they got kicked out and thrown into the wilds in the first place.

And the only time that he ever admits that is when he's alone at night when he thinks no one can hear him. But so all of that is is this, But we also for thomasin her this whole story to Meet was about her finally getting out from the crushing weight of her family. So I viewed the ending as a very happy ending. Same same same, By the way, like genuine with no no shred of irony, I think it is rather meant to be a rather uplifting end. She so she's finally free from being constantly blamed by her fail family, from being constantly having to labor, having to do all of the work, and yet still getting like no love.

She even tells her mom as she is trying to keep her mom from killing her, I love you, I love you, And then she has to defend herself. But she's finally free from all of this, and so her all of her father's pride has brought all of this hardship onto her and her family, and she finally is free. Of all of that. At the end, as much as she is mournful and she has still feels like she has lost everything, this is also when she finally like finally, she's finally not under anybody else's direction, and whether she's damned or not is almost beside the point at then, because like for the first time she has agency, and. At the end of the movie, she's completely hosed either way because her entire family is dead and she is a woman on her own in the middle of the woods of sixteen thirties New England.

What is she gonna do? Anyways, if the devil comes knocking at this moment, I'd be making that trade too, because what choice do you have in that moment? I mean, but to be fair, and I think that this is very much like to your point, Julie, I think that is very much like you know, a doctor Pearl Mutter. I'd love to do a podcast on midsummer with you, boy. I think that would be I think you'd really have a I think you would have less of a hard time with that movie than you do with this movie, because that movie has no child killing whatsoever, and actually well, and the other thing is like it very much is also in the modern day fairy tale vein, especially the extended cut, which literally has an opening like like triptick painting that shows the entire plot of the movie and then it kind of opens, which is amazing, like in this movie.

I think for me, Doctor Pearl Mutter, and I think that this is probably the thing I would say, if you want to give this movie a little bit of the grace with like the child killing, grim fairy tales did the exact same thing, and I would say that this is kind of in that vein of like a grim fairy tale, of like, look, this is trying to be as period accurate as possible. And hansel On Gretel, we know why they were given away. They were given away because he couldn't feed him. And if this were real life, he would have killed the youngest one and they would have eaten him. That's what would have happened.

I mean, Unfortunately, like child cannibalism was a lot more prevalent than I think they talk about, but it is it was common, like I mean, it was like it's not a pleasant topic, but I mean again, if the options are let your whole family die or one goes and the rest of the family survives, I mean again, I don't think it would be surprising to learn that that was a thing that happened in these kind of frontier situations. I think it's kind of I think this movie traffics a lot in the grim fairy tale world of like child killing, not as a way of like shocking the audience, but more as like a matter of factism to show that like the world is in fact, while this is a fairy tale, the world is still a really awful place.

Because again, like in Hansel and Gretel, the parents are giving up the kids because they can't feed them, and so it's ironic that they're giving them to someone who's going to fatten them up and then eat them. Like that's the irony of the story, is, like that's who they're given to. Is you know, a witch who fattens them up to eat them? I don't know, but I will say, doctor Perromutter, to your point, child murder is not a particularly endearing topic for a film to be trafficking and trafficking and however, it doesn't bother me. I'm saying that I understand for a large portion of the population, not a supremely positive topic to be yielding on.

And by the way, it's not just one kid that dies this movie, by my approximation, it's like three or four. Well, whenever I watched it the first time through, I didn't read that scene as baby sacrifice. Initially I read it as circumcision. Oh, because that is a thing that there's plenty of examples of infant foreskin being used in rituals even throughout history. True, And it was like I realized what threw me off, and it was how gentle the lady is with the baby, like gently touching it before she takes a knife to it.

But then it immediately cuts away and all you see is her like pounding mush in a bowl, So you. Don't see the baby be murdered. It's all implied. So but it's fun because it does go against those like horror movie tropes early on started out doing like you don't hurt kids and you don't hurt animals, and this film was like, we're gonna do both. Right Frankenstein.

And Frankenstein was portrayed as negatively as he was because he murdered a child, Yeah, drowned a child. Like to your point, doctor pearl Mutter, people have a real aversion to children being murdered. Are children? Is it animals then children for you, doctor Pearlmutter? Or children?

That I'm serious, Like there's like a there's like a dividing is it animals than children or children than animals? You know, let's there's two responses and thank you both. And I know you're going to give me more, but like this was a really helpful analysis. First, let's talk about the circumstances of the time. Okay, So if this is the sixteen thirties, sixteen twenty, the Mayflower land within a few years, there's like a year they're starving right right, because they did not come prepared.

If you read the story of Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony, these people, it's you know, if you were going to start a space colony now, you would like have all these these you know, we need somebody who's a geologist, we need somebody who's a soil scientist. These people went over now for different reasons. Some people, especially the earlier Collists and Jamestown, thought they were going to find like gold mines. They would just dig gold and to go back to England and sell it. The Pilgrims, the Puritans were escaping religious oppression.

You know, they were oppressed and they had their particular view of the world. Everybody at that time, whether you were the King of King of Spain, or you or a peasant or somebody in the wilderness. Child mortality was a reality of human existence. On this planet for most of our existence was The anthropologists talk about this and we've talked about it on this show before. You know, you go to those the graveyards of those people from the sixteen thirties and they're still in New England, their graveyards and you see the tombstone and you can see from one family five children under the age of five who died childhood disease, starvation, maternal mortality.

I mean, the most dangerous thing a woman could do for most of human history is give birth right, and the most dangerous thing, you know, as a child lived past age six or seven, and they might very well lived age seventy. I mean there were a lot of old people. But like the children in metality rate was thirty forty percent. Just imagine that. The horror of that talk about the horror movie, you know, the idea that like thirty to forty to fifty percent of every child and they didn't love their children any less than we do.

Yeah, so there's a built in horror there that I think, the fear. And of course they did, I mean, they did have doctors, they did have medicines, but like they weren't that good. I mean, yes, and I'm sure the Native Americans famously had, you know, things that they knew in the woods that you were the equivalent of aspirin or the you know, treated fever and things wounds and things like that. They did have that. But like, we have some hope, right that if our child is sick and we go to a hospital, somebody really knowledgeable who went to medical school and like has the entire pharmacopeia of humanity available.

But so I sort of, Julie, maybe maybe we're on the same page here. I understand the extreme fear and paranoia of those people that they have no control over the world and so they have to look at faith as their only hope of Like, I mean, how do we stop from starving? Like, well, maybe we could do a better job of growing corn, but we you know, we didn't grow grow ma's back in England. We have no idea how to do it. That the local peoples have helped us a little bit and we've traded with him.

How do we stop disease? How do we stop a woman from dying? And we don't know. We just all we have is prayer, right, So I understand their extreme fear, and there were a lot of religious disagreements between them and things like that. But I guess what I need further explanation on is so everything the father was worried about technically just technically, everything the father was worried about in his pride was factually correct, yes or no, because he kept worrying that the devil was just out there coming to take his family and wasn't he right?

A sidebar question that I have for Julie to answer Doctor's question, do you feel like the film has an unreliable narrator in the character of thomasin Man. I well, I don't know if she's an unreliable narrator. Untrustworthy main character has that for a question? I don't even think that, because I think that she is the most trustworthy of any of the characters that you have in front of you. She's the only one that has any kind of like humility.

She's the only one that actually like stays faithful up until the very end she starts the hymn during the travel sequence. She's the one that tries to keep the family unified and together, even but her dad is like choosing he'll let his family darve and suffer rather than try to go back to the village and be like we've deep But as far as like unreliable narrator, the part that meet me go this is I think that this is not all imagined. Is whenever Samuel is first stolen from her, the baby is first stolen from her, and she doesn't run into the woods, she stops right before entering the woods, and then the camera cuts to the witch walking through the woods with the baby. There's nobody there, there's no there's no other point of view except the baby.

So the point of view that we're seeing isn't anybody else's. It's it's just a thing that is happening. And so I that's what makes me think that she's that this isn't her not it's not necessarily because I don't even feel like the dad is the one that thinks that there's evil out there. He what he really imposes on his children is that they are born with sin, and it's the mom that tends to realize there's witches out there. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think doctor promoter, I would say no, but yes, but no, because I think to Julie's point, like there's in my mind there's two there's three interpretations of this movie.

So you have these straightforward interpretation, which is I think the one that I think we could all agree on, which is, there's a family and not just whiches. Uh, there's a family and they're in the woods, and they're in the woods next to a forest, and in the forest there seems to be a witch. That witch is hexing and vexing the family in some capacity, and the witch drives a wedge, and the devil through the witch, drives a wedge between the family members to the point where there's no connection anymore, and they all end up dying and the only one left is now isolated, and she has only one choice at the end, which is to fall into alignment with the devil. I think we're all in kind of agreement, right, That's like the basic plot of the right However, there's also the other interpretation, and this again, this is I'm just putting this out there as a possibility.

I mean, there is a possibility that Thomasin is just a witch the whole time. That's fair. I mean she is kind of like leaning into it a fair amount. And to be fair, at the end of the movie, who is in a better position than her really nobody, Like she has effectively shirked the bounds of what you could interpret to be a patriarchal society, and now she is living amongst strong women like herself who will do whatever it takes to be successful or live a quote delicious life unquote. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that.

Frankly, I think it's interesting because again, I think as much as the ending of this movie is like a yes girl moment, it does feel a little mid summary in that respect, because at the end of Midsummer, I know there's a lot of people that take it as like a you go girl moment, but it is not a you go girl moment at all. It's like it's such a horrifying thing that happens at the end of that movie. And I would say, in a lot of ways, this movie has a similar ending where it's like, yes it is. I still stand by what I said before, Like it is an uplifting ending. She has shirked the bounds of this like, you know, really oppressive by the movies extent matriarchal society or patriarchal society, but like now she's in a concubine with the devil.

Like, Okay, I don't know. Like by my approximation, that's not much better. But at this point in time, I'm probably better off taking my chances with Satan than a God who, by this movie's approximation, is not there for them. That's the other thing, Like God is not there for them. They pray to God, and Caleb is praying to God in that moment where he pukes up the apple and God does not come to help him.

Yeah, So, like I mean again, the devil is manifesting himself in the woods, so you know he exists. If God is unwilling to make his or her presence known, I guess it would be hard for me to not fall in league with the devil if I were a character who had been living in England and been taken over on a ship. Because there to your point, doctor Pearl Mutter Thomason is probably the only one who remembers what it was like to live in England where yes, there may have been squalor and disease and other things, but you add access to processed goods and like mildly processed goods and other things, and there was some ease of living that living on the frontier in America across the pond, where you can't just dial up a door dash to get your groceries.

It's just I mean, even in England there wasn't any of that obviously, but it was more you were more able to do certain things easier than living on the frontier. So Thomasin's the only character who can remember anyway, So she's probably like Florence Pugh's character in Midsummer The devil kind of is able to walk into a room and pinpoint who the easy mark is and can see the pressure points very easily. And what benefit does the devil get out of an old, older man or an older woman when like, you have this beautiful woman here, like who will be able to do exactly what this old hag and the witch has been trying to do and has to go out of her way to make herself look beautiful. Thomasin can live for like twenty thirty forty years before she ever has to worry about it.

So, yeah, gosh, you brought us some really great points. You are pointing out that technically, from what we know, if it exists, Hell was a patriarchy, I mean, but not again, who knows I don't know. I don't claim special insight into heaven or hell. Definitely, if you read Dante's Inferno and Purgatory and Heaven, it's pretty delineated what some of the traditional views were in the Catholic Church. And of course the people in this are Protestants, so but they too had a patriarchal vision that God was male and that Satan was male too.

So it's an interesting question about the decision of the filmmaker to make if this is supposed to be safe. It's a very traditional film in some ways, right, I mean because thing the Black Goat, which is it's interesting. I purposely did not like read reddit or watch other YouTube videos about this because I wanted your fresh reaction. I wanted my own fresh reaction to this. But there is this old going back ten thousands and thousands of years of Pan, the great God Pan, who is a goat god now a hybrid of goat and man.

And there's this interesting ancient story. It's not in the Bible, but if you just look up on Google Great Pan is dead. This idea that there was a like people heard when the tomb in the story of the told the New Testament, when the tomb opened for Jesus. That simultaneously these people heard Pan is dead, that the old gods were dead. That's not in the Bible, but like that's a folkal legend.

It's associated with religion. Goat God. And then again it's a very he's an eighteen his sixteen thirties, devil. Right, he's got a black pointed beard and a black hat. But what struck me?

So then you said something else, and I'll just again, I'll raise an issue and then be quiet. Hell is the absence of God. There's a very good short story about this by Ted Chang, who wrote a short story that the Amy Adams film The Arrival was based on. But that comes from Second Thessalonians one nine. The apostle Paul describes the fate of those who do not know God.

Quote I mean, obviously this is a translation. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might. So that's been interpreted as the idea that separation from God is the greatest punishment that you can give somebody being in the wilderness, and the idea that like is God, here is God in these dark woods of this new land that has never known the feet of you know, missionaries or Christians like us. That was a real fear of them back then. So I like the way that movie recreates that.

Please Julie go ahead. Even Catherine voiced that because she said at one point like did the devil not meet Jesus in the wilderness? And I thought it was so funny whenever they first come to the spot right before the woods and the wilderness where they're going to set themselves up, that they're seen on their knees giving thanks and they kissed the earth. And something that just popped into my head whenever I watched it was it's so funny that he's kissing this earth that is not it's definitely not his land. He's outside of their community and therefore outside of God's protection, and he thanks God for a land that he's still finding really unsafe and really precarious.

But this is something that's it's so interesting because at least witches and natives typically have are portrayed, and I believe really are they find the earth more sacred than Christians tend to. And so I thought that was interesting that he's kissing the earth that he's thanking God for this land when it's witches and others who this land belongs to at that time, but he doesn't. They don't know that yet. And so but I thought that was interesting because Catherine brings that up. Even in Before I forget about it, Thomason talks about the glass windows in their house in England.

So I think that they were fairly well off when they were in England. So this is a much more squalor place that they live now. And I and I think for me that that, you know, I think it's if you're gonna as the devil isolate somebody, you isolate the person that has had the experience and the things being taken away. And I also think, you know, again, you know, doctor Perlmutter, you ask like, well, you know, is this proving that you know the paranoia of the Father? I mean, I guess by the movie's approximation, it is like in some ways, like I would say, the thing that we can also probably all agree on in this movie is that the movie makes a very strong case that in this universe that the movie has created, the devil is real, the devil exists, and the devil can walk on Earth, and those are all things that the movie establishes.

Whether or not we can agree on other things, I think is kind of, you know, beside the point. I think we can all agree, like the movie has made that clear. So I think it's very interesting that once again, like the movie is showing us one it's seemingly showing us only one side of the conversation. We never see the side where God came into this point, and by the movie's approximation, God does not exist. Like it's a very nihilistic movie in a lot of ways, Like we never see God intervening in any capacity to help these people, like to do anything.

Like the question becomes, have they, like you said, doctor Pearlmutter, have they isolated themselves from God intentionally by doing what they've done and in being away from the community and out on their own, have they made themselves lesser? I don't know. But I also don't know if by staying in a community that they felt not a part of for their religious beliefs, is that really a genuine I don't know, Like, I don't know if that's a real genuine way to live either by these people's account, because they came halfway across the world just to get away from persecution already, like and now they're being persecuted while they're here, Like you know that's yeah, it's pretty you know it's pretty. You know that's I would say, that's pretty intense stuff to feel that level of persecution, to be willing to leave your community in this in this way, like on the frontier, making your life harder for yourself.

Low. Yeah, yes. And what I was thinking of was, Chris, one of the very first conversations you and I had, and I, Julie, you got a chance to listen to it, But Chris and I talked about Cabin in the Woods. Many moons ago. Now Love Bitch has some parallels in the sense that remembering our conversation of it, at least, it's still my view that Cavin the Woods was a commentary on the audience right on, like this long tradition of this genre of let's take some healthy teenagers with normal thoughts and torture them and punish them for those being a normal teenager.

Yeah, we the audience pay money and enjoy it, and it's and the film ends, and again I don't mind giving them the end of the way there with this magnificent dialogue Sigourney Weaver as the head of the project there where, in order to appease the ancient gods, they agree to torture some teenagers every X number of years to saying, you know, you got to save the world. You have to die. To the last two teenagers alive, you have to die in order to save the world. And one of them the I was calling the Shaggy from Scooby Doo character, because I think he actually physically looks like the Shaggy escape Scooby very close. If this is what we have to do, If like ritually killing children essentially is what we have to do to keep the world, maybe we just have to call off the world, like give somebody else a chance, you know, giant rats one hundred thousand years from nover like that.

And I thought, what a power. And it was a very powerful end. And I did, I mean, I didn't appreciate all the mayhem, but I understood in Cabin in the Woods the mayhem was in service of this moral Just now, you guys have mentioned Grim's fairy tales a lot. The speculation by a lot of people who study folklore is that they were lessons, right, they're like, Okay, something is does a monster in the woods, because kids, it's not really good for you to wander in the woods. In pre you know, prehistoric times or in medieval times, there were dangerous things in the woods.

Just don't don't do things. And here's here's a story about some bad things that happened to kids who who did that. I saw this film and again I want to go back to the last couple of minutes, and I like, maybe you to explain we are seeing reality. Is that what both of you are arguing, like this actually happened. Yeah, that's what I think the film has set up, is that this is all literal.

This is what's actually happening. She is literally a she has literally signed her name in the literal Book of the Devil, and she is a literal witch. Now, yes, And that moment of ecstasy where she you've used the word uplifted a couple of times, and again for anyone who hasn't seen the film, she is literally uplifted, like she flies through the air exactly like some of those old paintings you see of witches. And she's not on a broomstick, you know, and she's not wearing a pointy hat, but like she's naked, and we infer that sheese naked and she flo She's lifted up into the air into the trees. These these glorious you know, old growth trees.

Uh, I want to insert here. You know that there's this if you read a Natural History of North America, before we started cutting trees down, it was said a squirrel could like not touch the ground all the way from like Maine to Minnesota because the tree cover was so dense, so that the trees were were important symbol of you know, the wilderness, the uncut tree, the giant tree. But anyway, she is lifted up. Explain that moment to me. Is this real happiness?

Is she sound fulfillment? There? Uh? What happens the next morning? I tell me more about that last scene of what it meant.

Well, So she she her whole family's been killed. She she killed her mother for the last one after her mother tried to kill her. She's been in shock and mourning before she has even been given the book to write in. She's covered in blood. And then it goes inside of her house and takes off her outer clothing and then grabs I think it's her dad's jacket and puts it on and just lays her head on the table and falls asleep until night has fallen.

She gets back up. She wanders around to look at all of the destruction because all of her family's goats have been killed. Except for Black Philip, everybody else is dead. She's standing by candlelight covered in blood and starts asking Black Philip to speak to her, and he finally does, and you know, late leads to the which style like a taste of butter, a pretty dress, which thou like to live deliciously? Wouldst thou like to see the world?

And she and that's when she's like, do you see a book? Or he asks do you. See a book? Before thee and she signs it. I thought it was interesting that he does.

She says that she doesn't know. At first I thought she was saying she can't write her name like she she will not, But then it occurred to me she doesn't know how to write her name. She doesn't know how to write, and so she has to have somebody guide her hand. So it's like, this is none of this is. This is why I.

Don't think that she's necessarily an unreliable narrator, because it's not like this is all triumphant villainy that is happening. It's a poor girl who's left with absolutely no options and has one door still opened her like we've talked about, So everyone she's loved is dead or gone, the farm is destroyed. She's gonna be sent away anyway, and if it goes back to the village, she'll probably be hanged. So the devil never corrupts thomasin all of her family and theology left her with nothing, and he just shows up last to pick up all of the pieces. So I thought that was interesting.

And so whenever she says yes, I want to see the world, Yes, what would you have me do? I think that is her only option. And now I do think she was manipulated into that option, but I do think it's better than dying or being abused or being hanged. And so I think as she's walking through the field naked towards that fire, towards the other women who are dancing in ecstasy around the fire, who are chanting, she seems so scared at first, but then she starts laughing on her own and that's when you can see all of the woods moving behind her, which I thought that was beautiful. She you just see her framed in it and all of the woods moving around behind her to show that she's lifting up.

And I loved it because now she's she's just been so crushed under having to do all of this labor on the farm because she, you know, she was expected to watch the twins, watch the baby, clean out the manure, fetch the water, all of these things that she's being asked to do. And now she doesn't have to have that labor, but she also doesn't have to have her mother blaming her for when things don't get done. Where she doesn't have all of this lovelessness. At least, even if her soul is damned for all eternity, she gets to experience some bit of love and happiness during her time on Earth. I think that, I think that's where it leads us.

And I would I would add on to that, because I think you're right to go back to my comparison to Midsommer. At the end of that movie, you have a character who is watching. In this movie, we're not having them watch something transformative, a we're kind of seeing a little bit further down the road than Midsomar gives us this this movie. If this movie ended the way Midsomar did, it would probably well it ends on that same note, but this movie would have ended like ten minutes early in terms of like the where the character is left, but we are left with that same visual of like what I would and I know Robert Eggers calls it the sublime and I would agree. It's like it's like horrific ecstasy because I feel like in Midsomar, the character in that movie feels this same like is more is less aware than the character is in this one, Like in in the which Thomasin is left with no choice.

In Midsomar, Danny has plenty of choices. But she got home. Yeah, she could have still gone home. She just chose not to really like in a lot of ways, but she was intentionally isolated in that movie, and it made it easier for the things to happen that did happen here. The isolation is of no fault to Thomasin's own like it's it's forced upon her by her family.

So the devil kind of already has a leg up versus where the cult in Midsomar does, but they both end on that same visual of a woman's face in kind of divine ecstasy. But similarly to Midsomar, there is an underlying sense of the real horror that's going on, because in Midsomar at the end, she's you know what's gonna happen when she hits seventy two, Like we've seen it, yeah, literally, like she's seen herself in the future already, so we know where that's headed. And in the Witch, we know where it's headed. We've seen what Thomasin's gonna look like when she gets older, Like she's going to be this old crone in the woods off by herself, eating children and being up to no good. It'll be fun for a while, but then it won't be so much fun anymore when the reality sets in.

It's the it's the old you know, it's the old vampire gag, right of, like, well, now that you're a vampire, you have to you know, suck people's blood. And it's like, oh what, no, Like it's like, well, that's that's the give and the take. That's the trade off. That you don't get all of these things without giving something up. It's like being a skin walker, right, which I know you're not even supposed to say the term, but not I know, I know it's being one of them that you give up a piece of your humanity.

I believe you give up your soul for that. So, like there's always a trade off with these stories, with the supernatural, especially a supernatural of the evil or religious evil. You always have to give something up. With the devil, it's your soul. With this, you know, skinwalkers, it's your soul.

With other things, it's your you know, something x Y, your first newborn, something like that. You always have to give something up. And so I think with this it's just you know, Thomasin looks at the situation and goes, I have no choice. I have been intentionally isolated by the devil who is not playing fair because he's the devil, and you know, Satan lies, like that's his whole thing, Like you know, that's literally one of his things. And so I don't know.

Like again, like Thomasin as a character at the end of the movie is damned, but she was damned either way because well she just I mean, your other choices just die in the middle of the woods. Yeah, because like Julia said, if she went back to her village. What she gonna tell him Native Americans killed my family? Like come on, you know, like I guess you could say that, But what what? Where is?

Where is the grim's fairy tale message? Right? Where's the lesson here? The lesson is, don't go into the woods where you think the devil lives, because on the off chance that you're wrong, that you're right or in hopefully wrong in some cases, that the devil does live out there, he's gonna kill you and your family and corrupt, because that's what the devil does. It's like Tony Soprano.

He says it in the in one of the episodes of the second season. He's like, you know Frog and the scorpion, Davy, you know scorpion stings. What are you gonna do? Devil corrupts? I think that's again.

I give this movie a plus in so many categories, and one of it is the struggle, especially with modern horror. Right is that? And there've been some really funny comedies. I think Key and Peel did a comedy sketch and Studio C Channel did the comedy sketch about like why a lot of horror movies don't make sense. It's because hey, there's a cabin there, and there's a rumor that they're like there's a murderer in the woods.

Uh, you know what, let's go at Cabo instead. You know, like a lot of modern horror has to figure out a way to trap somebody in a situation where they can't just like go into town, call the police and check into a marriotte, you know, to get away. That's how you get away from the devil. I mean, that's the whole conceit of Cabin in the Woods, right. Yeah, So this movie recreates a time where everything was scary, right, every you'd eat a meal and you don't know if there's batchel.

I mean, you know, you died three days later after you ate a peach, right, and you don't know why, and and your your your child dies of a fever because there's we'll know why. And so the fear of everything and the face that there was something that would protect you from everything was so ingrained into growing up, you know, from childhood, and they showed that, like the small children there. It's interesting to me though, that four kids growing up in that thing, the two younger children, not the baby, but the two little children. There, boy, they pull out Black Philip, the goat who wanders in by the way, if I were really scared of like the devil, I would actually, if I were the parents, I would be sort of suspicious of a black wondering.

No, doctor Pearl Mutter, he's the least suspicious thing. I like how their dad's just like, there's no way this goat could be the devil. Brother really, you know what the devil looks like man. Especially with his two children that are the most mean to him and everybody else are like Black Phillip's our best friend in dancing with him and singing about him, like singing creepy songs by the way. Yeah, And it's funny how in some ways they're insufficiently paranoid.

They could have been even more paranoid. Let's eat the goat, Like, okay, this black goat, I think that's gonna be our dinner. You know, the last there is a couple of days will salt it, you know, the blackfil Let's not take a chance. And I feel like with the kids in Black Philip, it's very funny. I feel like that's almost the movies like Rumination on the Salem witch trials of like, but you know, the parents are so easy to believe these children who are saying, like, you know, oh my god, Thomasin is a witch.

She's hexed us and vexed us and she's making us do all these crazy things. And it's like, but yet the answer is so obvious. It's like, no, it's not Thomasin, it's actually this goat. Who the parents if they sat for two seconds and thought about it, yes, it sounds insane. But accusing your own daughter of witchcraft, I feel like, is a bigger jump than thinking if again, if you're willing to believe that the devil lives in the woods, why wouldn't you be willing to believe that the devil could be a literal goat on your property?

That's maybe my like again, like it's the grim fairy tale of it all, Like the parents, it's like an old horror movie right from like the eighties and old Jesus dating myself here believe the parents, Like the parents don't believe the kids. That was always the trope, That was always the trope, and they lean into that here even a little bit like ralph Inson doesn't believe Thomasin, for whatever reason. It's like, bro, I don't know why why you believe all this other crazy stuff, but the goat being the devil is a bridge too far, like okay or that. I mean, it's it's it really frustrated me the scene with Caleb uh Caleb's possession, because it's it's so clear that they're like faking not being able to say prayer, that they're pulling a crucible here, whereas I saw her dancing with the devil, and it's like, why didn't you say anything anytime before this?

Like you there there were much better times to bring this up rather than while your brother is dying. I'd like to point out, as much as I know, doctor Perlmutter, we started this podcast talking about child murder, those two kids being missing at the end of the movie, could not care less like thank you goodbye. Like those kids the witch came and ate them, and you know what, they kind of deserved it, like they were playing. They were playing that they were possessed, you know, you know what they say, f around and find out and I think the in the assumption at the end of the movie is that they did. Let's tell a little story here, so I don't know if both of you have read the Little House on the Prairie books, but I did growing up, and they're extremely well written.

They're beautiful books, and they tell you about another time and place. They are different. Up. In one of the books, there's a moment there which every parent thinks about and goes like, Wow, how different parenting was at this time. So these books, gosh, I believe they're in the eighteen eighties, eighteen seven seventies books The Childhood lower Ingles Wilder, and there's this one book describing a little boy.

It's during harvest time, and everybody's right, everybody's harvesting, and this little boy is screwing around. He's running around, he's, you know, pretending to do this, pretending to do that, and he runs around and he stumbles over a hornet's nest and he's stung by hornet. Now, a modern middle class American family who's nine year old is stung by multiple hornets, would A do nothing and continue with their activities or b rush the kid to you know, the emergency room. Right well, they're gathering the harvest. And she makes this point, this is why these books.

You know, the TV show didn't really do justice to the seriousness of the books which dealp with starvation and things like that. Well, they wrap the kid, this boy in some wet blankets, put him on the porch, and go back to harvesting, because if they don't get the harvest in, everyone are gonna go hungry and hostly. Nobody in town was going to have any special medicine or something like that. Wrapping a wet blanket was probably all you could do for me. And if he dies, he'd I mean, they would warn him.

But like, there was nothing else to do. There was limited choices. And I and I always find that such an interesting thing of all the lengths people have to go to today for modern horror to make it plausible that that's a choice, you know, fa to face the devil U. But back then there what else could they do? Right?

And and I I'm not completely sure I agree that like she's going to be an ecstatic beyond the moment, like the next day. Yeah, I don't think she is, Like I think I think the next scene. I think that's why you end the movie here, because the reality of what comes next Witch too well, yeah, electric WITCHILIU like doesn't it doesn't work as well and that's why, like doctor Pearlmutter, I think you would really enjoy mid Somar because Midsomar a dress. This is that question in the movie in a really interesting way filmically, using like just the language of film that I think this movie doesn't really care about doing because again, like at the end of this movie, it is a little bit trying to be a little bit more uplifting, no pun intended, but I do think that the characters in this movie at the end of it, thomasin is like the next scene is like you're, you know, like like Goya, like you're essentially like you know, you and the devil are having a good time and not necessarily all the right positions.

Is kind of you know what Goya was always talking about, Goya and the Devil. I mean, come on, all of that, like you and the devil, Like if you're a witch, you are having Sabbath with the devil. Yeah, they don't show the bad part. They just show the good part. I mean, that's what this movie is saying.

I mean not in reality obviously, but that's where I mean again, because like you said, what would we see after the after the credits, Like nothing super positive? I feel like the blooper real was uncalled for sick, you know, and really you. Should love a blooper reel for this movie. I mean, there's some films which shouldn't have a blooper reel, and this is definitely one of them where they you know, they're they're breaking, they're joking. And how about that Ralph Inoson though, Huh, what a great actor with a great voice.

I wish I had his voice. My god. The adults and the Taylor Joy Anya Taylor Joy were fantastic, and I want to give credit to the to the little boy and the little girl. I just felt that they were being asked to do a little bit carry a little bit too much. A little girl who played Mercy really was incredible though, Like she had most of the lines out of the two of them and did such a good job making me hate her.

Right, yeah, Well, it's very. For a child. I mean, a child actor can be lovable and you can also hate them. Well, I was gonna say it's very The example I always use is Sharon Stone and Casino, Like I hate her in that movie, and that's the intent of the filmmaker and the screenwriters. Like I'm not meant to like and that's the same like no the kid, the child like there are very few films where child actors and an Anya Taylor Joy's case, like, you know, young adult actors kill it.

This hard. Horror tends to be the genre where we get a lot of either really bad child actors or really good child actors. I mean a lot of great actors. Recent actors cut their teeth in horror. Anya Taylor Joy is one.

Another person. Jacob Tremblay is another one. Oh god, what's her name? She's in everything. She was in five Nights of Freddy's two, she was in a bunch.

I mean, she's in She's in like everything to the point now where when she's in a movie, it's just her. It's her for like five minutes now, and that's all they need of her time is just five minutes in a movie. It's it's pretty for a reason to recommend this movie, you know. There are definitely there's lots of actors in Hollywood, and so McKenna gray and some of them I have trouble watching because I just don't think they're very good. There are still a few people who are stars in the old sense, like like there's just something about them on the screen that's radiant.

If you go back in time and watch Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe at seventeen years old, no one who sees that didn't know, My God, a star is born. And yes, I think she was. Anna Taylor Joy was sixteen, I believe when this film was made. And you know, you really your head goes back because you're going I mean, her physical beauty, her is somewhat unusual physical beauty, like she's not a traditional Hollywood starlet or something like that. Yeah, but just there's something fascinating about her, literally fascinating, like you want her to speak, you want her You were interested in the movement of her arms.

You know, her eyes her unbelievably and I don't know whether they're physically larger than other the normal human eyes, but they seem like they're abnormally gigantic and just she I can't imagine. This is one of those things where you can't imagine somebody else in that role. Not even remotely. Anya Taylor Joy reminds me a lot of Juno Temple, where it's just like when she's in something, she's just I don't know what she's doing but she's great because I think she elevates even the smallest thing, and like, obviously this is a massive role for her. But then something like Split where she's sharing screen time with James McAvoy and she's amazing in that too, And that's like the next thing that she's in.

I you know, i Anya Taylor Joy. The last thing I saw her in of like big things. Obviously she was in Furiosa, which she's pretty amazing in that, especially having to take up the reins for Charlie's Dron, who is amazing in the role in the first Mad Max movie. But I thought she was really good in The Menu, which I mean, again a horror movie or not, I don't know what to classify that movie as. And then I know she was in one of doctor Pearlmutter's favorite films, the AI created and generated The Gorge, which is a film that comes up way too often for how unbelievably bad it was good in it.

Of course she was good, because she's good at everything. If you told me Anya Taylor Joy was in Mortal Kombat too and she was amazing, I would go, yeah, I believe it, Like I'm not, you know, she's I mean she's good in the Super Mario Brothers movie, and she's given about an inch of runway to work with, Like, you know, just go be Princess Peach, okay, like you know, Anya Taylor Joys is I think to your point, Doctor Pearl Mutter. And this is something that's kind of lost on American audiences who don't watch Indian cinema as much as I do. American cinema doesn't have movie stars anymore. Indian cinema does where you're like asked to do eight million different things saying and dance and do your own stunts or something.

American actors aren't asked to do that anymore. And I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. Like I remember there was a an article in maybe Variety or GQ a couple of years ago when that insufferable Top Gun sequel came out that was like Tom Cruise the last real action or the last real movie star. And it's like, as much as I don't like Tom Cruise, I unfortunately would be inclined to agree with that sentiment that they just don't make actors like him anymore. That are, when he's in something, it's treated as a big deal or as like an event or people are I guess more aptly.

And this is the thing that Indian cinema has that American cinema has kind of gone away from. People will go see a movie because he's in it. Him being in it is enough. And like I went and saw an Indian film last year called der Honda, and people were cheering when the main actor showed up on screen. Tell me the last time anybody did that when you were watching an American film like and it was one of those things where I was like, yeah, you know what, the the love and joy of filmmaking is still alive elsewhere, and it's because, to your point, doctor Pearl Mutter, they still treat their actors kind of like a big deal because their actors are doing more than just showing up and acting.

And I'm not saying that's not enough here. It's just I think we've kind of as a culture gotten complacent with not very much being enough, and some actors I think, really go for it. And Anya Taylor Joy is in a class of like Michael B. Jordan and Jesse Plemmons and Emma Stone that are just a cut above their contemporaries. And I mean we've talked about Bagonia Doctor Parlmutter, a film that I had no interest in watching, and then once I realized who was in it, I was like, Okay, this movie is gonna be amazing, and guess what it was and why because the actors who were in it were amazing.

And that's the thing anymore. It is almost The analogy I would use is like people used to cheer for sports teams, and I think cheering for teams is derivative of the reality of like the especially with certain sports, like the value of the people singularly on their own and cheering for like an athlete as opposed to a team has become more popular amongst people younger than me, because you know, as someone who's a Dallas Mavericks fan, we Luca and some of us still like him and care about him, but he's no longer on our team, so we feel weird cheering for a guy who's on the Lakers, but we cheer for him as a player because he elevates any team that he's on. Actors, really good actors, have that same effect on a movie.

They can elevate something that would otherwise just be your run of the Mill movie into something that I think is amazing. And if you have like five of those people involved like you like you do in this movie, where you have great child actors, great adult actors. We've barely talked about Robert Eggers, but my God, talk about a guy who knows what he wants how to get it. And I'm almost I'm disappointed to say this goes he like commits to the bit. It almost makes me sad though to say that, because I would say there's a caveat now because he stopped committing to the bit so much with The Northman and Nosferatu, two films that should have been in there, like Native Languages and weren't.

And if you're gonna do the Witch and you're gonna do the Lighthouse as movies that commit to the bit, don't stop committing to the bit. Bro, that's part of the fun, like, because nobody commits to the bit anymore, like no one, you know, two thirds of the way. Like I miss the days of the Blair Witch Project where it's like, Nope, we're gonna keep ourselves out of the limelight for a while to pretend like we're dead, Like you know, that's a little manipulative and exploitative. But I miss that, I miss committing to the bit and going, well, you know what, this is a movie that I have the actors learned German in a you know, in a Western Austrian dialect so that they can deliver the lines like you know what.

I find that immensely hilarious that you have to make actors do that, a B that there will be some actors that will lovingly do that, and then three that the audience is going to sign up to sit through that nonsense. I'm on board. And he didn't do that with Moos Faratu, and it detracts from my enjoyment of the movie ever so slightly because I watched this movie and, like you said, doctor Pearl Mutter at the opening of this podcast, this movie is like somehow you took a camera and threw it back to the sixteen thirties, Like I don't know how else to explain it, Like he captured something that most filmmakers don't capture, which is a time and a place succinctly, even if the movie is off putting and upsetting and it features all kinds of wild stuff, take all of the like the supernatural weirdness out of the movie.

What Robert Eggers achieved technically is Kubrickian in terms of the levels of like attention to detail. Like you said, doctor promoter Barry Lindon movie, I'm not a huge fan of, but I can respect it technically. The Revenant like movies that use natural lighting. I mean even no Saratu does. But yeah, like, I think the thing about this movie that bums me out is Robert Eggers doesn't like this movie anymore.

He's like, I think this movie is not as you know, as not exactly what I wanted it to be. And it's like, man, that's maybe just keep it to yourself. That's disappointing because there's so many good little things that are throughout here throughout the movie. Like specifically, the one that takes me back to getting my undergrad and art education was Caleb's possession and he's quoting scripture but it gets really erotic, and I was immediately taken back to what were the ecstasy of Saint Teresa Bernini's sculpture, and I was like, oh, it's this, It's exactly this, but he's experiencing it. But it's also like a twisted form of it, because it's a possession and and he's being killed in the middle of it, and so I thought that was so beautiful and so interesting.

There's so many little things. The app that. Whole Caleb's whole possession I thought was the most beautiful as far as like all of the imagery that's hidden in it, because like he has the apple that falls out of his mouth. It's the original sin. It's also the first sin that he tells his mother, original sin being like the eating of the forbidden fruit.

It's said that Adam could not swallow the fruit entirely and it became lodged in his throat, and that's how he got the Adams apple. And so the apple literally gets launched in his throat and he has to spit it back out. But it's not just biblical, it's also the poison apple and fairy tales. So that whole little scene like if he could, he can, he can dislike the whole rest of that movie, but that particular scene, I was just like, this is a really beautiful scene. No, I was gonna say, like I'm with you in terms of like what what Robert Eggers is able to achieve as a filmmaker I think, for the most part, is really right now unmatched in a in a literal sense in terms of his ability to craft a world that feels again imminently like real and lived in, but also slightly elevated in terms of the reality.

I mean, even with something that I would say is the most realistic leaning, which is no sfaratu like, it's still like fairy tale adjacent like it's it's heightened reality. It's not. It's playing about it the same pitch that the Witches. But I'm sure his next film, which is where Wolf spelled the German way wer Wulf, which is supposed to come out later this year, and it has a lot of the people that have been in a lot of the other things he has worked on, and it takes place in thirteenth century England with a bunch of English actors. Maybe it'll be I mean, it's I mean, that's the easy layup.

It's like, oh, it was just do thirteenth century England and cast a bunch of English actors. Lay up here you go, like, if there's not as much work has to be done, granted you don't have Willem Dafoe speaking in German on screen. I just don't think anybody is working at Robert Eggers's level right now other than maybe are a astor genuinely in terms of in the horror space. And I think that that. I think that there are other people that are trying to get there, but I don't think that anyone else is able to get there, because the level of work that has to go into these movies is more than I think a rational person should be willing to.

I guess my closing lines for this movie first to thank both of you for this class. I hope I got to be minus at least big, because you really have done it for a terrific job, Julie and Chris and explaining to me some things that I guess it wasn't that I missed them as much as I didn't appreciate how they fit together. And going to what you both have said about this movie that some movies, you are watching a plot like you're going, okay, there's you know, they've got to deliver the fuel to the station the mountain or something, or you know they've got to win the battle or something. You're following a plot from A to Z and you like the movie or not based partly on like, well, that was a good plot. Lots of interesting things came up, and you know, twists and turns and and so on.

But sometimes you watch a movie to be transported into an alternate reality, and that reality could be in reality that's never existed, you know, a very good science fiction film, or it could be a reality that that did exist, but is so far from the modern sensibility of being a middle class American in twenty twenty six that you need this immersive experience. And I think Robert Edgers as a filmmaker, as you're saying, from what I've seen, I didn't actually see a couple of couple. I saw a North Norseman. I didn't see us fraud. To did you like the Norseman?

I thought he was trying to achieve what this film we're talking about, The Witch did achieve, which was that you felt you were in not just another physical world, not just another material world, but another spiritual, psychological world. And that's what the Witch achieved, is right, I live in this world again. And I've said a couple of little details of like, okay, you know, imagine massive child with mortality, which for some people on this planet does still exist. Imagine, you know, the constant threat of death and childbirth, which, first off, some people on this planet still exist, not as much for us. But but but you know, there was there was a line and I don't know who said it.

I can't have said it. It's too clever. It goes back to and you know, I guess maybe we could meet again to do the Odyssey is actually it sounds like it's adjacent to this film in some in some ways, but. Chris Nolan movie signed me up by can't wait, But I big nothing to say. That's what.

In the ancient world, they had gods everywhere, right, like like a tree was a god, and there was a god of rivers and it was a god that there was a god terminus, a god of like borders, you know, like in the in the pagan reality and in the pre monotheistic reality, everything was it could be a god. And so there was this wonderful phrase and again I don't know who said it. It can't have been me, that like you should be kind to strangers because you never know when they might be Zeus disguise, and that the good ones sorry about Zeus visiting these people and they're kind to him, and he rewards them. You know, they're a sort of a pre Christian, pre pre Jewish, pre pre Abrahamic morality tail because a lot of them were morality details.

Right. The Honesty has morality tale in it. But I think this film really did this amazing job of immersing us in a world where the horrors were real. I mean, the devil, the devil was real. The they were out the evil forces were out there, and they were planning to kill your family.

You know, the most paranoid delusion possible turned out to be right. But also that you understood the physical horror of just living in this day to day existence where starvation and murder and just death was all around you. Yeah, dead animals did like having to deal with with just taking care of your your animals that died was enough, so so much. Sorry, go ahead, well please talk about that. I mean, we live in the world where you know, I love cats.

I'm just gonna come out and say it. Don't don't censor this from the show, Chris, Okay, I think we all love cats on this ship. We don't allow anybody who doesn't love cats to be on the progress. Travis. Yeah, my cat heard you.

Yeah, he has a very I do. He's around here somewhere. I don't know where he buyers his music like my cat's. But but yeah, like, Okay, you're a middle class American. Your cat is.

Sick, you have resources, right, Yeah, certainly here in West Texas, we have a Texas Tech We have a fantastic vetschool. You know, like your cow is sick, your horse is sick, there are resources. Back then the disaster of your goat died and that's the goat that gives you milk for your children, you know, to have some protein and some realities. Right, Just what a horror What a great horror film. I don't necessarily like the way I got to it, but in terms of like it was so disturbing to me to see what happened here.

But thank you for explaining why I had to be disturbed. And I'll end there. I'll also add on, yeah, and you know we we we talked about you know, you asked the question like, was was the paranoid Father proved right in the end, And I'll go back to my training as someone who watched all of Barney Miller, a show where the paranoids have proof as they would say this this story if you want a doctor Pearl Mutter, you could have had this story end with after she levitates into the air. Peter Fulk closes the book that he's telling the story to Ben Savage in the bed as he's fallen asleep, because that's I mean, that's and you know, but I obviously not of this time. But again, like this feels like a story that a mother or father in sixteen forties New England would tell, or you know, even in this time would tell their family like well, mom, why don't we go out into the woods, And it's like, well, did you ever hear the story of thomasin and and you know, again you wouldn't tell the parts of the baby Poltice or the other things obviously, or again, if you were telling it to maybe an older kid, you would, I mean, again, what is the point of showing teenagers who were in this country that like red blood on the road, like those like in drivers that it's the same thing.

It's like to scare them senseless so that they don't act recklessly while driving the witch if you really wanted to look at it is just it's a parable like you know, you don't but that's the thing, Like what do we get from it in the end, Like patriarchy doesn't know what they're doing. The woods are in fact deep, dark and scary, so don't go out there, like always trust in community. I don't know, you could take a bunch of things away from it. I think ultimately the real message of the story is, if you want your family to die in sixteen twenties New England, maybe do it if you live in a community, because otherwise there's a less than zero percent chance that the devil is somehow involved, and now you're his concubine.

Uh. I love all of this. I loved all of that. I don't really know when I can tell you that I got out of like the story of this movie as much as I can tell you. I got so much enjoyment out of all of just the little references throughout the movie to other fairy tales, to other Puritan times, to UH, to other cultures that are in here.

I thought that was I thought it was really cool. I loved even like the uh there's a dead bird fetus in the egg and we you know, we see witchcraft in historically being blamed for blight and failed crops. And dying animals, and animals not being able to be produced or not being able to reproduce. Uh So I. Just thought, and the references to art, the references to all of the wood cutting, woodcut paintings, and uh a trial dialogue from which which trials.

All of that was just so. It was done well, It was researched well, it was put together very beautifully. I like that the first time that you watch it, it's more ambiguous. The second time it's pretty obvious that this is all real. But I love I loved that.

I really enjoyed that for the whole movie. I do wish it hadn't been filmed so dark. It was so m boy it is huh boy, and man Eggers was just like, you know what, hold my beer. Here's No Sparatu, a movie that's even more impossible to watch if you're if your TV's not tuned correctly, or if you're watching it with a glare, you're just like, what God's name am I watching? And The Witch was bad, but No Sparatu is somehow worse, like genuinely one of the hardest, Like you have to watch it in like a basement or a home theater or something like I'm not even joking, it's impossible to watch on some tvss Doctor Prolmutter.

I'm glad you picked this movie because I hadn't watched it in a while. And Julie, obviously, I mean, but you know, I again, like you know, it's to your point about asking, like what what is what is the whole point of the movie. I think, ultimately, like the point of the movie was for someone other people to watch it and interpret it through their own lens. And I think that that's ultimately what someone like Robert Eggers has succeeded at doing. And that's not every filmmaker's goal.

And when you find a filmmaker who that is their goal, you kind of tend to follow the things that they do and watch the things that they do, and the things that they do end up being kind of an event, or they end up not just being a movie like the next ari Astor movie or honestly, the next Robert Eggers movie, like It's it's kind of a thing worth going to the theaters to watch. Seeing those faratu in theaters was much better than watching it all at home, like it was. I was actually able to enjoy it at the theater h and so it's it is one of those things where like I think Robert Eggers wants his movie to be tearor torn apart and reput back together and looked at, because I think he spent all that time getting to that point, doing all the research, getting all of the source material, like Julie said, like all of the subconscious conscious choices that were influenced by years of research, and just the things that he likes and cares about, like it's it's his.

It's an external manifestation of his like inner in and that that's probably why he doesn't like it, because it's probably too much for him, and I don't I don't disagree, Like it is a lot as a movie, but I also think it's a movie that it'll probably be put into the old US, you know, historical vault like all the other you know, important movies for you know, at least American culture, because I think it's there are a few films better that speak to that time and place and experience. And yes, it is a witch in it, but the manifestation of that is a reality I think is just a bonus for this movie. Getting to see all the other stuff I think is really why you would show this movie to other people, and especially to someone who wants to see what that looked like in a really believable way.

And so it's fun that we have an American filmmaker doing that because there wasn't really anyone else for a while, and so he's kind of taken that mantle. So it's exciting. So maybe maybe we'll do the odyssey. That's doctor purmmutt. I don't put that out into the world.

I don't want to go see a Christopher Nolan movie, and I really don't want to have to go see one in theaters. I would rather go see Mortal Kombat in theaters, which I'm going to go do. So maybe that says more about me than it does the kind of assignments I signed myself up for, Doctor Promutter. Julie both, thank you so much for the conversation and picking the movie and for showing up. If you want to hear more of me, going over to Weirdingwaymedia dot com, where this show and all the other shows I work on can be found.

Yeah, this is the part of the show where I say Patreon dot com is a thing you can go to. Five dollars is a month, is not a whole lot. Ten dollars gets you access to all the bonus episodes of Ranking on Bond. Five dollars a month gets you access to all the bonus episodes, and there's like twenty or thirty of them, and that's the thing you want to do. But like, rate and review the show on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you get it, make it one of.

Those two places. Please, Doctor Pearl Mutter, Julie Bull, thank you so much for joining me. And yeah, we'll catch on the next episode.