After years of vampire and zombie supremacy, witches have clawed their way out of those beguiling Blair Witch woods and back into the horror mainstream. Which is a huge relief for anyone who, like me, can no longer look at a zombie for more than three minutes without becoming, well, zombified. And Twilight has done such a number on vampires that the poor bastards may never be scary again.

Witches, however, make fascinating and versatile horror adversaries.

Director Robert Eggers’s debut feature, The Witch, is a deeply unsettling collage of New England folklore with – horror of horrors – some surprisingly feminist themes.

Set in mid-17th-century colonial America, a time and place where women were forced to dress up as sofas and were generally loathed and mistrusted, the film follows a fresh-off-the-boat English family who have been banished from their puritan community for being, it seems, overly puritanical.

Finchy from The Office (Ralph Ineson) makes an unexpectedly compelling scripture-spouting puritan dad. Ineson is, of course, a professional gruff Yorkshireman slash some sort of stretched-out Sean Bean. He was made to play characters built on the very worst facets of masculinity.

Read More – By turning fantasy into reality, The Witch exposes society’s fear of female sexuality – NewStatesmanAmerica