A couple of days ago, I watched the film Witch (The VVitch: A New-England Folktale) the movie about religious obscurantism.
The film is dark, heavy, and unpleasant to watch for those who don’t enjoy horror movies. I am one of those people who don’t like it when moviemakers create graphic horror scenes just for the sake of causing fear.
If it comes to experiencing the lowest human emotions, I’d rather watch porno.
However, this movie, although filled with horrific scenes, is not a horror movie. Rather, this is a look into a human past, when practically all the decision-making was predicated on the existence of the highest authority. It is a sincere movie that submerges deeply in the subject and where the acting crew did a splendid job of portraying this imaginary reality.
While I was searching for this movie on Netflix, I found a variety of them made in the same genre, and I even started watching one of them. In it, a girl dressed the 17th-century attire, was unjustly accused of witchcraft. Then the local magician sent her to the future (nowadays) where she was amazingly quickly adjusted, fulfilling his task to save her true love in the past.
I mention it because of the striking contract in the authors' position on the subject. In this movie, the very existence of witchcraft is denied. Thus, the movie’s sentiment is clearly on the side of the unjustly accused – a comfortable and nonthreatening position. The reference to the seventeenth century is made as a relative point of entry to start time leaps; something like in Outlander.
The movie “The Witch” also takes place in the 17th century, in the future US state of New England. However, the author's position is different. It is built on the assumption that witchcraft with all its paraphernalia does exist. Having made such an assumption, the plot deploys a picture of possible destructive consequences of such a turn of events. Grotesque accidents are following the castaway family with evil inevitability until only the devil-possessed daughter remains alive.
The picture ends with the heroine joining to witch’s Sabbath and her ascension in sin. Something reminding me of one of Goya’s Caprichos.
Satan himself leads to the Sabbath in the image of a black goat, speaking a low thoracic baritone - the envy of all seducers.
I’d like to point out the excellent work of Anya Taylor-Joy, who appears here in a completely different role than she had in the Netflix show I recently watched and reviewed.
It's amazing what her acting range is. Her character here is completely different from Elizabeth Harmon of the Queen’s Gambit. She plays it so different that if I had seen The Witch five years ago, I would have found it difficult to immediately identify the actress.
Another conclusion, suggested by the plot, is that in the religious community is not welcome voluntarism. Keep quiet. Don’t be too smart for your own good. Or else you’d fall victim to Satan.
After all, the family was kicked out due to disagreements in minor religious nuances.
I have only a very superfluous familiarity with the Christian Gospel, but it seems that a devoted Christian would find many moral problems with the behavior of the family to justify their demise. For example, the pride of the father. Should he obeyed the community regulations, his family would have continued living under the protection of the walls of the fort instead of praying in the wilderness.
However, the way I see it, the devil is cunning and probably could have given them much grief inside the fort, including burning the daughter at a stake.
After watching the film, you wonder where witches and witchcraft came from with all their odd behavior, spells, and warships.
In general, religion is an amazing thing. It seems that living in the 21st century with the advancement in technology, flight to the moon, and Mars, its influence should have subsided. And yet, most of humanity is still religious.
It must be difficult to get used to the idea that when we will die that would be the end of it. In addition, while you are young, your hormones make you hope for something extraordinary. Then, when you have already completed your program minimum - you have produced the offspring, it seems your life becomes worthless. You want to think that there is someone out there who sees everything, and who you can open up to without harming your career and family, ask for forgiveness, and have a shoulder to cry on.
In addition, religiosity is not so much the faith in a supreme being as the obligation to fulfill a set of rituals supposedly demanded from a believer by a supreme being.
Typical in this case is the story of the biblical patriarch Abraham, who almost stabbed his son Isaac in the service of a superior being. Ostensibly, God demanded that Abraham's faith was thus tested.
Firstly, it is not clear why the superior being has such a strange method of inquiry if it can read whatever is happening in any soul, including Abraham’s. Secondly, why at the very last moment, God cancels Isaac’s ritual murder replaces it with the sacrificial lamb.
That is, why do the superior being needed one poor lamb if by clicking divine fingers can create millions of sheep in a fraction of a second?
The answer is simple. In the human mind of the 7th century BC, natural cataclysms were evidence of God's wrath. Similarly, to how a local chieftain chopped the heads of his subjects in anger or put them on a stake, and the even larger boss should have expressed his anger even more powerfully.
I think the genesis of witchcraft is the same. The human fantasy that led to scientific discoveries produced the fictitious mythology that sent so many innocent people to the bonfire.
Why, for example, was the devil embodied in butting goat, rather than an elephant or a cow? Elephants didn’t live in northern Europe, and cows, as a rule, are not known for invigorated butting.
