Check out Part I on Midsommar and Part II on Longlegs now.
The VVitch (yes, with two Vs because it’s spookier and more old-fashioned, obviously) bills itself as “A New England Fairy Tale.” Once again, the devil is real, and so are witches. In this film, voluntary separation from the community makes the devout Puritan family at the center of the story vulnerable to the predations of an actual, no-kidding witch and ultimately Satan himself.
William, the pater familias, has placed himself in opposition to the rest of his village on a theological matter, judging his neighbors to be “false Christians,” saying that they belong to an “unseparated church” that remains too loyal to the Church of England, where episcopal hierarchy remains. After William’s family is banished to the wilderness on the edge of the forest for his “prideful conceit,” the eldest daughter, Thomasin, finally succumbs to the devil’s invitation to “live deliciously” after the titular witch and the devil (in the form of the family goat, Black Philip) have terrorized and ultimately killed the rest of her family.
Like the families in Longlegs who are readily taken in by the ruse of a strange doll, the devil has no difficulty winning Thomasin over with the paltry promises of a pretty dress and the taste of butter. Those promises are quickly shown to be illusory, when we see Thomasin at the last, smiling but naked, and joined by a coven of infanticidal witches who most definitely are not eating butter. Her father, having cut his family off from community and tradition in pursuit of his own theological vision, has yielded an outcome that is quite literally diabolical.
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The concept that unites all three films is an anxiety around the idea of home.
Cramped, screen-lit interiors feature heavily at the beginning of Midsommar, when the film introduces us to Dani, Christian’s girlfriend. Her world is dark, wintery, and indoors. Alone in her apartment at the film’s outset, she receives a cryptic, concerning email from her bipolar sister, and makes a series of frantic, helpless calls to family, friends, and Christian. She pops Ativan in her apartment, the isolated command center from which she exerts no actual control. Dani later learns her sister and parents have died in a murder-suicide. A wordless sequence reveals her sister has connected herself and her sleeping parents through a network of sealed-off hoses to a running car in the closed garage, a communal death made possible by a piece of machinery.
Dani arrives together with Christian and his friends in bright, sun-washed Sweden at the invitation of Pelle, their perpetually smiling Swedish friend and a member of the Hårga. Pelle speaks often of family and of the Hårga’s communal nature. Unlike the adrift academics, Pelle says he “never had a chance to feel lost, because I had a family here. Where everyone embraced me and swept me up. And I was raised by a community that doesn’t bicker over what’s theirs and not theirs.” This apparent prioritization of family appears attractive to Dani, who ultimately submits to their way of life. Eventually crowned the community’s May Queen, by the film’s end she is rendered nearly motionless by a flower garland of grotesque size that nearly consumes her.
The Hårga detach babies from their parents for the community to raise them. When they are older, these young people go on “pilgrimage” to detach from the community for a time, and to bring in fresh faces to replenish their insular stock of hearty blondes and redheads. Like Thomasin’s family in The VVitch, they place themselves in isolation from the wider world and culture. The families in Longlegs have not placed themselves in such obvious opposition to the world, but they also occupy a world of interiors, in detached featureless suburban homes, or in remote rural ones. The calendar features prominently in the world of Longlegs, where, unlike the countryside psychogeography of Midsommar and The VVitch, the passage of time isn’t a seasonal cycle, but a repetitive construct—the eternal return of the same.
At the root of all three films’ horror is people seeking certainty. The protagonists feel unmoored and siloed from others, and wherever these individuals seek stability—neopaganism, drugs, the four walls of home, the edge of town—evil lurks. But none of these films entirely succeeds as an effective critique of modernity, being unsure what to propose as an alternative (or perhaps, unwilling).
We as viewers may not be trapped by murderous Swedish cults, stalked by devil-worshiping dollmakers, or visited by talking goats and witches, but news of war, fire, famine, and floods reach us every day. It can be overwhelming to know where to start in making the kind of changes we’d like to see in the mindless, modern, technocratic world that most of us inhabit. To paraphrase St. Paul, how are we to avoid being carried off by all kinds of strange teaching?
Without even having a name for their illness and without knowing where to turn, the Christians and Danis of the world are tempted to retreat from the present age as a cure for what ails them. There is also the temptation of falling into the solipsism of the families in Longlegs and The VVitch, carving out our own preferred reality for ourselves within the four walls of our own homes. These are the choices of the “forlorn and shipwrecked” that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about in his poem “A Psalm of Life”—those individuals who do not understand that “life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal.”
Christ tells his disciples in the book of Matthew, “Sufficient for a day is its own evil,” and similarly, “A Psalm of Life” does not prescribe anxiety about the future, nor nostalgia for a bygone era. “Let the dead Past bury its dead,” Longfellow wrote. “Act,—act in the living Present! / Heart within, and God o’erhead!”
God is decidedly not o’erhead in Midsommar or Longlegs. In The VVitch, the idea of God certainly haunts and torments William and his family just like the titular villain. But severed from his religious community and its mores—and even further from the magisterial authority of an established hierarchical church—William’s understanding of the divine is limited to the purely experiential and interpretive, which ultimately leads him—and his family—astray.
Unlike the explicitly faith-based films that are enjoying popularity at present, few horror films are interested in openly proclaiming God and organized religion as the antidote to evil, even if they have no problem portraying their enemies as the unequivocal bad guys. Still, when approached with discernment by viewers of faith, the more thoughtful examples of the horror genre present plenty of thought-provoking and edifying commentary. For the Catholic horror fan, as with Halloween, part of the fun in the jump scares and spooky atmosphere is the knowledge that, in real life, the monsters don’t have the last word.