Robert Eggers‘ The Witch gets under your skin and stays there, making you feel a certain kind of filthy for a good chunk of time (for me, a few days of looking over my shoulder at night and rubbing the back of my neck like a crazy person). Contributing to the film’s noxious effect on the psyche are a litany of major and minor details: the American-gothic allure of the 1630s New England setting; actor Ralph Ineson‘s incomparable, gravelly voice; a collection of the most sinister-looking animals you’ve ever laid your eyes on. (Away, evil bunny! Away!) But the real reason The Witch sticks so tightly to the back of the mind is that it leaves us lost in the fog, uninterested in demystifying the terrible, unsettling, supernatural events we bear witness to. Super-serious horror movies aren’t my preferred branch of the genre but when they work, as Eggers’ film does, I can’t help but bow down as I quiver in my 17th-century boots.

The backdrop of this “New-England Folktale” (as the movie is subtitled) is an isolated farm on the edge of a dark wood where a Puritan family resides and tends to crop. Why anyone would choose to live with an ominous ocean of decrepit-ass trees at their back I don’t know, but in this instance, it was the decision of the family’s patriarch, William (Ineson). After being banished from their plantation community (for unknown reasons), the family needed a new place to make a life for themselves, hence the lonely little farm at the foot of hell’s gates.

With a stern hand and a booming voice, William raises his litter alongside his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), who’s scary in a stoic, nun-like way. They’ve got an infant, Samuel, who one day disappears while under the watch of their eldest, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). While the parents and Thomasin’s younger brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw, who has a shining moment that must be seen to be believed), are convinced the newborn to have been taken by wolves, young twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) have a more twisted theory, that baby Sam was taken by the witch of the wood, who they believe to be none other than their dear older sister. The mischievous tykes’ tall tale would probably fall on deaf ears under normal circumstances, but Samuel’s vanishing has thrown the family into a state of panicked hysteria; suddenly, sweet, sensible Thomasin becomes the family scapegoat. Eggers gives us a glimpse of moldy corn, which may or may not effect your perception of the unfolding events. Curious.

Female repression emerges as the movie’s major theme as Thomasin is poked and prodded into a corner with dubious accusations slung at her by the twins and her own mother. The hatred mistrust spirals out of control when Caleb wanders into the forest and returns one night, naked and not quite himself. The blame’s heaped on Thomasin and even William begins to question his daughter’s virtue. One can only take so much abuse; if they want Thomasin to be the witch so desperately, maybe she should play along.

Eggers’ film is rife with Satanic imagery (the family’s goat is suggestively named “Black Philip”), but the real horror comes from the volcanic family tension and their religiously fueled motivations. The movie’s set in a time when things we now consider supernatural—witches, ghosts, demonic possessions—were strongly accepted part of the natural world. The Puritanical mindset of the time almost acts as a magnifying glass for the subconscious fears of moderns like us: Misogyny is disconcertingly prevalent in today’s society, but discrimination against women was even more extreme in the time of The Witch. Gender inequity is the source of myriad societal fears, anxieties, struggles, and conflicts, and at its core, Eggers’ story digs down to the roots of this enduring friction, particularly in this country. The fact that Thomasin is on the brink of sexual awakening just as her loved ones turn on her adds another layer of richness to the predominantly feminist narrative.

A jump-scare rollercoaster The Witch is not; it’s more like those dead-drop rides that crane you into the sky at an agonizingly slow clip and then plunge you toward the ground when you reach the apex. Moments of subtle, subconscious dread are stacked on top of each other carefully by Eggers until the overwhelmingly tense final act. I was relatively calm during the majority of the film, but I was absolutely frozen in fear for the last twenty minutes or so. The horror is cumulative, and the escalating, asymmetrical shape of Eggers’ story is a nice change of pace for the genre.

Take one look the detailed design of the family’s cabin and the period-accurate costuming and it becomes clear that Eggers’ background in theater production and scenic design is one of his most valuable assets. The textured, ashy, gothic imagery brings Bergman to mind, which speaks for itself. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, costume designer Emma Fryer and composer Mark Korven (whose wailing choral arrangements are absolutely blood-curdling) keep the movie’s production standards high on all fronts, working in concert to make The Witch one of the most put-together, elegant horror productions in recent memory.

Robert Eggers‘ The Witch opens this weekend, and if you shell out your hard-earned money to watch an independent, historically authentic period piece about a 17th-century Puritan family, I’d say that’s a win for all of us who love weird, geeky productions like this one. The slow-build horror movie centers on a cast-out family of seven living on the edge of a dark and scary wood, their minds warped and ires aimed at each other by an external, possibly supernatural force. Starring Ralph Ineson as the father, Kate Dickie as the mother and Anya Taylor-Joy in a breakout performance as their eldest daughter, the film is more Satanic-family-drama than scare-factory, though its climax had me absolutely frozen in fear. Atmospheric, well-acted and directed, and full of disturbing imagery you won’t be able to shake, The Witch is one horror fans shouldn’t miss.

In a roundtable interview, I spoke to Eggers about the film, which opens wide tomorrow, February 19th.

The 17th-century Puritanical mindset is something that’s pretty integral to your story. What’s special about it to you?
The most interesting thing to me was that the real world and the fairy-tale world were the same thing for everyone except for the extreme intelligentsia. Everyday life was imbued with supernatural stuff. Witches were real; that was something everyone knew and understood, and that was the end of the story. A witch today is a plastic Halloween decoration without a lot of impact, so if I could find a way to get audiences into the mindset of a 17th century English settler, the witch could be real and scary again.

Were there any models you had in terms of trying to recreate the sort of dead vernacular in the film?
I have a background in Shakespeare so I’m sort of comfortable around this kind of language but writing in it wasn’t easy. I studied the grammar and the vocabulary—there are books that do that kind of stuff—but then it was really digging into primary source material and jotting down phrases and sentences of all different kinds of situations and categorizing them. If I needed a greeting, I would take it. In earlier versions of the script, there were disastrous, cannibalized collages of other people’s words. It took a while to turn it into me. It’s a really interesting period for the English language.

What I really liked about the movie is it puts you in this state of mind that’s almost hallucinatory. I’d swear I saw things I didn’t actually see.
I like strong imagery and there were certain things I wanted to show. But your imagination is better than what I can give you. What scares you is more personal than anything I can provide. It’s important to keep things in the shadows and keep things restrained because then they can actually be effective. Some things, if I showed them to you, would not be scary—they’d just suck. Better to keep it in your imagination.

Was there anything you read in your research process that you really liked?
I don’t know if this is my favorite but I used it a hell of a lot: Louis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety, which was, like, a prayer manual. The majority of the prayers in the film are from that book. Kate Dickie, who played Katherine…the script would sometimes say “Katherine prays.” She had a digital version of that book on her iPad and she was just walking around the corn fields reading it. It was pretty cool.

Ralph Ineson has one of my favorite voices. Was his voice one of the reasons you wanted to cast him as William?
Honestly, before I thought we could cast Ralph, his voice was the voice of William when I wrote. I was expecting we were going to have to go down the route of getting a name to do our poor little indie movie. But luckily, when we finally found investors, they trusted in my vision to cast who I wanted. I was like, “Wow. Well…let’s try Ralph out!” He’s fucking incredible and he was so committed to the role. I’m happy to see him on the screen.

Did you set the movie in the early 17th century partly because there’s something inherently scary about that historical period?
Yeah. The idea of the supernatural world being real in the past was kind of crucial for me. When we do supernatural movies that take place today I find it hard. It’s metaphysical truths that don’t work for anyone today. There are obviously successful examples that prove me wrong, for sure, but I also just like the past. I don’t want to make contemporary movies currently. I just don’t give a shit. People ask why it’s set in 1630 and not during the Salem witch trials. Aside from the fact that I could have never afforded to have something of that scope, this is much scarier. [The family’s] so much more vulnerable because they’ve just arrived at this place.

Female repression is something that exists today but in the time your movie’s set, it was much more extreme. I imagine it’s helpful to your story that women in this period kind of had this ceiling they’re never able to break through. That’s a big theme.
I tried my damnedest to do my interpretation of how a family in Puritan New England might have experienced a witching. I wanted the camerawork to be subjective but I wanted to be objective about the themes and let people come to their own conclusions. Feminism just bursts onto the screen, out of history. It just rises to the top. You cannot ignore it. It’s clear, looking back from a contemporary perspective, that the evil witch in the early modern period is men’s fears and ambivalences and desires and fantasies about women and female power. It’s also women’s own fears about themselves and their own power and fears about motherhood. The shadows of that still exist today. Sometimes they ain’t shadows.

There’s sort of a hint in the movie involving moldy corn [as to what’s going on with this family]. How important was it to give moderns an idea of what was happening?
That’s cool that you saw the ergot because most people don’t. I one billion percent do not think Salem was because of ergot of the rye. I sound like a freshmen in college, constructionist loser, but we live in a world with certain rules that are given to us by science and we say it’s the best way of understanding things. But science really isn’t objective, actually. Today, science is our god. It’s not too juvenile to say that, in one hundred years, people will look back at us and think we’re wacky. All these different pieces, from ergot to what’s in your imagination, is all tied up in interesting knots.

Costume design is something I’ve been fascinated with lately. What was your approach?
We were just trying to recreate the clothing of the time. I took a lot of work. The source material, the creation of the script, is pretty easy to access for anyone. But the stuff we had to do to make the clothing and build the farm was more obscure. I was working with historians and museums and people in the living history communities to try to create this stuff. I did so much research for years, waiting to get the money. When I brought on Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir, I gave them piles of stuff and they were pumped. We went to great lengths. All the clothes were hand-stitched and made from patterns of extant clothing. One big compromise is that they are not all hand-woven cloth. Linda ordered swatches of all this stuff, and when we could afford it we used it, but where we couldn’t, her modern equivalents were fantastic.

With the farm, I wanted to build it the way they did back then, end of story. Craig said, “That sounds like a great idea but it’s the winter and we’re never going to be able to do it when we’re up to our balls in snow.” But everything that’s onscreen is the real thing. Everything onscreen is going to be the real materials. That did mean having to use traditional techniques and tools to make the stuff. Where we could use modern tools we did, but if modern tools betrayed the authenticity to the camera, we couldn’t use them.

It comes as a bit of a surprise that The Witch, currently heralded as one of the scariest movies of the year since its Sundance debut, isn’t really scary at all. Set in 1600s New England, the film follows a devoutly religious family of Pilgrims as they try to live on their own on a patch of land near a large forest. Everything seems fine until the family’s infant son gets snatched away by an unseen figure from the woods, and it becomes apparent that something seriously evil is trying to destroy this family by making their lives a living hell.

First, the good stuff: Writer/director Robert Eggers, also a former production designer, nails the period look down with his film’s small, distinct setting. And it’s hard to find a weak link in the cast either, with new actress Anya Taylor-Joy exuding a magnetic screen presence as the family’s eldest daughter Thomasin, along with her parents (played by Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie). But Eggers gives up the ghost almost immediately by clearly showing that, yes, supernatural shenanigans are afoot, and by doing so, removes any ambiguity or fear from the proceedings. And rather than try to establish any tension, Eggers prefers to utilize poor jump scares sporadically between artfully composed shots, all of which amounts to little. It’s a suffocating horror film, though not in the way usually useful to horror films, taking itself so seriously it’s hard to enjoy.

Add to all of the aforementioned that a rather poor attempt to weave the subject matter into a sort of commentary on patriarchy and the oppression of women—and boy, I can’t wait for people to sink their teeth into how problematic the film is in this regard—and you have your reasoning as to why The Witch is one of the year’s biggest disappointments. It gets by on its impeccable acting and technical aspects, but nothing can hide that this is a horror film without any horror.

It feels like 2014 all over again. Last year, audiences at Sundance could not stop raving about Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a horror film that apparently scared the crap out of anyone who saw it. This year, it happened again: Dave Eggers’ directorial debut The Witch screened to raves from terrified critics at Sundance, and quickly turned into one of the most buzzed about films at the festival. A24 quickly snatched up distribution rights, and now after months of waiting, a very unsettling trailer has arrived. Here’s a rundown of the plot if you don’t know:

Set in New England circa 1630, The Witch follows a farmer who get cast out of his colonial plantation and is forced to move his family to a remote plot of land on the edge of an ominous forest rumored to be controlled by witches. Almost immediately, strange and unsettling things begin to happen-the animals turn violent, the crops fail, and one of the children disappears, only to return seemingly possessed by an evil spirit.  As suspicion and paranoia mount, everyone begins to point the finger at teenage daughter Thomasin. They accuse her of witchcraft, which she adamantly denies…but as circumstances become more and more treacherous, each family member’s faith, loyalty, and love will be tested in shocking and unforgettable ways.

And despite our best efforts to go into this one blind, we couldn’t resist getting a peek at the film, and this one looks like it’s going to be quite a trip. Unfortunately, A24 has only given us a tentative release date of “2016” for The Witch, meaning we’ll have to wait a bit longer to watch all the madness unfold. But if you’re lucky enough to attend this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, The Witch will have its Canadian premiere there. We’re hoping we’ll catch a glimpse soon, because after watching this trailer, 2016 feels very far away.