“‘I am That Very Witch’: On The Witch, Feminism, and Not Surviving Patriarchy."

While contemporary discussions about witchcraft include reinterpretations and feminist reclamations, earlymodern accusations contained no such complexity. It is this historical witch as misogynist nightmare that thefilm,The Witch: A New England Folktale(2015), expresses so effectively. Within the film, the very patriarchalstructures that decry witchcraft – the Puritan church from which the family exiles itself, the male headship towhich the parents so desperately cling, the insistence, in the face of repeated failure, on the viability of theisolated nuclear family unit – are the same structures that inevitably foreclose the options of the lead character,Thomasin.