"The Witch" (2015): Eggers' debut with Anya Taylor-Joy is a perfect horror film

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Before Robert Eggers fully stepped into his own as a filmmaker and teller of folktales with Nosferatu and The Northman , he terrified audiences with his debut, 2015’s The Witch , a horror film set in 17th century Puritan New England. The Witch follows a family in exile from their settlement, forced to fend for themselves deep in the woods while they are under attack by a mysterious witch who represents a holy kind of evil. Like Martin Scorsese 's take on Cape Fear , the family’s built-in traumas and repression are a time bomb set to destroy it, with the external evil only lighting the fuse. At the center of the witch’s machinations is Thomasin ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), the teenage daughter on the cusp of becoming a woman in a deeply repressed environment.