Straight from Sundance like a bat out of hell, and here to traumatize you for the rest of the week, is the first trailer for The Witch, the ballyhooed debut of director Robert Eggers. The film is set a generation before the Salem witch trials, and features a family of seven homesteading at the fringe of an impassable forest. All is well, until crops start dying and the youngest son, in an ill-fated game of peek-a-boo, vanishes beyond the tree line.
The family responds by slowly succumbing to paranoia, and the eldest daughter (Anya Taylor-Joy) is accused of being—you guessed it—a witch. Eggers nabbed Sundance’s directing prize for his twisted recreation of Puritan life in New England, and his trailer smartly establishes a tense, painterly atmosphere without divulging too much plot. The Witch hits theaters in 2016.
