URL	Title	Content Length	Incoming Links
	A Nightmare On Samityville Street	374,875	737
2009/05/review-hide-and-go-shriek-1987.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: Feaure Length Review: 'Hide and Go Shriek' (1987)	167,300	27
2009/05/review-killer-klowns-from-outer-space_28.html	The Witch's Final Scene and the Power of Female Agency Robert Eggers' 2015 folk horror debut feels like a fever dream pressed into black and white, and Australian genre fans have circled it ever since. It surfaced at the Sydney Film Festival, then drifted into late-night slots at the Melbourne International Film Festival and onto home screens from Surry Hills to Fitzroy. The story tracks a Puritan family exiled from a 1630s New England plantation. The forest beyond their clearing feels closer than the paddocks outside Geelong, and the goat hums with the menace of a stray circling a Brisbane yard in January. The film burns at low, relentless heat, and its closing sequence remains the most debated image here. The ending, in which Thomasin takes flight with the devil and smiles into the camera, has been read as surrender, damnation, and horror punchline. View it through the lens of gender and power, though, and the scene reads very differently. Inside a Newtown cinema, or waiting for the next session at the Hayden Orpheum in Cremorne, the image of a teenage girl stepping into her own authority lands with strange joy. Anya Taylor-Joy's face, rigid with grief for ninety minutes, finally cracks open. The film traps its only female character in the narrow corridors of religious expectation, then hands her the keys. What follows is a close reading of how that sequence rewrites the grammar of horror, what it owes to centuries of witch lore, and why its vision of female agency still rattles around Australian genre forums. The Witch, subtitled A New-England Folktale, does not trade in modern feminism in any banner-waving sense. It does something more subversive. It lets a girl choose the devil, and lets her keep her face while she does it. The Puritan Trap and the Disappearing Women The opening act establishes the family as a closed economy of male authority. William performs his piety like a man trying to impress a board in the Sydney CBD, measuring every word against an imagined scripture-based standard. His wife Katherine, played with quiet ferocity by Kate Dickie, is reduced to a vessel. She nurses, grieves, warns, and is ignored. The baby vanishes in the first twenty minutes, and from there the film is technically about hunting for that child, but really about how patriarchal religion devours the women inside it. By the time Thomasin plays with her brother's body in the barn, the family has lost every female member to suspicion or self-destruction. Eggers, working from period documents, was less interested in pace than in the texture of belief. He has said he wanted the audience to smell the damp cabin. The result is a film where the air itself feels moulded by male anxiety. The women are watched, corrected, and beaten for their own salvation. Even small pleasures, a shared bowl of milk, the warmth of a newborn, are framed as temptations. When Thomasin is blamed for witchcraft after the baby disappears, the script is precise in showing how accusation becomes a male management tool. The horror is not the witch in the woods; it is the family around the hearth. Black Phillip and the Devil's Bargain Black Phillip, the family billy goat, is the film's most startling creation, a patient-eyed devil with horns curling like wrought iron on a Melbourne terrace. He speaks to Thomasin in the original screenplay, and even without dialogue his proximity triggers the final turn. He is positioned as a masculine counterpart to the family's suppressed lust and rage, but also as a recruiter. He offers Thomasin something her father cannot: a relationship with power that does not require her to disappear first. The deal, signed in milk and witnessed by the other goats, is read by many as a Faustian inversion, but is really an economic proposition. She trades domestic erasure for sovereignty. Australian viewers familiar with the Pentecostal revivals still moving through the outer suburbs of Perth or Adelaide's northern reaches will recognise the texture of religious suppression. The Australian Classification Board gave the film an R18+ rating, and that classification carries weight: it means the film's most transgressive gestures, including Thomasin's final, lewd kiss, were preserved. The Witch does not court comfort. When Black Phillip lifts Thomasin onto his back, the camera does not cut away, and that reluctance is what makes the scene political. The Hexagram and the Erotic Body In its final moments the camera tilts from forest floor to clear sky above, a scrubby canopy a walker on the Bibbulmun Track would recognise as temperate woodland rather than the deeper hardwood of Tasmania's southwest. The hexagram, drawn earlier as a game, becomes a doorway. Thomasin steps through, and the film ends with her leaning into the wind as if receiving a lover. This is not a rape, not a possession, not even a corruption. It is a celebration. Her body, buried under smocks and accusations all film, is suddenly visible and joyful. She opens her mouth, lets the air in, and the audience reads that openness as pleasure rather than dread. The subversive feminism of the scene lies in its refusal to make that pleasure ambiguous. Eggers has spoken about wanting a film about girlhood rather than witchcraft, and that emphasis shows in how he handles the final image. Most horror endings punish female sexuality; The Witch rewards it. There is no redemption arc, no return to the settlement, no paternal forgiveness waiting in the long grass. There is flight, and the flight is upward. For viewers used to the moral arithmetic of Carrie or The Ring, that arithmetic feels quietly revolutionary, the kind of ending that lingers after the credits roll at the Paramount in Darling Harbour. Why the Ending Stays With Australian Horror Fans The Witch found its Australian audience in fits and starts, partly through film blogs read on university library desktops, partly through DVD racks at Video Ezy outlets still operating in towns like Warrnambool and Devonport. Australian horror fandom has long had an appetite for atmospheric films, and this is one of the most atmospheric of the century. It arrives at a moment when Australian genre criticism, led by writers like Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and the programmers at Monster Fest in Melbourne, is taking feminist readings of horror seriously. The closing scene sits comfortably in that conversation. There is something distinctively Australian about how the film handles landscape, too. The forest is not the gothic European wood of Hammer horror, but a stripped, pale New England wilderness that rhymes with the eucalypt regrowth south of Hobart or the pine plantations of the Strzelecki Ranges. When Thomasin leaves her family behind, she enters a landscape indifferent to her suffering, and that indifference is its own liberty. It is the liberty of a country that, for all its problems, lets its viewers watch a teenage girl choose the devil and call it a coming-of-age story. The Long Reach of the Scene Since its release, the final sequence has been referenced, parodied, and quietly stolen by a dozen horror films, from Midsommar to The Autopsy of Jane Doe. None land quite like Eggers' original. He trusted his protagonist at the exact moment other directors would have reached for the knife. The closing image is not an ending so much as a handoff. It hands the horror genre back to its female characters and tells the audience to stop flinching. The film's refusal to flinch extends to its reception in Australia, where it arrived with the same austere poster art that fooled casual renters into thinking they had picked up a costume drama. Most came out arguing about the ending. That argument, more than any single reading, is the film's quiet feminist victory. It insists that we sit with the discomfort of watching a girl choose badly, and choose freely, without any pat reassurance at the close. Long-time readers of this site will remember the early conversations about folk horror that ran through the old archive, well before Eggers had even shot his first feature. Dig back through those pages if you want to see how slowly the shape of this kind of cinema was forming, then drop a comment below with your own reading of Thomasin's flight. Whether you see her smile as damnation or as deliverance, The Witch is asking for a conversation, not a verdict.	169,082	27
2009/09/anoes-trailer-breakdown.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: ANOES: Trailer Breakdown	172,404	5
2009/11/review-eaten-alive-1977_20.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: Feaure Length Review: 'Eaten Alive' (1977)	165,100	25
2009_05_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: May 2009	177,132	20
2009_06_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: June 2009	261,907	20
2009_07_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: July 2009	220,447	20
2009_08_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: August 2009	200,631	20
2009_09_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: September 2009	247,227	20
2009_10_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: October 2009	220,526	20
2009_11_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: November 2009	193,867	20
2009_12_01_archive.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: December 2009	205,042	20
2010/01/review-spontaneous-combustion-1990.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: Feaure Length Review: 'Spontaneous Combustion' (1990)	179,581	22
2010/03/return-to-predatory-grounds.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: A Return to 'Predator'y Grounds	159,534	6
2010/03/review-lost-boys-2-tribe-2008.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: Short Review: 'Lost Boys 2: The Tribe' (2008)	161,730	25
2010/03/review-sssssss-1973.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: Feature Length Review: 'Sssssss' (1973)	179,635	27
2010/03/rip-haimster.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: R.I.P Haimster	160,034	6
2010/04/short-review-dahmer-2002.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: Short Review: 'Dahmer' (2002)	166,318	23
2010/04/short-review-great-american-snuff-film.html	A Nightmare On Samityville Street: Short Review: 'The Great American Snuff Film' (2003)	183,762	23

The Witch's Final Scene and the Power of Female Agency

Robert Eggers' 2015 folk horror debut feels like a fever dream pressed into black and white, and Australian genre fans have circled it ever since. It surfaced at the Sydney Film Festival, then drifted into late-night slots at the Melbourne International Film Festival and onto home screens from Surry Hills to Fitzroy. The story tracks a Puritan family exiled from a 1630s New England plantation. The forest beyond their clearing feels closer than the paddocks outside Geelong, and the goat hums with the menace of a stray circling a Brisbane yard in January. The film burns at low, relentless heat, and its closing sequence remains the most debated image here.

The ending, in which Thomasin takes flight with the devil and smiles into the camera, has been read as surrender, damnation, and horror punchline. View it through the lens of gender and power, though, and the scene reads very differently. Inside a Newtown cinema, or waiting for the next session at the Hayden Orpheum in Cremorne, the image of a teenage girl stepping into her own authority lands with strange joy. Anya Taylor-Joy's face, rigid with grief for ninety minutes, finally cracks open. The film traps its only female character in the narrow corridors of religious expectation, then hands her the keys.

What follows is a close reading of how that sequence rewrites the grammar of horror, what it owes to centuries of witch lore, and why its vision of female agency still rattles around Australian genre forums. The Witch, subtitled A New-England Folktale, does not trade in modern feminism in any banner-waving sense. It does something more subversive. It lets a girl choose the devil, and lets her keep her face while she does it.

The Puritan Trap and the Disappearing Women

The opening act establishes the family as a closed economy of male authority. William performs his piety like a man trying to impress a board in the Sydney CBD, measuring every word against an imagined scripture-based standard. His wife Katherine, played with quiet ferocity by Kate Dickie, is reduced to a vessel. She nurses, grieves, warns, and is ignored. The baby vanishes in the first twenty minutes, and from there the film is technically about hunting for that child, but really about how patriarchal religion devours the women inside it. By the time Thomasin plays with her brother's body in the barn, the family has lost every female member to suspicion or self-destruction.

Eggers, working from period documents, was less interested in pace than in the texture of belief. He has said he wanted the audience to smell the damp cabin. The result is a film where the air itself feels moulded by male anxiety. The women are watched, corrected, and beaten for their own salvation. Even small pleasures, a shared bowl of milk, the warmth of a newborn, are framed as temptations. When Thomasin is blamed for witchcraft after the baby disappears, the script is precise in showing how accusation becomes a male management tool. The horror is not the witch in the woods; it is the family around the hearth.

Black Phillip and the Devil's Bargain

Black Phillip, the family billy goat, is the film's most startling creation, a patient-eyed devil with horns curling like wrought iron on a Melbourne terrace. He speaks to Thomasin in the original screenplay, and even without dialogue his proximity triggers the final turn. He is positioned as a masculine counterpart to the family's suppressed lust and rage, but also as a recruiter. He offers Thomasin something her father cannot: a relationship with power that does not require her to disappear first. The deal, signed in milk and witnessed by the other goats, is read by many as a Faustian inversion, but is really an economic proposition. She trades domestic erasure for sovereignty.

Australian viewers familiar with the Pentecostal revivals still moving through the outer suburbs of Perth or Adelaide's northern reaches will recognise the texture of religious suppression. The Australian Classification Board gave the film an R18+ rating, and that classification carries weight: it means the film's most transgressive gestures, including Thomasin's final, lewd kiss, were preserved. The Witch does not court comfort. When Black Phillip lifts Thomasin onto his back, the camera does not cut away, and that reluctance is what makes the scene political.

The Hexagram and the Erotic Body

In its final moments the camera tilts from forest floor to clear sky above, a scrubby canopy a walker on the Bibbulmun Track would recognise as temperate woodland rather than the deeper hardwood of Tasmania's southwest. The hexagram, drawn earlier as a game, becomes a doorway. Thomasin steps through, and the film ends with her leaning into the wind as if receiving a lover. This is not a rape, not a possession, not even a corruption. It is a celebration. Her body, buried under smocks and accusations all film, is suddenly visible and joyful. She opens her mouth, lets the air in, and the audience reads that openness as pleasure rather than dread.

The subversive feminism of the scene lies in its refusal to make that pleasure ambiguous. Eggers has spoken about wanting a film about girlhood rather than witchcraft, and that emphasis shows in how he handles the final image. Most horror endings punish female sexuality; The Witch rewards it. There is no redemption arc, no return to the settlement, no paternal forgiveness waiting in the long grass. There is flight, and the flight is upward. For viewers used to the moral arithmetic of Carrie or The Ring, that arithmetic feels quietly revolutionary, the kind of ending that lingers after the credits roll at the Paramount in Darling Harbour.

Why the Ending Stays With Australian Horror Fans

The Witch found its Australian audience in fits and starts, partly through film blogs read on university library desktops, partly through DVD racks at Video Ezy outlets still operating in towns like Warrnambool and Devonport. Australian horror fandom has long had an appetite for atmospheric films, and this is one of the most atmospheric of the century. It arrives at a moment when Australian genre criticism, led by writers like Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and the programmers at Monster Fest in Melbourne, is taking feminist readings of horror seriously. The closing scene sits comfortably in that conversation.

There is something distinctively Australian about how the film handles landscape, too. The forest is not the gothic European wood of Hammer horror, but a stripped, pale New England wilderness that rhymes with the eucalypt regrowth south of Hobart or the pine plantations of the Strzelecki Ranges. When Thomasin leaves her family behind, she enters a landscape indifferent to her suffering, and that indifference is its own liberty. It is the liberty of a country that, for all its problems, lets its viewers watch a teenage girl choose the devil and call it a coming-of-age story.

The Long Reach of the Scene

Since its release, the final sequence has been referenced, parodied, and quietly stolen by a dozen horror films, from Midsommar to The Autopsy of Jane Doe. None land quite like Eggers' original. He trusted his protagonist at the exact moment other directors would have reached for the knife. The closing image is not an ending so much as a handoff. It hands the horror genre back to its female characters and tells the audience to stop flinching.

The film's refusal to flinch extends to its reception in Australia, where it arrived with the same austere poster art that fooled casual renters into thinking they had picked up a costume drama. Most came out arguing about the ending. That argument, more than any single reading, is the film's quiet feminist victory. It insists that we sit with the discomfort of watching a girl choose badly, and choose freely, without any pat reassurance at the close.

Long-time readers of this site will remember the early conversations about folk horror that ran through the old archive, well before Eggers had even shot his first feature. Dig back through those pages if you want to see how slowly the shape of this kind of cinema was forming, then drop a comment below with your own reading of Thomasin's flight. Whether you see her smile as damnation or as deliverance, The Witch is asking for a conversation, not a verdict.