Which is Witch?

I’m usually pretty good at keeping different movie personalities straight, whether in front of the camera or behind.

But the confluence of three new(ish) young(ish) white men breaking through as horror directors in the past five years has thrown me for a loop a bit.

Those three men are Robert Eggers, Ari Aster and David Robert Mitchell, and the similarity may all be in my head. But bear with me.

The three came into our sphere of awareness in different years, but the fact that they’ve all had their follow-up to their breakout movie in the same year – this year – has kind of cemented their similarity in my head. Even though at least one of their follow-ups is not a horror movie. (Unsure about the third director’s follow-up as I haven’t seen it yet.)

Chronologically, the first to come on the scene was Mitchell, both in terms of his earlier films and also his breakout film. He’s also the oldest (45) and the one whose name I tend to forget because all three of his names are fairly indistinct in terms of the larger continuum of whitebread American names.

Mitchell grabbed our attention in 2014 with It Follows, which was the unlikely follow-up to a movie I still haven’t seen (but probably should), 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover. Suffice it to say that that one’s not a horror movie. Despite its flaws, It Follows really whetted our appetite for what Mitchell could do, and would do next.

Well, what he did next undoubtedly demonstrated a command of the language of cinema, but it was not a horror movie. Appropriately, it was also the first of the three follow-ups to come out this year, Under the Silver Lake. I admire that movie but boy is it tedious at times. I’m not sure how possible it is to like it, but it does present us a visual stylist at the top of his craft.

Next up was Eggers in 2015 with The Witch, or The VVitch, or however you want to write it. Although the subject matter is not at all similar to that of It Follows, I began to think of them in the same boat because they both represented new creative voices giving us something clearly outside of the standard way horror movies were being made by studios. And like It Follows, The Witch had significant flaws for a viewer to contend with, which similarly didn’t detract from the sense of being in the hands of a cinematic visionary. Eggers is also middle in age at 36, by the way.

Eggers’ follow-up to The Witch is the last of the three to be released, just this past week, which destroys a little of the nice chronological symmetry we had going. That’s The Lighthouse, the only one of the six films mentioned here that I have yet to see. Though I’m champing at the bit. It looks even weirder (in a good way, of course) than The Witch. I can’t find an Australian release date yet for that.

Then you have the prolific young prodigy, Ari Aster, who is only 33 and yet has now had buzzworthy horror opuses released in back to back years. Given the scope of the films he makes, it seems hard to believe that it was only last year that Hereditary came out. He followed it up this year with Midsommar, beating Eggers to the theater by a couple months. Both of Aster’s films can fairly be described as great, and both also have pronounced flaws. I see a pattern here.

I don’t actually have trouble remembering which guy directed which movie, though I do sometimes need to remind myself that it was Mitchell who started out with The Myth of the American Sleepover and not Eggers. If I’d seen that movie I’d probably recognize it as a lot more similar to the aesthetic of It Follows than The Witch, but I haven’t yet.

The point of this post is not really that I confuse them, but more, that we are living through an exciting period in which new horror names are regular presenting themselves as more than just any other studio hack. They’re coming with enough frequency that the possibility exists to confuse them. If we abandon my premise that I'm confusing them for one another, you could also mention Jennifer Kent, who has a similar career trajectory to date, having knocked our socks off in 2014 with The Babadook and then followed that up this year with The Nightingale – which could be characterized as a similar type of historical horror to the ones Eggers prefers. Then of course you’ve got Jordan Peele, who can’t be confused for the others in terms of his racial identity, but who has also had his sophomore horror film Us come out this year, following on the heels of 2017’s Get Out. He might be most similar in execution and aesthetic to Aster.

It is a rich time for horror indeed.

But it could be another white man who has me most excited, though we’ll have to wait until next year for his next. That’s Osgood Perkins, and a weekend rewatch of The Blackcoat’s Daughter – which has a release year of anywhere from 2015 to 2017 depending on festival/theatrical release – reminded me why I ranked it as my #3 movie of 2017. He’s also a bit different from the others as he had two movies come out practically on top of each other, the other being I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. That one kind of went in one ear and out the other for me, but considering that I saw it before Blackcoat mesmerized me, I should probably watch it again. Perkins has Gretel & Hansel coming out in 2020, and I’m really excited for it.

Who are your favorite horror visionaries to come on the scene in the past five years?