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The Witch is the titular secondary antagonist of the 2015 A24 horror film of the same name. She is an evil witch who torments a Puritan family on their isolated farm.
She was portrayed by Bathsheba Garnett (old) and Sarah Stephens (young).
Biography[]
Past[]
The Witch was an elderly woman living in New England during the 17th century. Wishing to become a witch, she contacted Satan who made a pact with her. She signed Satan's book of souls, binding her soul to him forever. This deal gave her the ability of witchcraft. The Witch resided in the forest, practicing satanic rituals.
Film[]
The film concerns a Puritan family being cast out of a New England plantation due to religious disputes. The family eventually comes to settle on a plot of land at the edge of a large forest, and a few months later, the mother, Katherine, gives birth to her fifth child, Samuel. While Thomasin, the film's protagonist, is playing peek-a-boo with Samuel, the Witch kidnaps the child and takes him to the forest. In her home, the Witch kills Samuel and grinds his body into an ointment, which she rubs on herself and to her broom, giving her the ability to fly. She is then seen flying towards the full moon.
Katharine despairs over the loss of Samuel, becoming secluded as she tried to pray to God for solace. William, the patriarch of the family, takes his son Caleb on a hunting trip in the woods after their crops fail. As they walk, Caleb asks if Samuel made it to heaven since he wasn't baptized, while William reveals that he traded Katherine's silver cup for hunting supplies. Fowler, the family dog, begins to bark and William spots a wild rabbit, only to then have his gun backfire on him when he tried to shoot it. At night, when Thomasin goes to check on the barn animals, she sees the rabbit in the stable among the animals.
The next morning, Thomasin accompanies Caleb into the woods on a hunting trip, and he spots the rabbit from the day before once again. Their horse goes crazy upon seeing the rabbit, and it knocks Thomasin off its back, rendering her unconscious. Caleb goes further into the woods and finds his dog, Fowler, has been disemboweled. Caleb sees the rabbit and wanders deeper into the woods until he comes upon the Witch's house. The Witch appears to him as a young beautiful woman, and seduces him into kissing her before taking ahold of him with a suddenly aged, withered hand. Thomasin returns home that day, but her brother is nowhere to be found. Caleb returns to the house later that night, naked, sick, and delirious.
Tensions continue to rise as the family start to turn on each other. As the family prays over Caleb, he coughs up a bloody apple. He then has a seizure, deliriously calling to Jesus before dying. Jonas and Mercy have fits as well, spasming on the floor. William accuses Thomasin of bewitching her siblings, but she retorts that Jonas and Mercy are conversing with Satan in the form of the family's pet goat, Black Phillip. William boards his remaining children in the stable that night.
The Witch reappears in the stable, and terrorizes Thomasin and the twins as she drinks blood from the udder of the goats. During that time, Katherine hallucinates seeing Samuel and Caleb, as she attempts to breastfeed Samuel, who turns out to be a crow.
William awakens from his sleep the next day to find the stable destroyed, the goats drained of blood and the twins missing. Moments later, Black Phillip gores him to death. Driven mad with grief, Katherine accuses Thomasin of being a witch and tries to strangle her, forcing Thomasin to kill her in self-defense.
That night, Thomasin enters the stable and asks Black Phillip to speak to her as he did with Jonas and Mercy. Black Phillip transforms into a tall man in dark clothes, revealed to be the Devil in animal form, and asks her if she wants to "live deliciously". She says she does, so he commands her to remove her clothes and sign her name in his book. Black Phillip leads her into the forest, where the Witch leads her coven in a Black Sabbath. Thomasin then joins them in levitating into the sky.