Who directed the 2015 folk horror film The Witch?

Robert Eggers directed the 2015 folk horror film The Witch.

The film, also styled as The VVitch: A New-England Folktale, follows an English family living in isolation near a forest in 1630s New England. After the disappearance of the family’s youngest child, fear, religious conflict, suspicion, and supernatural forces begin to tear the household apart.

Eggers wrote the screenplay and emphasized historical detail in the dialogue, costumes, architecture, and religious worldview. The production consulted period sources, including accounts of seventeenth-century beliefs and language, to create a setting that feels distinct from modern horror.

The Witch premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the directing award in the U.S. narrative category. It was Eggers’s feature-film debut. The movie is often grouped with “elevated horror,” but its specific genre is commonly described as folk horror because it combines rural isolation, folklore, religious anxiety, and supernatural threat.