"I am infected with the filth of pride."

Americans are a funny lot. About half of them will spend the whole day after a presidential election crying, "How? How did this happen?" then two weeks later, sit down with their families and celebrate their heritage as countrymen in a nation that started as a colony founded by buckle-hatted religious nuts, and never draw any connection.

I can hear you now.

"Hey Devil, how come you're always spreading misleading stereotypes? I know you're the Father of Lies and all, but come on!"

And you're right. The Puritans didn't actually have buckles on their hats, and in the movie I'm about to tell you about, you will see zero hat buckles because the costume department obviously got their history straight.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Witch.

This 2015 period drama by writer/director Robert Eggers is about a pilgrim named William (Ralph Ineson) who's too nutty even for the other pilgrims so they banish him and his family to go live in the woods by themselves. 

That's a pretty good beginning even though it's a little hard to follow what's going on through their thick accents and 1600s dialect. The first step in a lot of horror movies is to isolate the victims. It's rare to find a horror movie these days whose opening title sequence isn't a montage of a car driving out to the ass end of nowhere. Generally, it's either college kids on spring break or a young family moving into a new house with a dark past. It's become so common that if I see people unpacking cardboard boxes in the first five minutes, I turn the damn thing off. So maybe you can appreciate, as I did, the novel approach of having this family shunned by angry pilgrims.

Once in the woods, William's family becomes easy pickings for destruction by supernatural forces. The baby vanishes. The crops go bad. At one point the mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie), hallucinates she's nursing her baby again, when in fact she's letting a raven eat her titty off. The real fun starts when the kids accuse each other of witchcraft and William can't decide which one to kill. 

I've noticed opinion on this movie is split. Some horror fans hate it. I have to admit it's not typical Thursday Thrillers fare. The screams and splatter are minimal, but sometimes I enjoy a movie that's not constantly exploding.  I found the performances compelling, especially from the child actors Anya Taylor-Joy and Harvey Scrimshaw who portray William and Katherine's two eldest. The atmosphere is brooding and the sound design keeps the tension simmering throughout. Story-wise, I'd say it's like The Crucible meets The Exorcist with a dash of The Shining thrown in.

The Witch streams on Amazon Prime, now shut up and eat.