Robert Eggers has four movies to his name. All four of them have been landing in Backlot lists this month, which tells you something about how his work travels. Nobody stumbles onto The Lighthouse and moves on. You watch one and then you watch the rest.
His thing is period settings and the fear that lived inside them. Not period in the way Hollywood means it, with clean costumes and safe lighting. Period in the way that means months of historical research, dead languages spoken phonetically, and folk horror that feels like it was pulled from a primary source. The Witch is set in 1630 and sounds like it. The Lighthouse is silent-film-era New England and looks like it. Nosferatu is Weimar Romantic horror and commits to every second of that.
What ties them together is that the dread is always internal. The monsters in Eggers films are real and they are also the characters. The Witch's Thomasin. The Lighthouse's Winslow and Wake. Nobody is innocent and nobody is safe, and the historical detail makes it feel like you are reading something true rather than watching something invented.
He is building a filmography with basically no filler. Every film is a different register but the same obsession. The communal pull his work has been getting on Backlot this month makes sense. People are doing exactly what you should do with a body of work like this.
The Witch is where you start. Tonight, if you can.
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