Don’t go to The Witch looking for an allegory. Robert Eggers’s film, depicting a Puritan family grappling with evil in 17th-century New England, reclaims a period in American history that was remapped into a more symbolic, contemporary space by Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible. But the witch was very real to 17th-century Puritans, and it’s very real in Eggers’s remarkable debut feature (opening Friday [February 19] ).

“They really believed that they were these fairy-tale ogresses who were capable of doing all the things that this very primitive, primal witch in my film does,” the filmmaker says, calling the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles. Eggers remains circumspect about his own beliefs on the matter, but he is more than satisfied that his film is being released “when there’s something witchy in the air”.

Indeed, The Witch arrives—complete with an endorsement from the Satanic Temple—in a time of growing hostility between those who defend a strictly rational view of the world and those who would rather not. If the Richard Dawkins–led crowd of scientific materialists take an ever more bullying tone with anyone who disagrees with them, Eggers’s film feels like a shot across the bow.

“To really understand the full weight of that different belief system was so eye-opening and really brought me into this film,” he says. “It made me wanna re-create the 17th century and the mindset of these English Calvinists so that the audience can be immersed in that world. Then they can believe in that evil witch again, and she can be scary and have power again.”

To that end, the dialogue, costume, and farming methods of the period were painstakingly researched and re-created by Eggers and his team, along with the story’s gradually surfacing supernatural elements. Eggers chuckles when he remarks that he’s “articulating each frame as if it’s my memory of my own childhood as a Puritan”, but it’s tempting to consider that this near ritual aspect to the film’s production has an impact on the viewer in ways that probably can’t be measured. In every sense, The Witch seems to cast a spell. A less inhibited interviewer might even suggest that the very act of making The Witch was a kind of magical rite.

Quite rightly, Eggers prefers to let the Straight make that kind of speculation. But he offers a follow-up that isn’t exactly a denial.

“Chris Marker did a great documentary on [Akira] Kurosawa’s Ran,” he says, “which I watched more recently, not before I made The Witch. But Kurosawa spent years making sure that even all the extras’ costumes were made to be not only authentic-looking but made with all the traditional techniques, like all the samurai armour. And when they were shooting that film, he would just rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse—and then there’d be one take, no matter what. No matter what happened, it’s one take. Now talk about magic. Talk about that. That’s, like, religious filmmaking, you know?”