The Witch: A New England Folktale is the debut film of writer/director Robert Eggers, who hails from southern New Hampshire, one of the oldest English-settled regions in America, famous for creepy folktales and ghostly hauntings, and, of course, steeped in the memory of the Salem witchcraft trials and Goodwife Cole, the Witch of Hampton.

Aside from wanting to see a good horror flick, I was curious to see the results of Eggers's efforts to accurately portray a 17th-century setting and capture the Puritan zeitgeist. I'm no expert, but I was impressed with the attention lavished on the details of dress, speech, culture, and living spaces.

Seventeenth-century Massachusetts was a dirty, grubby, sickness-infested wilderness - yet one in which the majority of the people managed to thrive, mainly by sticking together as a community -- so when Eggers's antinomian farmer and his family are banished from the town, the lesson they learn (the hard way) is that conformity is a good thing...if you want to survive.

Like The Witch, my own book, Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole (1656-1680), is set in the Puritan world of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Eggers' film offers a little window into that tumultuous time --when the veil between the worlds was especially thin -- in a most entertaining and spooky way.