10 scenes from Robert Eggers’ movies that prove he’s a modern horror master

Robert Eggers
is a horror master who has proven his ability to masterfully weave a terrifying scene time and time again. First made his A24 horror movie debut with 2015’s The witchThe visionary director quickly earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the premiere modern voices in the genre. Following his folk horror masterpiece with the Lovecraftian thrill ride The lighthouse And the Viking Age revenge flick the northman, Eggers continued to churn out some truly disturbing sequences.

Compared to most horror directors, Robert Eggers’ best movies are able to do a lot with very little. Without showing too much gruesome imagery, Eggers is able to evoke screams through his brilliant direction alone, with brilliant performances and chilling cinematography to convey an unmistakable sense of dread and fear. Hope, Eggers’ upcoming Nosferatu Remake can continue to fill his filmography with terrifying moments.

10

Sam goes missing

Iconic moment was in the witch

One of the most compelling sequences in The witch is the incident of the film. After being cast out along with her family from a local pilgrim community, forced to live on a dangerous homestead in some isolated forest, the teenager Thomasin plays with her baby brother Sam outside.

Tomasin plays peekaboo with her brother, covering her face and revealing it to surprise him with joy. But when Thomasin opens her eyes after a brief moment, her joy turns to horror when she finds that her brother has disappeared.

Even worse is the brief glimpse that Thomasin (and by extension, the audience) gets of the plant life before being led into the forest moving back into space, implying that some creature has disturbed it while scampering away with Sam at inhuman speeds. But briefly, this scene sets the haunting tone for the rest of The Witch.

9

Thomas decided to live happily

Iconic moment was in the witch

The witch is truly bookended by two of its most effectively terrifying scenes, with Thomasin’s final acceptance of the diabolical influence plaguing her family just as scary as her initial loss of Sam. The entire film, the presence of the mysterious goat Black Phillip plugs The witchBeing an object of obsession for Thomasin’s younger twin siblings. After her family is all but wiped out, Thomasin approaches the goat, only to learn he is none other than the devil himself.

In a bone-chilling whisper, Black Philip asks Thomasin to sign her life to him, asking if she would like to “Life is delicious.” The face of Philip’s human form remains just out of sight as he gently guides her hand, prompting Thomasin to finally give in to his influence and join his coven of witches. When Tomasin joins her new cohort of sisters, hysterical laughter overtakes her as she rises into the air, marking the end of her troubled journey into obscenity.

8

Winslow finds out what’s in the lighthouse

Iconic moment was in the lighthouse

For as many haunting moments as The lighthouse Is able to conjure up, the film ironically leaves the audience in the dark in many respects. Throughout the film, Eggers gives precious few concrete answers about the nature of the madness that has overtaken the small sea-swept outpost. When Robert Pattinson’s Winslow finally seeks for himself the secrets of the lighthouse, he soon finds that the answers are accompanied by a fate worse than death.

Gazing at the ominous beacon, the audience’s senses are overwhelmed by blinding light and blaring sounds as Winslow succumbs to the lighthouse’s influence. Even if the film never directly shows what exactly he saw in the candle’s glass container, his face’s gradual transformation from hysterical laughter to deep anguish almost makes the viewer grateful for this fact. When Winslow arrives, he is destined for a cruel end, sprawled naked on the beach with his eyes and guts picked out by Sims, fulfilling the warnings of Willem Dafoe’s wake.

7

Hamlet fights a Viking Zombie

Iconic moment was in the Northman

As great as Robert Eggers is at stirring deep psychological terror with little gore and gore, he’s just as capable when directing a spooky encounter with a generic supernatural creature. The Nortman It’s not a horror movie at all, but some of the warrior protagonist Amlet’s visions, which may or may not be real, border on horror territory with their intensity. The most obviously qualified one is his encounter with a draugr, a warrior zombie from Scandinavian mythology also known as a hill-dweller.

Told by a soothsayer that he will need a special blade drawn from moonlight to have any hope of defeating his wicked uncle, Amlet enters a tomb to claim the sword from its original owner. In the process, he has to fight against the corpse, which springs to life in his presence. The creature’s makeup effects and hissing sound design are on point, and the way the scene ends implies that the undead being may be able to enter Almeth’s mind.

6

The Village Raid

Iconic moment was in the Northman

For the most part, Robert Eggers prefers his horror to more fantastical, supernatural, or folklore-inspired elements, and doesn’t care about representing real-world terrors. The only exception is his chilling direction of the berserker attack scene in the northman, Which paints a type of fear that was once very real for many people living in the Viking Age. After a time-skip, Eggers reveals that Almeth has been surviving as a berserker in a band of Vikings, pillaging villages across the countryside to survive.

The violence in this impressive scene is some of the most gruesome in Egger’s filmography. Even if it’s more war movie than outright horror, the scene pulls no punches in depicting just how disgusting the actions of the Vikings were, from the wails of the village’s mourning women as they are used by the invaders to the post-battle Jitters from the exhausted berserkers as they come down from their adrenaline high. It is disturbing to remember that scenes like this were actually experienced by many innocent people throughout history.

5

You love me lobster, don’t you?

Iconic moment was in the lighthouse

In contrast to the carnage depicted in The Northman, The Lighthouse is able to convey desperately scary horror with frighteningly little. The psychological stress of the feelings that build up between Wake and Winslow as a result of their confinement in such an isolated place with one another, finally reaches a boiling point at one point of the film, arising from an initially humorous argument. When Winslow disparages Wake’s cooking, even his famous lobster, William Dafoe’s character has had enough, breaking into a long monologue that curses his pal by the power of the sea itself.

Even if all that’s really happening in this scene is an old man yelling at his coworkers, Eggers manages to twist the moment into one of the most chilling sequences of his career. The stark black-and-white low-angle lighting makes Willem Dafoe’s face a mile wide as he spits his vitriol at Winslow, screaming “Hark!“To punctuate his judgment and generate so much sheer terror through performance alone. It’s no wonder that Eggers will be working with Dafoe again in the form of Nosferatu.

4

The witch kills Sam

Iconic moment was in the witch

like the lighthouse, Some of the most terrifying bits of The witch Are made all the scarier by what they choose not to show. That said, when it’s time for the film to depict its gruesome brutality overtly, it pulls no punches, with some of the most disturbing images ever seen in a folk horror movie. The goriest and most upsetting scene that does not hide anything out of frame happens early on when it is revealed what exactly the witch wanted with Thomasin’s baby brother, Sam.

The witch is a tall old woman, and for the first time the witch runs her hands along Baby Sam’s tender body, trembling with excitement. She proceeds to stuff the poor child into a butter churn, mashing him up into a bloody pulp that she then applies to her own skin in a sort of sick ritual that seems to restore her youth, as seen in her next meeting with Caleb. Eggers avoids showing every gruesome detail of this dark skin care routine, but shows just enough to create a disgusting scene that’s hard to even watch.

3

Winslow finds a mermaid

Iconic moment was in the lighthouse

Like all the best horror directors, Eggers does not shy away from sexual themes in his work. much of The lighthouse Revolves around phallic imagery, sexual frustration and dominant-submissive relationships, all set in the pressure cooker of two hot-blooded working men confined to a small space for months at a time. In his violent sexual psychosis, Winslow dreams of a companion for himself – an eerily beautiful mermaid.

In a dazzlingly edited scene, Winslow comes upon a mermaid half-buried in the dredged-up seaweed on the beach. His desire for the creature is interrupted when she wakes up, gives him a terrible smile and pierces his ears with a haunting scream. The mermaid’s actress, Valeriia Karaman, deserves more credit for making this jarring beat so upsetting, her twitching, inhuman movements as Winslow scrambles away hard to forget. Interestingly enough, Anya Taylor-Joy petitioned for the mermaid role, but was rejected by Eggers.

2

Winslow wrestles with Wake

Iconic moment was in the lighthouse

Winslow’s encounter with a mermaid isn’t the only time his freeing sanity and overactive imagination get the better of him while imprisoned in the lighthouse. Whether or not the film’s more supernatural imagery is real is still open to interpretation, but there’s no arguing how effective Eggers is at crafting inhuman monsters. This was also shown when Winslow and Wake wrestled for dominance one last time.

With the guilt of his past eclipsing his present, Winslow imagines Wake as a variety of different beings. wake shifts between the real Ephraim Winslow, The mermaid from Winslow’s earlier visions, and finally a screaming protean sea god, full of writhing tentacles that almost do “Winslow” in. The makeup and special effects of the sudden delve into fantasy pair brilliantly with Dafoe’s screams, conjuring the image of the genuine fury of the sea.

1

Calf is bewitched

Iconic moment was in the witch

Veteran industry darlings like Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson aren’t the only actors that Robert Eggers is capable of wringing terrifically gruesome performances from. The witch Demonstrates how strong Eggers is as a director of children, getting impressionable young children like twins Mercy and Jonas’ actors to convincingly speak in Old English while still feeling natural. However, Harvey Scrimschaw’s Caleb is the best directed horror scene, making a case for best child actor in a horror movie ever.

Returning to his meager homestead after his encounter with the witch, Caleb is cursed, writhing in pain and frothing at the mouth as he screams chilling religious pleas. His violent destruction is followed by the breaking of a whole apple, shortly afterwards he dies, driven into a hysterical state of religious zeal by them. Encounters with the supernatural. For his command over actors of any age, Robert Eggers More than deserves his recognition as a horror visionary.