Plumbing the Depths of Darkness, and Finding Liberation

This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we fear? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.

It rains softly. The massive, ancient trees of the forest loom over me. I walk forward in the dim twilight. I can barely see. My eyes mistake every shadow or faint glimmer of dusky light.

I hear the wind moaning through the pine boughs above, causing the thick trunks to sway and groan, but it is unnaturally still near the forest floor. The air is thick. It smells of resin and moss. It is increasingly difficult to walk through the dense, pungent air. But I must walk on. I am compelled to walk on.

I am terrified. My clothes are saturated with the rank humidity, my sweat, everything that would slow my step over the damp autumnal leaves reddened by the rainfall and the incoming night. Tall ferns rub against my calves but seem to slither as if alive. My heart is racing. My head is pounding.

And then I see it. In the distance.

A hovel.

The door is slightly open. It reveals nothing but complete darkness within. I know instantly it is the dwelling of a witch. A child-killing witch. A demonic ogress. My heart sinks. My breath accelerates.

I am drawn to it as I have never been drawn to anything before.

I want to scream, but I cannot. All I can do is walk closer. Closer. Closer still to the open door of the hovel. Shuddering with every step, I approach the threshold. The hovel smells of the rot and decay of earth. It smells of suffocating death.

I enter. It is utterly dark, but I walk on. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see something ever so faintly. And I know. I know who it is. I know what it is. I see the back of an old woman at the far end of the hovel. She is impossibly still. Her spine is bent and twisted. Over her shoulder, I see her balding, blistered head with its few strands of coarse, gray hair.

All the time I walk closer. Closer. Closer.

I feel I am about to expire from fear. I am now a few paces from her. The pressure of my pounding heart is so extreme, so painful, I feel it will burst. Her stench is maddening. I put my hand on her shoulder. Slowly, slowly she turns toward me. I can bear it no more. I can taste my blood. As I am about to see her face ….

I wake up.

I had this same dream a few times a year from the age of 6 or 7 until I was 31. Recreating these same images, more or less, in my first feature film “The Witch” somehow exorcised this dream. I had a happy childhood. But I had many fears. Normal, but perhaps heightened.

As a filmmaker, as a creator of horror films, I get to take control of my fears — to face them and share them. Like many people in creative fields, I often turn to my own dreams and nightmares for inspiration. Of course, these dreams reflect ourselves, and it is my unoriginal notion that what we are most afraid of is the darkness within us. This is where the most successful tales of horror come from. Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of obsession. The depth of Mary Shelley. Arthur Machen’s stories of euphoric madness. Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of “The Shining.” The cinema of Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch. It is when the darkness takes over, when it is absolute and inescapable, that it is the most terrifying.

My interest in the macabre is often one of liberation. It is liberating to control my fears by recreating them cinematically. It is liberating to feel close enough to the darkness of death to fear it less. For my own personal interest and in researching my films, I have read extensively in different disciplines of the occult. For my so-called art, I have plunged deep into the darkness.

In the 1930s, the psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote of a notable artist who “suffers the underworld fate — the man in him who does not turn toward the day-world, but is fatefully drawn into the dark; who follows not the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty, but the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil.” Jung continued: “When such a fate befalls a man who belongs to the neurotic, he usually encounters the unconscious in the form of the ‘Dark One.’ ”

This is truly frightening. Where does the exorcism of the fear end and the possession by darkness begin? That notable artist was, by the way, Picasso, whose work seems on the face of it far away from the work of his countryman Goya, whose “Los Caprichos” and Black Paintings seem to have been conjured from the depths of hell. Yet Picasso’s abstract grotesqueries were enough for Jung to see one who passed “through the perils of Hades.”

The witch of my nightmare was terrifying because she was inescapable. As much as I was frightened of her, I was even more drawn to her — even though I knew that meeting her meant my death, or worse. Fear, whether we explore it or shun it is, like my witch, inescapable. She was, somehow, within me.

Though I have rid myself of this witch, I find the nature of fear is elusive. In earlier periods witches, vampires and werewolves could be the external scapegoats to our inner fears. But today: a stabbing on a subway platform. The abduction of a child. The atrocities of war. These daily monstrosities are also inescapable. These evils haunt us. They force us to ask ourselves, how are we as humans capable of such darkness?

It must be the humble horror author’s duty to probe this malevolence in our nature. If an audience partakes in a story that endeavors to articulate some of life’s inner and outer demons, can we meet them face to face and pass though the perils of Hades together? Can we do this and come out unscathed, and even more human?

Robert Eggers is the writer and director of such films as “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.” His next film, “Nosferatu,” opens later this year.”