Robert Eggersis a horror master who has proven his ability to masterfully weave a terrifying scene time and time again. First making his A24 horror movie debut with 2015’s The Witch, the visionary director quickly earned a deserved reputation as one of the premiere modern voices in the genre. Following up his folk horror masterpiece with the Lovecraftian thrill ride The Lighthouse and the Viking age revenge flick The Northman, Eggers has continued to churn out some truly unsettling sequences.
Compared to most horror directors, Robert Eggers’ best movies are able to do a lot with very little. Without showing all too much directly horrifying imagery, Eggers is able to stir up screams through his brilliant direction alone, using breathtaking performances and chilling cinematography to convey an unmistakable sense of dread and fear. Hopefully, Eggers’ upcoming Nosferatu remake can continue to fill out 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 film’s inciting incident. After being outcast alongside her family from a local pilgrim community, forced to live on a dangerous homestead in some isolated woods, the teenager Thomasin plays with her baby brother Sam outside.
Distributed by A24, The Witch marks the feature directorial debut of Robert Eggers and the first film appearance of Anya Taylor-Joy. Written by Eggers, The Witch follows a puritanical family in New England in the 1630s who are forced to leave their community after a religious dispute. Attempting to set up a farm in the New England countryside, the family soon find themselves beset by malevolent and supernatural forces beyond their comprehension.
- Release Date
- February 19, 2016
- Studio(s)
- A24
- Cast
- Kate Dickie , Wahab Chaudhry , Ellie Grainger , Ralph Ineson , Sarah Stephens , Lucas Dawson , Anya Taylor-Joy , Bathsheba Garnett , Harvey Scrimshaw , Julian Richings
- Runtime
- 92minutes
Thomasin plays peekaboo with her brother, covering her face and revealing it to surprise him in delight. But when Thomasin opens her eyes after a brief moment, her joy turns to horror as she finds her brother has vanished.
Even if this scene doesn’t have a lot happening, the sheer chills caused by Sam’s sudden unexplained disappearance are hard to shake off.
Even worse is the brief glimpse Thomasin (and by extension, the audience) gets of the plant life ahead of her leading into the woods moving back into place, implying some creature disturbed it while scampering away with Sam at inhuman speeds. However brief, this scene sets the haunting tone for the rest of The Witch.
9 Thomas Decides To Live Deliciously
Iconic moment was in The Witch
The Witch is truly bookended by two of its most effectively frightening scenes, with Thomasin’s final acceptance of the devilish influence plaguing her family being just as scary as her initial loss of Sam. The entire film, the presence of the mysterious goat Black Phillip plagues The Witch, being 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.
The face of Phillip’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.
In a bone-chilling whisper, Black Phillip begs Thomasin to sign her life over to him, asking if she would like to “live deliciously.” The face of Phillip’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. As Thomasin joins her new cohort of sisters, hysterical laughter overtakes her as she rises in the air, marking the end of her unsettling journey into profanity.
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 movie, Eggers gives precious few concrete answers as to the nature of the madness overtaking the small sea-swept outpost. When Robert Pattinson’s Winslow finally seeks the secrets of the lighthouse for himself, he soon finds that the answers are accompanied by a fate worse than death.
The Lighthouse is a psychological thriller directed by Robert Eggers. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as Thomas Wake and Ephraim Winslow, two lighthouse keepers who begin to experience strange and supernatural phenomena after they get stranded on a remote island in the 1890s.
- Release Date
- October 18, 2019
- Studio(s)
- A24
- Runtime
- 110 minutes
Gazing into the ominous beacon, the audience’s senses are overtaken 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 within the light’s glass container, his face’s gradual transformation from hysterical laughter to intense anguish almost makes the viewer grateful of that fact. When Winslow comes to, he’s assigned to a gruesome end, splayed naked upon the beach with his eyes and guts picked out by seagulls, fulfilling the warnings of Willem Dafoe’s Wake.
7 Amleth Fights A Viking Zombie
Iconic moment was in The Northman
As great as Robert Eggers is at stirring up deep psychological terror with little overt blood and gore, he’s just as capable when directing a spooky encounter with a generic supernatural creature. The Northman isn’t altogether a horror movie, but some of the warrior protagonist Amleth’s visions, which may or may not be real, verge on horror territory with their intensity. The most obviously qualified one is his encounter with a draugr, a warrior zombie from Scandanavian mythology also known as a mound-dweller.
Robert Eggers’ The Northman adapts the ancient legend of Amleth, the basis for Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. When a young Viking prince (Alexander Skarsgård) witnesses his uncle (Claes Bang) murdering his father (Ethan Hawke), he flees and swears revenge. Returning after years of honing his skills as a warrior, Amleth hunts his uncle in a bloody and brutal tale of revenge and retribution, hoping to rescue his mother (Nicole Kidman).
- Release Date
- April 22, 2022
- Cast
- Claes Bang , Ian Gerard Whyte , Nicole Kidman , Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson , Kate Dickie , Olwen Fouéré , Katie Pattinson , Ethan Hawke , Gustav Lindh , Willem Dafoe , Doa Barney , Ralph Ineson , Ian Whyte , Bjork , Alexander Skarsgard , Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson , Anya Taylor-Joy , Murray McArthur
- Runtime
- 136 minutes
Told by a soothsayer that he’ll need a special blade drawn from moonlight to have any hope of defeating his wicked uncle, Amleth enters a grave to claim the sword from its original owner. In the process, he has to struggle 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 the undead being may have been able to enter Almeth’s mind.
6 The Village Raid
Iconic moment was in The Northman
For the most part, Robert Eggers prefers to ground his horror in more fantastical, supernatural, or folklore-inspired elements, caring little for representing real-world terrors. The sole exception is his chilling direction of the berserker raid scene in The Northman, which paints a type of fear that was once very real to many people living in the Viking age. After a time-skip, Eggers reveals that Almeth has survived 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 Eggers’ filmography. Even if it’s more war movie than straight-up 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’re taken advantage of by the invaders to the post-battle jitters of the exhausted berserkers as they come down from their adrenaline high. It’s disturbing to remember that scenes like this were actually experienced by many innocent people throughout history.
5 Yer Fond Of Me Lobster, Ain’t Ye?
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 pressure of the animosity that builds between Wake and Winslow as a result of their confinement in such an isolated location 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, Willem Dafoe’s character has enough, breaking into a lengthy monologue that curses his comrade by the power of the sea itself.
Even if all that’s really happening in this scene is an old man yelling at his co-worker, 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 into Winslow, screaming “Hark!” to punctuate his condemnation and generating so much sheer dread through performance alone. It’s no wonder Eggers will be working with Dafoe again in the cast 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 being said, when it’s time for the film to depict its gruesome atrocities plainly, it doesn’t pull any punches, with some of the most disturbing imagery every seen in a folk horror movie. The goriest and most upsetting scene that doesn’t hide anything out of frame happens early one, when it’s revealed what exactly the Witch wanted with Thomasin’s baby brother, Sam.
A haggard old woman, the Witch first runs her hands along baby Sam’s nubile body, trembling with excitement. She proceeds to stuff the poor infant into a butter churn, mashing him up into a bloody paste that she then applies onto her own skin in a sort of sick ritual that seems to restore her youth, as seen in her next encounter with Caleb. Eggers avoids showing every gruesome detail of this dark skincare routine, but shows just enough to make for a nauseating scene that’s difficult to even watch.
3 Winsloww Finds A Mermaid
Iconic moment was in The Lighthouse
Like all the best horror directors, Eggers doesn’t shy away from sexual themes in his work. Much of The Lighthouse revolves around phallic imagery, sexual frustration, and dominant-submissive relationships, all put into the pressure cooker of two hot-blooded working men confined to a small space for months at a time. In his ravenous sexual psychosis, Winslow dreams up a companion for himself – an eerily beautiful mermaid.
In a dizzyingly edited scene, Winslow comes across a mermaid half-buried in the dredged-up seaweed on the shore. His lust for the creature is interrupted when she wakes up, giving him a horrific smile and piercing 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 being 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 fraying sanity and over-active imagination get the better of him while imprisoned on the lighthouse. Whether the more supernatural imagery of the film is real or not may still be up for interpretation, but there’s no arguing how effective Eggers is at crafting inhuman monsters. This is also shown off when Winslow and Wake wrestle for dominance for the last time.
The makeup and special effects of the sudden delve into fantasy pair brilliantly with Dafoe’s screams, conjuring up the image of the genuine wrath of the sea.
With the guilt from his past eclipsing his present, Winslow imagines Wake as a variety of different beings. Wake shifts between being the real Epharim 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 up the image of the genuine wrath of the sea.
1 Caleb 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 squeezing terrifically ghoulish performances out of. The Witch demonstrates how strong Eggers is as a director of children, getting impressively young children like twins Mercy and Jonas’ actors to convincingly speak in old English while still feeling natural. However, it’s Harvey Scrimschaw’s Caleb that gets the best directed horror scene, making a case for the 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 contortions are punctuated by the vomiting of an entire apple, soon after which he dies, brought to a hysterical state of religious zealotry by his encounter with the supernatural. For his command over actors of any age, Robert Eggers more than deserves his recognition as a horror visionary.
