Black Phillip is a character from the horror movie "The Witch". He is a male goat who may appear to be the embodiment of evil or even Satan himself. Throughout the film, Black Phillip maintains a sense of mystery and darkness, adding to the eerie atmosphere. Black Phillip is initially introduced as a seemingly ordinary goat, calmly grazing and roaming around the farm where the story takes place. However, as the plot progresses, it becomes clear that there is something sinister about this particular animal. As the family in the film becomes more and more isolated and tormented by supernatural forces, Black Phillip becomes a constant presence, lurking in the background.

Interviewing the Fictitious: Black Phillip

I drive my jeep through the rolling hills till I reach the Mcmansion. I get out on the gravel road and a tuxedoed butler takes me around back. There in the back patio is Black Philip, the break out star of the new movie The Witch. At 250 lbs the dark skinned actor cuts a fantastic profile. With his firm jaw and foot long horns…Oh I mentioned that Black Phillip was a goat didn’t I?

The first time I heard mention of the movie The Witch (2015) I was told how ‘the goat’ stole the show. He has become an internet phenome and even has a re-cut trailer of the movie featuring just him. Black Philip is enjoying the mid-day sun eating alfalfa and sipping a mint julip. He beckons me to take a seat.

“Thank you for letting me interview you.” The last interview I did with the goat from the original Jurassic park didn’t go over to well, because he could only make bleating noises. Fortunately Black Philip can talk

“Oh my pleasure.” The goat explains. “I have always been grateful of Dave’s Corner of the Universe pro-goat Positions.”

“Let’s start off with one of your personal passions, the importance of goats in the world.” I say breaking the ice.

His eyes grow animated. “Oh yes, thank you…In many places of the world goat milk is drunk much more than cow milk. Historically goats may have been one of the first animals that human domesticated, over 7,000 years ago. The gift of a few goats to a Third World village can mean the difference of survival or the village dying off. Goats a vibrant part of developing countries’ economies.”

“Wow. That is amazing.” I say then go for a hard hitting question. “There are however rumors about your behavior on set.”

He makes a sputtering sound. “Really most of that was just the tabloids, showing their bias against quadrupeds. Sure Robert Eggers the director of The Witch said that my actor Charlie was hard to work with and that he was aggressive one moment and sleepy the next…But he’s a goat what was Robbie expecting?”

“What happened to Charlie?” I ask.

Back Philip sighs. “Will the whole movie thing left a bad taste in his mouth and he pretty much dropped out of the Hollywood scene. He has retired and now lives on a farm eating brush and sleeping…Some say he went hippie…But I say, he is pretty happy the way his life turned out, he’s living the life he always wanted to.”

“How did he get the job?” I asked.

“Pretty much the same way a human gets a big movie roll, his good looks. His long gorgeous horns, black fir, jaw line, I mean ask any doe, the guy is a hunk. Works out too, teabo, pilates and cross fit the whole nine yards.”

“You have a twitter account I understand.”

“Well I don’t do it myself.” He shows me his hooves. “No thumbs. I have some IT nerd do it for me.”

“There has been some complaints by Wicca followers on how witches are protruded in the movie, how do you respond to that?”

“Ok…I get their point, but The Witch and witchcraft in the movie is not based on Wicca or Wiccans. It is a fiction based on a type of witchcraft that never existed, but it is based on the fears of witches and devils people in the 17 th century created, it not supposed to be a real portrayal of magic, it has talking goats, I mean, come on people.”

“How do you feel about the movie being embraced by the Temple of Satan?” I ask.

Again he makes a sputtering noise. “The Temple of Satan, are not devil worshipers. They aren’t even a religion. They are more a political group. With trying to get a statue of Baphomet on a court house grounds. Let’s face they want to shock people get their names in the papers. Any time you are a big star, even a goat star, you are going to get a fringe group trying to ride your coattails.”

“Why do people think goats are evil?” I ask.

“I don’t think we are evil.” BP responds. “I think we are stubborn and the fact that we want our way vexed many a generation of goat farmers. Eliphas Levi responsible for the modern connection of the goat and the devil. But let’s be honest that guy was as crazy as an outhouse rat. He was pulling stuff out his poop hole. The whole modern concept of the devil with goat legs was made up by him.

The lies, the lies.

I know you are big Lovecraft fan, we know HPL was familiar with Levi, because he sites him several times in The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. That familiarity is probably how we get Shub-Nigguroth, Lovecraft’s perverted fertility goddess and an architype for goat like demons in the Pulps.”

The black goat with 10,000 young.

Black Philip takes a sip of his Julip. “Also, goats seem to be able to almost speak English. Just look at all those Goats singing Taylor Swift post on the internet. It like we have some knowledge that we are trying to share with you that you cannot quite understand.”

He’s right when I feed the goats on our farm in the morning they seem to make a noise that sounds like “The Man…The Man…The Maaaaannnn…” It is very distinctive from the noise they make when they see me the rest of the day.

“Also human seem creeped out by our eyes.” This isn’t the first time I have heard that. They also glow at night if you shine a light in them like cat’s, but instead of red they glow blue.

“Do you want to address any goat urban legends?” I ask.

“Thank you for that opportunity.” Philip says shifting his wait in his chair. “I want people to know that goats do not eat cans.”

“They don’t?” I ask.

“No, we can’t digest them. The legends comes from the fact that goats will try to separate the can from the bottom and then eat the glue that holds them together. Trust me that glue is delicious.”

“What if they need some iron?” I quip.

“OK, first of all the cans are tin, and the act of an animal knowing what vitamins they need and instinctively eating them is called mineral sense and goats don’t have that. With the exception of salt they will crave salt when they need it.”

“Oh.” I respond. “You know when I am working on the farm, and the baby goats won’t do what I want them to, I threaten them ‘Black Phillip is going to get you’ How do you feel about that?”

He gives me a quizzical look. “I am not sure I like being the boogieman of the goat community. But I guess it is like ancient Roman mothers telling their children to go to sleep because Hannibal is at the gates”

“Well what about the presidential election?”

“Officially, the Union of Barnyard Animals forbids me from endorsing a human being in a human election.” Then he bends in to me conspiratorly. “But between you and me, if Trump wins I am moving to Canada.”

With that I leave Black Phillip to continue his day of chewing his cud, clearing brush and corrupting the souls of the innocent.

All The Witch’s Most WTF Moments, Explained: A Spoiler-Filled Interview With the Director

Among the many odd moments in the very odd (and great) new horror movie The Witch is the closing title card, which notes that many of the preceding moments in the movie came “directly from period journals, diaries, and court records.” If that postscript came at the end of your average horror movie, you might suspect it of being just a fake-out designed to trick viewers into thinking that everything you just saw was real. But The Witch is not your average horror movie. Instead it’s designed to be, as the subtitle suggests, “A New England Folk Tale.” As writer-director Robert Eggers has said, he wanted the movie to feel like “a Puritan’s nightmare,” like what would happen “if I could upload a Puritan’s nightmare into the audience’s mind’s eye.”

Eggers has spoken often about how much research he put into achieving this effect, but what exactly did he find? We called him up to ask about some of the movie’s most shocking moments—demonic goats, baths of baby’s blood, and certain somethings suckling certain other somethings—and their real historical and literary inspirations. (Note: This interview is designed to be read after you’ve seen the movie.)

In England, goat farmers were really considered very backward. You did not want to be a goat farmer. It was not cool. But when the settlers came over here, they brought goats with them, and there was a lot of people with goats, because goats could clear the land very efficiently and they were small, to travel with. So, from early on, it made sense for the family to have goats.

The idea that goats are related to Satan is something that’s familiar enough from Goya—which is of course a later period—but in the early modern period and the late Middle Ages, in [the works of German artists] Hans Baldung Grien and Hans Holbein, we see all this stuff with witches and goats. I think that having the goat as a Satanic image in English witch narratives is more rare; it’s definitely more of a continental thing, and I think that hardcore witch historians would say that I might be pushing it a little bit. But considering that this family had goats, it seemed to work well.

Hans Baldung’s The Witches Sabbath, from the 16th century. Note the witch flying atop a goat.
Public domain/Wikimedia Commons

How about the scene with the apple? Is that something you were borrowing from the Bible and the Garden of Eden, or was there a more specific point of reference there? I think a lot of us know Snow White.

Certainly Puritans would all be aware of the apple being synonymous with sin. But I read a book full of Elizabethan witch pamphlets, and there was an Elizabethan witch who was accused of giving children poison apples. This was earlier than any written accounts of Snow White that I’m aware of, and it’s really interesting to me how, in the folk tales and the fairy tales and the historical accounts of real witchcraft, the same themes and motifs come up. In all these stories, there’s no difference between the “real witch” and the “fairy tale witch.”

The big early reveal in the movie has a witch churning up a baby and then bathing in its blood—is that correct?

What’s going on there is another thing that you see in some English texts, but which is more common on the continent: the idea that a witch couldn’t just hop on her stick and fly, but instead she needed an unguent, an ointment, to help her fly. I think even some modern witches today make flying ointments, and they have potentially hallucinogenic properties, which induce a state that makes it seem like you’re flying.

But the lore in the day was basically that the active ingredient of this unguent was the entrails of an unbaptized babe. And the baby, Samuel—given that his family was far from the settlement, and also given that the Puritans had weird ideas about baptism, he was susceptible to that.

We’re getting into increasingly grisly territory here, but there are scenes of people sucking blood from goat udders, and of animals lactating blood. Was that your image, or something that you drew specifically from somewhere else?

Yeah, witches very often would steal milk from farm animals, dry up the animals’ milk, turn their milk to blood, curdle their milk, and drink it. Sometimes they would take the forms of other animals to do that.

Also, witches had familiars, which were sometimes in demonic shapes and more often in the forms of everyday animals. The black cat that we associate with witches is a witch’s familiar. The witch, being an anti-mother, would feed these animals with her blood that came out of her nipples. [Note: This explains a certain scene with a raven that comes later.] Or sometimes the blood would come out of extra teats that she would have—potentially in her labia or in her anus. I’m not joking about this! This has been talked about a lot, but it didn’t quite make its way into the film.

I’m curious whether you have set ideas about what’s real in the movie and what isn’t—in other words, who’s possessed, and who might just be going mad?

I have very clear ideas about this. But I have intentionally tried to keep some mystery and enigma around that stuff, so I won’t share my opinions on it. It was designed with intentions, but also designed to be read in multiple different ways.

So you won’t tell us whether Thomasin was evil all along, or only becomes desperate at the end?

No offense, if that was anyone’s reading, but for people who think Thomasin was evil all along: “Once upon a time there was a story of a witch”—that’s the movie, and that’s not a very interesting story. So I will say that much.

But there are clues about different interpretations. So, for example, the rot on the corn is ergot, which is a hallucinogenic fungus, so if you wanted to take that route, you could. It’s not necessarily my route, but there are multiple ways in.

The Witch: the blood, the gore, the goat – discuss the film with spoilers

Horror fans are an undernourished bunch. There’s the tantalisingly cruel promise of something worth having nightmares about on an almost weekly basis, but what’s offered up is usually subpar. Recent months have been littered with stinkers including The Forest, Victor Frankenstein, Paranormal Activity 6, Sinister 2 … the list goes on.

But critics have fallen under the spell of low-budget supernatural chiller The Witch (it boasts an unusually high 89% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and many have called it one of the few contemporary horror films they would wholeheartedly recommend. It’s now been unleashed on UK audiences, and here’s a forum to discuss the main plot points.

There are spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the film yet and want to remain blissfully ignorant, look away.

As the family in the film becomes more and more isolated and tormented by supernatural forces, Black Phillip becomes a constant presence, lurking in the background. He is often shown in dark, shadowy shots, enhancing the sense of fear and dread. One of the most memorable scenes involving Black Phillip is a conversation he has with one of the young girls in the family, Thomasin.

The witch

One of the most surprising elements of the film is just how early we’re shown the witch herself. After the family at the centre of The Witch are excommunicated from their puritanical Christian plantation, they move to a remote farm on the edge of a foreboding forest. Early in the film, their baby goes missing while in the care of their eldest daughter, Thomasin. Rather than keep us guessing, we see the culprit is a grotesque creature from the woods who, in arguably the film’s most shocking moment, kills it and uses the blood. It’s a disturbing reveal of the film’s black heart, and lets us know early on, what evil lies in the woods. But was it too much too soon? And is the subsequent appearance of the witch, as a beautiful young woman who appears to the older son, a bit cliched? Or, as some have suggested, is the witch merely a manifestation of the family’s religious fervour?

In this scene, Thomasin approaches the goat and seemingly has a conversation with him. The lines between fantasy and reality blur, leaving the audience unsure of whether this is all in Thomasin's mind or if there is something truly supernatural happening. Ultimately, Black Phillip reveals himself to be more than just a goat. In a climactic scene, he transforms into a man and confronts Thomasin. This transformation solidifies the idea that Black Phillip is not just an ordinary animal, but a malevolent force to be reckoned with. "The Witch" explores themes of paranoia, isolation, and religious fanaticism, all of which are amplified by the presence of Black Phillip. He serves as a physical manifestation of evil, a symbol of the darkness that lurks within the human heart. In conclusion, Black Phillip is a key character in the film "The Witch", embodying darkness and evil. The mystery surrounding him adds an extra layer of fear and tension to the story. Through his interactions with the characters, Black Phillip serves as a potent symbol of the dangers of fanaticism and the supernatural forces that can lurk in the shadows..

Reviews for "Black Phillip the Witch: A Historical and Cultural Analysis"

1. John - 2/5

I was extremely disappointed with "The Witch". I found it to be slow-paced and lacking in any true scares or suspense. The story felt disjointed and the characters were underdeveloped. Additionally, the ending left me feeling unsatisfied and confused. Overall, I would not recommend this film to anyone looking for a thrilling and engaging horror experience.

2. Sarah - 3/5

While I appreciate the unique and atmospheric setting of "The Witch", I found the plot to be too ambiguous and lacking in substantial scares. The pacing was slow, and the tension built up inconsistently throughout the film. While I did enjoy the performances of the actors, especially the young Anya Taylor-Joy, the overall execution of the story left me feeling underwhelmed. In my opinion, "The Witch" had potential, but failed to deliver a truly captivating horror experience.

3. Mike - 2/5

"The Witch" felt like a wasted opportunity. I was initially intrigued by the premise and setting, but the execution was lacking. The pacing was painfully slow, and the payoff simply wasn't worth the wait. The film relied too heavily on atmosphere and style, sacrificing a compelling story and well-developed characters. I found it hard to connect with any of the characters, and ultimately, I was left feeling bored and unimpressed. Overall, "The Witch" failed to live up to its potential and left me disappointed.

Black Phillip the Witch: Tales of his Malevolent Influence