“Our original location scout, a former logger, grew up there,” says Eggers. “He took us into Algonquin Park to Kiosk where the town used to be, saying, ‘This was the school, this was the general store, and now it’s just … trees.’”

Tall and ominous trees, ones left standing by the lumber company and railroad that left Kiosk in the 1980s, the community vanishing soon after.

“We had to go that far north to find white pines and hemlocks of a size that could look like 17th-century New England and feel like untouched wilderness. It’s not exactly like it was when English settlers came here, but it was evocative enough,” said Eggers in an interview at TIFF last September, following the film’s Canadian premiere.

Such intense attention to detail comes naturally to Eggers — he’s previously worked as a production and costume designer — and it paid off handsomely with the director’s prize and a distribution deal at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where The Witch world-premiered to critical and audience acclaim.

The Witch is finally in general release on Friday, since indie films often have to wait for their launch window. Eggers and his star, Anya Taylor-Joy, hope they can scare regular moviegoers as completely as they did festival buffs.

Eggers, 32, is attired all in black for the interview. Taylor-Joy, 19, an Argentine-Anglo-American actress and model, makes a fashionable contrast in white, although her blonde locks have been dyed black for another movie.

What was your intent with The Witch? Did you just really want to scare the bejeezus out of people?

Eggers: It wasn’t like, “I can’t wait to scare people! Muahhahaha!” I just wanted to create a nightmare from the past. I really wanted us to be inside a Puritan’s nightmare. So it does need to be scary, and there are some jump scares in the film, but I’m interested in something beyond that. If something is actually horrific, then it actually asks the question that horror stories are about: Why do they exist? Most genre movies hit the nail on the head, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s easy to laugh about the whole thing. But you’re not confronting what is. . .

Taylor-Joy (interjects): Your fear!

So much of the story of The Witch is implied. We don’t really know exactly why the Puritan family has left the safety of the community plantation, or why the supernatural forces target it.

Taylor-Joy: It relies on an intelligent audience. We’re not going to spoon-feed you something. I think people underestimate audiences a lot nowadays, and actually it’s far more powerful if you come to it and you bring your own thoughts and your own emotions into it.

The animals are integral to the story. Was the goat, Black Phillip — who has his own @BlackPhillip Twitter account — part of the script or did you improvise?

Eggers: If you read the script, that’s the film. I had more experienced directors saying, “The goat’s going to have to be all CG, man.” And I was like, “Well, we can work with the real animal, the actions don’t need to be exactly as they are in the script.” If there are actions that are the most improvised, it has to do with the goat. I will say that I would never choose to work with a goat again!

How did you both end up working together?

Eggers: I had a great casting director but basically I knew it needed to be Anya as soon as I saw her.

Taylor-Joy: That’s what I used to look like! It’s crazy. As soon as we wrapped the movie, every role that came about dramatically altered my appearance. So first the waist-length blond hair, gone, then the colour, gone.

Were you aware going in just how creepy this was going to be?

Taylor-Joy: No! I had never seen a scary movie before I saw The Witch, and straight after that I decided to watch The Blair Witch Project because I was like, “Yeah, I’m tough! I’ve made a horror movie!” But I don’t like being scared. It’s not my thing. However, I will say, and this isn’t even me upping the movie, I don’t see The Witch as a horror movie. I see it as a horrifying story. But for me it’s very much a family drama with a lot of bad things that go down. It’s a beautiful film.

Eggers: When the cast saw the movie for the first time, they went in thinking they’d been telling a story about a family. They weren’t around for the filming of the witch stuff.

Taylor-Joy: We made a horror movie! Damn! We didn’t know that!

Any thoughts on where The Witch fits into the horror genre?

Eggers: There have been a lot of good, small horror films lately. There’s something gone on there, cool stuff by younger directors in their 30s and 40s like It Follows, The Babadook and Let the Right One In. I’m glad to be part of that.

Taylor-Joy: People are expecting more from horror, and that’s a good thing. They should expect more from film.