The Witch Ending Explained (2015): Wait, Was Black Phillip Really The Devil?

The Witch Ending Explained: ok…you just finished The Witch, and the first thing you want to ask somebody is: wait, did that goat really just talk? And then turn into a guy in black clothes and offer a teenage girl some butter?

Yep, that actually happened. A family loses a baby, then a son, then the twins, and by the end it’s one teenage girl in a barn with a goat that has started answering her. She agrees to the offer, sheds her clothes, and heads deep into the trees where a group of women is already dancing around a massive fire.

Within moments, she’s hovering in the air right alongside them, laughing uncontrollably. If you hit the credits completely baffled by what just happened, trust me, you aren’t the only one.

The movie doesn’t explain any of it. Nobody tells you who Black Phillip is, what the butter is about, or whether the witches are real or just in the family’s heads. So let’s go through it together, one question at a time: was the goat really the devil, why does Thomasin say yes, what happened to the twins, and how are you supposed to feel about that last scene?

Heads Up: We are jumping straight into the deep end of the plot twists now. If you hate spoilers, close your eyes and turn back. (Or, you know, go watch the movie and come right back)!

Who’s who in this cursed little farmhouse?

Before we dig into the mess, here’s who you’re dealing with:

Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy): The eldest daughter and the heart of the story. Also the person everyone decides to blame.
William (Ralph Ineson): The father, whose stubborn pride gets the family banished in the first place.
Katherine (Kate Dickie): The mother, so deep in grief that she starts blaming Thomasin for everything.
Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw): Thomasin’s younger brother, curious, sweet, and worried about his baby brother’s soul.
Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson): The young twins, who love winding Thomasin up and chatting with the family goat.
Samuel: The baby whose disappearance sets everything off.
Black Phillip (voice and human form: Wahab Chaudhry): The family billy goat with a lot more going on than goats usually have.
The Witch (Bathsheba Garnett, with Sarah Stephens as her younger form): The presence in the woods that keeps taking what this family loves.

How did this family end up so alone in the first place?

Rewind to the 1630s. William and his family have just been kicked out of their Puritan settlement over a religious dispute, and William is way too proud to admit he might have been wrong. So off they go, hauling everything they own to a patch of land at the edge of a huge, dark forest. No neighbors. No help. Just crops that don’t want to grow and a stretch of woods everybody is quietly terrified of. Honestly, wouldn’t you be?

Here’s a detail that says a lot about how these people think. Eggers told Sight and Sound that the real Puritans built their windows tiny to keep nature out, so much so that the production had to enlarge the film’s windows by a third just to let some light in.

These are people who came to a wild continent and then spent their energy shutting it out, so when something strange finally comes for them, sin and the devil are the only ways they know to explain it.

Then baby Samuel disappears. Thomasin is playing peekaboo with him, and the next second he’s just gone. The audience gets to see what happened: a witch in the woods turns him into flying ointment. The family never learns that. All they know is that a baby is missing, and Katherine needs somewhere to put her grief. Guess where it lands?

Thomasin is the easiest target in the house. The very first time we hear her speak, she’s praying and confessing her sins: she’s been idle, she’s disobeyed her parents, she’s made merry on the Sabbath, and she’s broken the Commandments in her thoughts. That’s a teenager who already thinks she’s failing God.

Meanwhile, Katherine complains that Thomasin has reached womanhood, and in a house this rigid, a maturing daughter is treated like a problem to be solved. Caleb keeps sneaking glances at her, and instead of dealing with that, the family decides the fault is hers.

So the pile-on starts. Katherine is already annoyed at Thomasin over a missing silver cup, which William secretly traded away for supplies and stays quiet about for a while.

The kids overhear their parents talking about sending Thomasin off to serve another family. Then Caleb sneaks into the forest with her to check a trap, and when Thomasin gets thrown from their horse and knocked out, he wanders off alone and runs into a young woman who is really that same witch.

He comes home naked, feverish, and dying. He coughs up a whole apple, talks lovingly about Jesus, and passes away. (Earlier, this same kid had asked his dad whether unbaptized Samuel could even get into heaven. Ouch.)

The twins start screaming that Thomasin is a witch. She fires back that they talk to Black Phillip. William, out of answers and out of patience, locks all three kids in the goat house. And that’s the night everything breaks.

What actually goes down on that last night?

The finale moves fast, so here’s the play-by-play.

In the middle of the night, the kids in the goat house wake up and see a pale, naked old woman crouched over one of the goats, drinking its blood. She turns around and cackles at them. Then she goes after the twins, off-screen, while Thomasin watches, too scared to move. (We never see what happens. Isn’t that somehow so much worse?)

Meanwhile, back in the house, Katherine is seeing things. She thinks Caleb and Samuel have come home, and she takes the baby to nurse him. The horrifying truth? A raven is actually tearing into her flesh. Hold onto that detail, because it matters later.

Morning comes. The goat house is wrecked, the goats are torn open, the twins are gone, and Thomasin is lying there with blood on her hands. William walks out to look, and Black Phillip charges him. William raises a hatchet like he’s ready to fight, drops it, and gets slammed again and buried under a pile of logs.

Katherine comes out, decides Thomasin is behind all of it, and tries to strangle her. Thomasin keeps telling her mother she loves her, and then grabs a blade and kills her in self-defense.

Now she’s completely alone, and she does the one thing she once accused the twins of doing. She walks into the goat house and talks to the goat. “Black Phillip, I conjure thee to speak to me.” A low voice asks what she wants. She asks what he can give. Out come the butter, the pretty dress, and the big question: “Would thou like to live deliciously?” She says yes.

Black Phillip becomes a man, tells her to remove her shift, and guides her hand as she signs her name in his book. (“I cannot write my name.” “I will guide thy hand.”) Then she walks into the forest with the goat, where a coven of naked witches is dancing around a bonfire. They begin to rise off the ground. So does Thomasin, laughing her head off, and the movie ends.

Why does Black Phillip kill William?

Good question. If the devil wants Thomasin, why attack her dad?

Think about who William is. He’s the reason they’re out there at all. His pride got the family banished, and his refusal to back down keeps them isolated. He’s also the one adult who, at least once, stands up for Thomasin.

When Katherine is tearing into her over Caleb, it’s William who reluctantly admits he’s the one who sold the silver cup and took Caleb into the woods first. He’s far from a hero, since he locks her in the goat house, but he’s still the last person who might argue on her side. Take him out, and that’s gone.

There’s something fitting about how it happens, too. The goat house is trashed, the goats have been slaughtered except for Black Phillip, and William stands there stunned, doing nothing. Then Black Phillip gores him, and William, who seems ready to fight for a moment and then just gives up, gets pushed into a stack of firewood that collapses and crushes him.

The man who thought sheer stubbornness could protect his family gets flattened by the one animal on the farm he never bothered to look at twice. Doesn’t it feel weirdly fitting?

Then there’s Katherine. With William dead, she comes out of the house and her grief and blame explode. She accuses Thomasin of causing every death, and even of trying to seduce her brother and her father.

That’s the accusation the family has been circling for the entire movie, finally said out loud. When she tries to strangle Thomasin, Thomasin finally has to fight back, and she kills her mother.

By the time Thomasin ends up in the goat house, everyone who might have stopped her from saying yes is dead or gone.

So was Black Phillip really the devil?

Short answer? Yes. The longer answer is that the film has been quietly building that case all along.

Think back. The younger kids spend the whole movie claiming Black Phillip speaks to them, which the adults completely ignore as stupid make-believe. Thomasin repeats the claim when she’s cornered, and nobody believes her either. Then in the finale, the goat does something no goat should: he charges a grown man and kills him. Then he speaks.

Then he turns into a man who tells a girl to take off her clothes and sign a book. Signing your name in the devil’s book is pretty much the classic image of a pact with Satan, so the movie isn’t being subtle about it at that point. That’s the devil, plain and simple.

But why a goat? Fair question. Robert Eggers told Slate that goats show up as devilish figures in old European art, like the work of Hans Baldung Grien and Hans Holbein, and that the image carries forward into much later paintings like Goya’s.

He admitted it’s more of a continental thing than an English one, and that hardcore witch historians might say he’s stretching. But this family keeps goats, so it worked for the story. And isn’t a goat kind of the perfect quiet villain? It just stands there, watching you.

Here’s the other thing people trip on: is Black Phillip in charge of the witch? The movie never draws an org chart. The witch handles Samuel, Caleb, and the twins, and Black Phillip handles the finale.

But he’s the one who leads Thomasin to the coven, which strongly suggests everyone in those woods answers to him. Think of the witch as the one doing the grabbing, and Black Phillip as the boss.

One more thing worth knowing. When Black Phillip presents the book, it isn’t blank. It already has other signatures in it. That’s a small detail, but it tells you Thomasin isn’t the first person to be offered this deal.

It also matches how real Puritans thought about witchcraft: you made a pact with the devil by signing his book, and during the Salem trials, getting someone to admit to signing it was a huge part of investigations. So the film isn’t inventing a spooky symbol. It’s using the exact thing a Puritan would be most afraid of.

Why on Earth would the Devil offer Butter and a Pretty Dress?

Look, I get it. This is the exact moment that gets an uncomfortable, confused laugh out of most people. The devil has all of hell at his disposal and he opens with dairy?

Here’s the thing: it isn’t random. Real accounts from 17th-century New England have people claiming the devil tempted them with small, ordinary things, like a pair of shoes or a break from chores, and the film leans hard on that kind of period detail. “Would thou like the taste of butter?” sounds ridiculous to us. To a girl who has spent the whole movie hungry, overworked, and told she’s a sinner, it’s a real offer.

Notice how the pitch grows, too. Butter and a dress are just the hook. Then comes “live deliciously,” and then “Wouldst thou like to see the world?” Think about what her world looks like. It’s a failing farm, a house full of people who blame her, and a future of serving strangers.

She has never been anywhere, and the only “outside” she knows is the forest everyone is scared of. So the offer is small because her life has been small. What he’s really saying is: you could have ease. You could want things. You could be allowed to enjoy being alive.

And who else has ever told her that? Her family lives in fear of sin and hell every single day, and even a bit of fun on the Sabbath goes into her confession. So when the only voice that ever promises her any comfort is the devil’s, can you really be shocked that she stops to listen?

Why does Thomasin say yes?

Because by that point, what’s she got left to say no to?

Line it up. She’s blamed for Samuel vanishing. She’s blamed for the silver cup that her own father sold. She’s about to be sent away. Her brother dies right after being alone with her in the woods, and the twins call her a witch to her face. Her father locks her in a goat house.

Her mother tries to choke the life out of her, and even then Thomasin’s response is to say she loves her. That’s how badly she wants to be a good daughter. Ultimately, she’s left with zero choice but to take her own mother’s life just to walk away from the attack.

Now think about how a Puritan girl would see her situation. The settlement threw her family out. She’s a teenager alone on a farm at the edge of the forest with no food and no one. And she’s just killed her own mother, self-defense or not. Where does that girl go? Who takes her in? Even the version of God she grew up with seems to give her nothing but rules and blame.

Notice too that she’s the one who reaches out. Nobody forces her into the goat house. She calls on Black Phillip to speak, which means she’s already open to the answer. In a way, the family’s accusations did the recruiting for him. They told her again and again what she was, and eventually she stopped arguing.

Eggers actually points out this exact twisted irony during a chat with Sight and Sound. He talked about how the harsher strands of Puritan thinking, the ones descended from thinkers like Calvin, pushed people to turn away from darkness so hard that darkness ended up right behind them.

Isn’t that exactly this family? The parents are so completely paralyzed by the fear of damnation that they end up destroying the one kid in that house who actually needed their help.

One reading, and a popular one, is that the whole night is a setup: everyone in her life gets stripped away so that the devil is the only option left. Some film scholars even say it looks a lot like grooming, where someone is isolated from everyone else and then offered the one thing they’re missing.

Others point out that her yes feels less like a triumph and more like desperation, because a young woman with a dead family and no supplies at the edge of the frontier has almost no real choices. Does the movie confirm that Black Phillip planned it? Not out loud. But it gives you plenty of reasons to wonder.

Was Thomasin a witch the Whole Time?

Nope, and the movie goes out of its way to show you why not.

Start with how we meet her. The first thing we hear from her is a prayer where she confesses her sins, and she’s the kind of person who thinks she’s fallen short even when she hasn’t done much. She looks after Samuel, she works hard, and she’s crushed when the baby is taken. Does that sound like a secret witch to you?

Every accusation against her comes from scared people: Katherine, the twins, William. And the accusations are never about anything she did. The family blames her for a baby who was taken by a witch she couldn’t have stopped, for a cup her dad sold, for a brother who was lured away, and eventually for her own body.

Eggers said in Sight and Sound that in the era the film is set in, if your corn didn’t grow or your child died, people said it was a witch. That’s precisely how this family reasons. Something goes wrong, so somebody has to be the witch, and Thomasin is the easiest person to point at.

Even the one time she jokes about being a witch, teasing Mercy, it’s just a kid sister game that comes back to bite her.

Eggers also pushed back on the “she was evil from the start” reading in his Slate interview. He wouldn’t share his own take on what’s real in the film, but he said that if you think Thomasin was evil all along, the movie is basically a story about a witch, and that’s just not a very interesting one. And he’s right, isn’t he? The whole tragedy works because she starts out innocent.

So the movie’s cruel little twist is this: they call her a witch until she finally becomes one.

What was going on with Caleb’s Death?

It’s easy to forget Caleb in the chaos of the ending, but his death sets the tone for everything after. So let’s revisit it for a second.

The witch lures him in looking like a beautiful young woman, and by the time he’s back home, he’s gone. He’s delirious, sweating, and violently ill. Then that whole apple comes up.

Any Puritan would connect an apple to sin, but Eggers told Sight and Sound there’s more to it: while researching, he read about an Elizabethan witch put on trial for giving children poisoned apples, years before any recorded Snow White story he knows of. His point was that fairy-tale imagery and real witchcraft accusations were the same world back then.

And then, the strangest part: Caleb dies in a kind of religious ecstasy, professing his love for Christ. So was he saved? Taken by the devil? Both? The film won’t say. What it does show us is how the family reacts. Katherine suggests witchcraft is at work, and before long the twins are pointing straight at Thomasin, the one who was with him.

That’s the moment the movie shifts. The family stops fighting the woods and starts fighting each other.

Wait, are the witches even real, or is it all in their heads?

I get why people ask, because the movie does give you an exit door. Eggers told Slate that the rot on the family’s corn is ergot, a fungus that can cause hallucinations, so you could read the story that way if you wanted to.

He was careful to say it’s not necessarily his route, but that there are several ways in. Ergot poisoning has long been floated as a possible factor in real witch panics, including Salem, which happened decades after the events of this story.

Here’s where Eggers himself lands, and it might surprise you. In his Sight and Sound interview, he was asked whether the film is about a family conjuring its own demons or a straight tale of evil winning, and he said he hopes people can see it as “yes both.” His reasoning is that today we know witches don’t fly on broomsticks, but in the 1600s that simply was true, and he thinks things can exist within a society that believes in them.

So which is it inside the movie? I’d say the supernatural side has the stronger evidence, for a few reasons.

First, we see things the family never does. The witch making her ointment from Samuel happens with nobody from the family around. If it’s all hysteria, who’s imagining that scene?

Second, the film knows how to show us a hallucination and tell us it’s one. Remember Katherine and the raven? We watch her believe she’s holding her baby, and then we see the truth: a bird pecking at her. The movie is perfectly capable of separating what a character sees from what’s real. When it wants us to know something is a delusion, it tells us.

Third, the ending itself. Black Phillip doesn’t just talk, he turns into a man, and a full coven is floating over a bonfire. That’s not a moment the film hedges on.

But notice that “yes both” still matters. The witch is real, and so is the family’s panic, and the two feed each other. Suspicion pulls them apart, grief makes them crueler, and the witch only needs the gaps that open up. Isn’t that scarier than either explanation on its own?

So if you’re asking whether the witches are real, the answer is yes. If you’re asking whether the family helped the witch win, the answer is also yes.

What happened to Mercy and Jonas?

Honestly? The film never says, and I think that’s deliberate.

Here’s what we actually know. The old witch turns toward the twins in the goat house, laughs, and goes after them off-screen while Thomasin watches. By daybreak, the shed is a total disaster zone.

The regular goats are butchered, the twins are nowhere to be found, and Black Phillip is the only one left standing. And they’re nowhere to be seen when Thomasin arrives at the Sabbath. That’s the full list.

Notice what’s missing from that list: any bodies. We see what happens to Samuel. We see Caleb die. The twins? Nothing. The movie cuts away from them, which is a pretty big signal that it wants you left not knowing.

From there, fans fill in the blanks. Some assume the witch killed them and turned them into more flying ointment, like Samuel. Some think they’re alive somewhere, maybe already tied to Black Phillip, since they were always chatting with him. Neither theory is confirmed.

There’s one wrinkle worth knowing. Eggers told Slate that the old lore said flying ointment needed the entrails of an unbaptized baby, and Samuel fit that perfectly, since the family lived far from any settlement. The twins are older kids, and the film never tells us whether they were baptized. So the ointment idea isn’t a slam dunk.

There’s also the strange fact that the twins were the first people to hint at Black Phillip’s true nature. They kept saying the goat talked, everyone laughed it off, and then the two of them are the first to vanish when things get bad. Was that a warning they couldn’t put into words, or a sign they were already caught up in something? The film won’t say.

My take? The witch clearly took them, and given what happened to Samuel, it’s not going to be good. But the film purposely stops there. Isn’t it scarier that way?

Why is Thomasin naked, and what’s with the floating?

Two strange images end the movie, so let’s go through them.

Start with the clothes. Black Phillip tells her to remove her shift before she signs. Have you noticed that everyone touched by the forest ends up naked? Caleb stumbles home without a stitch. The witch is bare. The coven around the fire is bare.

In the movie’s world, clothes belong to the settlement, with its rules and its shame, and taking them off means stepping out of that world. So when Thomasin does it, she’s not just undressing. She’s leaving her old life behind.

Now, the floating. Remember the ointment? That grim scene where the witch used Samuel’s body? That’s the payoff. In the lore Eggers described to Slate, witches used an ointment to fly, and this is what it was for.

So when the coven and Thomasin lift off the ground, you’re watching the entire point of Samuel’s death play out. Isn’t that a creepy loop? The baby who vanished early on is, in a way, the reason she’s flying at the end.

It’s also why her laughter hits so strangely. She’s not just happy. She’s flying on the very thing that broke her family.

Is that Ending Happy or Horrifying?

Honestly, it’s both, and that conflicting vibe is why the ending is so damn memorable. Pay attention to the visual whiplash between Thomasin’s first scene and her last. We meet her bathed in this harsh, depressing gray wash, dressed in a restrictive high collar with her hair shoved under a tight cap, silently taking it as her father gets them exiled.

In the last shot, she’s lit by a warm amber fire, her hair is loose, her clothes are gone, and she’s laughing. That’s on purpose. The same girl, the same kind of shot, but the fear has been replaced by something that looks like joy. That’s the freedom side, and it might be the first time in the whole movie we see her really, openly happy.

But look at the price. She just signed away her soul, in Puritan terms, and she’s joining the exact coven that ground up her baby brother. She got there because she was pushed and cornered, not because she woke up one morning wanting to be a witch.

Some readers say that makes the ending less of a triumph and more of a last resort, and that she hasn’t really escaped a rigid belief system at all. She’s just swapped one for another, and this one asks for blood.

So what does Eggers want us to feel? Given that he told Sight and Sound he hopes people can see the film as “yes both” on the big questions, I don’t think he wants us to settle.

The witches are a Puritan nightmare, and yet Thomasin walks into that nightmare and finds warmth, company, and a way out. Both things are true at once. Isn’t that the uncomfortable part?

The movie leaves you with one more thing as it ends. A closing card tells us that many of the moments in the film came from period journals, diaries, and court records. So none of this is that far from what people in those days actually believed and feared. This story is set decades before the Salem trials, but the panic that fed those trials is already in the air here.

So is it a triumph or a tragedy? Can it be both? I’d say the movie wants you pulled both ways.

Wrap Up: So what do we make of that Ending?

Let’s boil it down. Black Phillip is the devil. Thomasin isn’t evil, she’s a girl who gets shut out of every door until the only one still open belongs to Satan. The witches are real within this world, even if Eggers is happy for you to see the family’s panic as part of the horror.

And those silly little temptations, the butter and the pretty dress, aren’t silly at all once you understand what her life has been like. Even the floating ties back to the very first tragedy, which is a pretty brutal way to end it.

What sticks with me most, though, is how the movie makes you feel two things at once. You watch Thomasin lose everything, and you watch her finally laugh. Those two feelings don’t cancel each other out, and Eggers doesn’t tell you which one to pick.

So next time you watch it, keep your eyes on her face in that last shot and ask yourself: is that joy, or is it something worse? Honestly, I still change my mind every time I watch it, and I think that’s exactly why this movie has such a grip on people.

If you’re interested, you can check out our Robert Egger’s Upcoming Werwulf Release Date here!

TL;DR: The Short Version

Yes, Black Phillip is the devil. The film shows him speaking, taking human form, and guiding Thomasin’s hand as she signs his book.
Thomasin is not a witch until the very last scene. Her family brands her one long before she does anything, and that label is what corners her.
”Live deliciously” sounds silly, but it makes sense once you see how little comfort her life has ever offered.
The witches are real inside this movie’s world, since we watch things happen that no member of the family ever sees. Eggers is also happy for you to read the family’s panic as part of the horror.
The twins vanish the night the witch attacks the goat house, and the film never tells us what became of them.
The ending is a horror ending and a freedom ending at the same time, and that’s exactly the point.

FAQ: Most Googled Ones!

Is Black Phillip actually Satan in The Witch?

Yes, the film shows him speaking, taking human form, and guiding Thomasin’s hand as she signs his book.

Is Thomasin a witch at the End?

Yes, once she signs the book and joins the coven, but she wasn’t one before that moment.

Do Mercy and Jonas die?

The film never shows what happens to them after the witch attacks them in the goat house, so their fate is left open.

What does “live deliciously” mean in The Witch?

It’s the devil’s offer of comfort, pleasure, and freedom, the very things Thomasin’s harsh Puritan life has kept from her.

About the Author.

Hi, I’m Vansh, the founder of Vibe On Cue. I track the absolute best ways to experience cinema, from the biggest Hollywood Blockbusters and upcoming release dates to the finest details of PVOD & Streaming and pristine Blu-ray & 4K physical media. And when the credits roll, I break down the narrative with deep-dive Ending explained guides. If you live for the full life cycle of film, stick around and explore the site!