In the beginning of 2016, Robert Eggers’ The Witch confounded audiences with its slow, not particularly scary take on “a New England Folktale.” In that film, a young woman faces the tyranny of religious and familial oppression in early Puritan New England while also trying to avoid the very-real menace from the film’s title. Different in almost every way, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015) seems at first like a sports movie, as it follows a young woman who switches from boxing training to a competitive dance squad housed in the same community center in modern day Cincinnati. Soon, though, the film’s real genre takes hold as women in the crew start to experience mysterious seizures that scare the other members of the squad. Neither film will inspire any screams of terror nor will any viewers’ hearts likely start racing except in appreciation for excellent filmmaking, though both films have terrifically creepy scores and feature some standard horror scenes. What patient audiences will discover, especially if they watch the two films as a double feature, is their shared examination of puberty’s perils for young women when they grow up in places where they are not allowed to be their full selves.

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