Long before the events of Snow White and The Huntsman, the Ice Queen Freya (Blunt) suffers a broken heart and flees her kingdom. Freya, who has the power to freeze her enemies (cough – Frozen – cough), spends the next few decade of her exile raising a legion of deadly Huntsmen in the hopes of one day being able to build a kingdom of her own. Her Huntsmen are skilled, feared and, above all, disciplined. That is, until two of them – Eric (Hemsworth) and Sara (Chastain) – fall in love, defying Freya’s number one rule, and must face the dire consequences for doing so.

Flashing forward, Freya is enraged to learn of the demise of her sister – the Evil Queen Ravenna (Theron) – at the hands of Snow White and The Huntsman at the conclusion of the previous film. In retaliation, Freya summons her remaining soldiers to bring the Magic Mirror to her in an attempt to resurrect Ravenna, so that she may once again rule the lands.

Unsurprisingly, after the former film’s leading lady Kristen Stewart was caught in an affair with its director, the two were not asked back for this film. But no matter – as this prequel/spin-off/sequel of sorts is just as epic and ambitious as ever in the hands of Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, making his directorial debut after serving as visual effects supervisor and second unit director on the first film. Expect a dark fantasy action-adventure tale with epic battles, forbidden love and Thor’s gravelly voice and abs back in the mix!

The modern horror genre began with “Dracula” – which saw Bram Stoker take monsters from the past, which the world thought it was done with, and unleash them on the present. Horror films have been mining that vein ever since, so consistently that there’s now something special to be gained by taking a modern-style horror movie and setting it in the past again. That’s the monsters’ home ground: it’s where they belong, where they’re strongest. Dracula lost only because he was up against modern Londoners; he’d had an unbroken run of success preying on backward peasants.

The Witch gives its characters no such advantage. It’s set in a New England homestead in the 1630s, where a Puritan family are farming on the very edge of civilisation. One day their infant child mysteriously – impossibly – vanishes, their crops start to fail, and that’s not the half of the creepiness. It seems they have been cursed, and one of them must be a witch – so on top of everything else, they start to turn on each other. There’s no respite, no escape from the constant fear – and none for us, either.

The cast, all compellingly frightened and utterly convincing as people born 400 or more years ago, will be refreshingly new to you – assuming you’re one of the few people left in the world not to have seen “Game of Thrones”. (If so, drop me a line; it’s lonely here.)