A24’s Empire of Auteurs

In November of 2015, the upstart film studio A24 had a problem. Executives had acquired the writer-director Robert Eggers’s stark, unsettling début, “The Witch,” at the Sundance Film Festival and wanted to make it their first release to open on thousands of screens. But both Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred as a teen-ager tempted by unholy forces, were then unknown.