The Love Witch is a 2016 American horror comedy film that was written and directed by Anna Biller. The film follows the story of Elaine, a modern-day witch and love enthusiast who uses potions and spells to attract and manipulate men. However, her search for love and happiness quickly spirals out of control, resulting in a series of dark and twisted events. In the film, Elaine is portrayed as a mysterious and provocative character, with her iconic 1960s-inspired fashion and beauty. She exudes confidence and sexuality, presenting herself as the epitome of femininity. Through her use of various love spells and potions, she attempts to control the emotions and actions of her chosen partners, creating an artificial sense of love and desire.

The Love Witch: a film about the perversities of desire that will soon be a cult feminist classic

Marion Gibson has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for her work.

Partners

Elaine is a gorgeous witch who has been abandoned by her husband. She tells us that she is looking for new love: she wants a manly man, someone who will be fascinated by her womanly charms (witchy puns intended) but remain the strong, silent type, pay no attention to her needs, and generally treat her as a trophy. A specific and peculiar desire, perhaps, but attainable. This may not sound like the premise for a thought-provoking film about feminism, but Anna Biller’s latest movie, The Love Witch, is just that: and it’s odd, shocking and beautiful to boot.

Elaine (Samantha Robinson) goes out looking for love: seducing a man she meets in the park, ensnaring her neighbour’s husband. But even when she finds what she wants and is appropriately adored, lusted after, and treated as an object, her love affairs tend to end fatally. It quickly becomes clear that “love” is not what she really wants – she seems more interested in power, or exploitation, or revenge. As we follow her on her quest, things get bloody.

But of course, Elaine is not a realistic character, and The Love Witch isn’t about real men and women. Instead, it’s about the pursuit of fantasy, especially unreasonable fantasies of the perfect man or woman. And it’s also heavily influenced by its director’s interest in the pleasures afforded by genre films: the Hammer horror, the 50s romantic comedy, the hey-nonny-nonny musical, the film noir.

By slowing down the action, quoting from lots of classic movies, and making her actors ham up their roles, Biller pushes us beyond the simple story of a lovelorn witch. The audience is encouraged to laugh at the plot and its stereotypes. What we end up with is a sophisticated reflection on the way old films offer us gendered pleasures, especially those involving the square-jawed cop and the soft-focus pussycat.

Even the critical vocabulary The Love Witch conjures up (as you can see) reeks of the mid-20th century, when men were men and women were women, or pretended to be. At times, you expect Cary Grant or Grace Kelly to walk into the frame, smoking without guilt or ash, grimly flirtatious, a walking stereotype of the debonair playboy or the femme fatale. Why, viewers might ask themselves, do we still enjoy these films? What do we get out of looking at these actually quite harmfully unreal heroes and heroines?

This makes The Love Witch sound like a joyless argument for censoring cinema. But in fact it’s the reverse. By all means, it suggests, let’s enjoy the ludicrous gender politics of mid-century Hollywood, so long as we know it’s ludicrous. Let’s play at being Doris Day or Victor Mature or Rock Hudson – after all, they were “playing” themselves in every sense of the word. Let’s pretend we’re fairytale princesses, and knights on white chargers. And, of course, witches.

The film goes all out to help us enjoy playing with these ideas. Its colours and textures are delicious, filled with scarlet lipsticks, creamy cakes, pastel veils and blushing roses. Samantha Robinson, as Elaine, goes from one breath-taking outfit to another, moving between 1955 and 1975 with equally gorgeous results. And the sets that surround her are crammed with design classics: cars, lamps, hats, bags, chairs, rugs that you immediately want to buy on eBay.

But there’s also the odd jam jar of urine, and splash of menstrual blood. Although it is broadly a romp, the film tips delicately from romantic comedy to exploitation horror, quoting every witchcraft film and TV show you could name: The Wicker Man, Charmed, Bewitched, Practical Magic, To the Devil a Daughter, Suspiria, Season of the Witch as well as a host of others.

Interest in witchcraft is at an all-time high in popular culture, with Harry Potter on the one hand and American Horror Story: Coven on the other: one a satisfying empowerment fantasy for children and teenagers, the other an adult festival of sex and violence dramatising female power and the strengths and limitations of sisterhood. The Love Witch is closer to the latter.

But because it’s not tied to a week-by-week suspenseful plot or ratings data, The Love Witch can wander off in absurdist or Brechtian directions whenever Biller wants it to. Bertolt Brecht’s drama aimed to show audiences the political facts behind personal stories, drawing attention to capitalist exploitation by breaking down the audience’s ability to invest in the characters he put in front of them. When characters started singing or directly addressing the audience with political statements, viewers couldn’t hide behind enjoyment of the plot or speculation about their fictional motives, but had to confront bigger economic truths.

The Love Witch works in a similar way at times, although its focus is gender, not economics. The result is that viewers who don’t know what to expect might sometimes be taken aback by sections where the acting is deliberately wooden or the plot is put on hold for a sing-song or a lecture on feminism. But if you know something about mid-20th century theatre, you should be greatly entertained.

There are also reflections on witchcraft as a pagan religion in the film, which will interest contemporary witches, and perhaps enrage some modern pagans. Scenes set in a Wiccan coven suggest that far from liberating women, witchcraft as it was imagined in the 1960s and 1970s simply replicated patriarchal exploitation. Elaine strips and submits to sex with the cult leader in a way that looks more like abuse than empowerment. Her witch friends are creepy pseudo-feminists, and she herself a “bad witch”, trailing madness and death in her wake. This depiction is more about paganism in film than in reality.

The Love Witch is a sophisticated collage of filmic history and as part of that it plays with stereotypes of the witch in popular culture. It’s funny and sad, but above all it is a visual delight and it makes you think. If that sounds like your chalice of hellbroth, then The Love Witch is for you. I enjoyed it, and I suspect before long I’ll be discussing it in the classroom as a cult classic.

Anna Biller on the real witchcraft behind The Love Witch

A glamorous witch, brewing love potions in her apartment. Lantern-jawed police detectives, digging a witch bottle out of a grave. A sinister high priest, coaxing young girls into depravity. And a tea room as pink as Cupid’s bleeding candy heart. These are just some of the evocative, gorgeous, and eerie images in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch.

I watched The Love Witch back in December and was haunted by it for weeks afterward. The film is a lovingly crafted throwback to old exploitation films1 and eye-popping Technicolor visuals. If someone tossed the softcore arthouse erotica of Radley Metzger2 the hippie and drug-panic films of the ’60s, a dash of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and a few Bewitched episodes into a blender, you’d end up with this heady, candy-coloured, and wonderfully strange cinematic elixir.

The Love Witch is the story of Elaine, a placid young woman searching for love in ways that go horribly wrong (her love spells have a pesky tendency to turn fatal). While clearly a work of fiction, the film depicts the occult in a way that feels lived-in and accurate. From the set design to the way Elaine’s coven behaves, The Love Witch feels like the work of someone who’s clearly read a Book of Shadows or two.

I reached out to filmmaker Anna Biller to talk to her about her interest in the occult, her cinematic influences, gender polarity, and the odd cases of synchronicity that popped up during her production.

Ashley Naftule: The first thing I wanted to ask you about was your research process for making The Love Witch. It really looked like you did your homework.

Anna Biller: I tried to do the kind of research that someone would do if they were going to be initiated as a witch. I read everything that I could get my hands on, so I’d really know. At one point, I thought of actually becoming an initiate! It was very time-consuming to do all that reading, and it took me a much longer time to write the script because I kept wanting to know more and needed more for the story.

Was there any particular occult tradition that you drew the most inspiration from, or were you inspired by a mix of different practices?

It was a little bit from multiple sources, but mainly it was Janet and Stewart Farrar, the Gardnerians, and a little bit of Alex Sanders.You’ll notice that there were two rituals in the film; one of them was a Gardnerian ritual, and the other was an Alexandrian one. Because of my own experience with covens, I’ve noticed that sometimes you’ll get a high priest and a high priestess who’ll come from different traditions. That was my thinking for Elaine’s coven — that the priest was Alexandrian and the priestess was Gardnerian and they’d do different rituals.

Were you able to observe or take part of any rituals as part of your research for the movie?

Yeah, I did — I went to some rituals. There are a lot of witches in Los Angeles, where I live, and I knew some witches already. It’s easy to get into rituals there. I also ended up casting a number of real witches as witches without realizing they were witches. I was just casting them to be extras in the coven scenes.

Seriously?

Yeah! A lot of the people in the witch’s circle scene, the nude people, were artist models. But it turns out that a lot of them were also actual practicing witches!

One of the things that struck me about your film was the extraordinary set design. The fact that one person wrote, shot, and designed this film boggles the mind. The level of detail in Elaine’s apartment — it’s such a beautiful creation.

That was important to me, to get the design to feel occult. The idea was that her apartment was originally owned by another witch, so she would have dictated what the design would be. In a film, many of your tools are visual tools, so if you want to say somebody’s a witch, you make their environment look like they’re a witch. Also, the witches I’ve known, they do work in really interesting environments. There are people who have whole apothecaries in their houses!

I’m a visual artist — I started out that way. My house is full of stuff for art-making, so I made a lot of the art in the spirit which I always make stuff for my films. It was really fun for me to make soaps, candles, little herb bags, voodoo dolls, and the rugs. That feels magical. I felt like part of being a witch is crafting your own objects, crafting your tools. There’s something magical in that, cause you put your spirit into it.

In the scene in the burlesque bar, where Elaine is talking to the coven leaders, it made me think of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Witch. Just the way they talk about glamours and using sex as a form of manipulation felt very LaVey. Was that an influence on your script?

That part of the script does come from Anton LaVey; it’s also what I’m trying to say in the movie in general. I’m trying to talk about this kind of double-edged sword of sexuality and glamour for women. Witchcraft is all about gender polarity, especially in the Gardnerian tradition. Elaine’s whole problem is gender polarity; her whole problem is that she can’t make that work for herself. She can’t get a man to balance her.

There’s something about the female polarity that doesn’t work in today’s world very well. People don’t respect it. There was something very sweet about the ’60s — it was the time of the sexual revolution, and people were trying to get gender polarity and sexual equality, but that revolution didn’t work out so well for women. It was a real tragedy that it didn’t because it ended up getting men even more power over women because now they had sexual power as well as social power over them. This is the second movie I’ve made about that subject!

I don’t know if you’ve read any of my reviews, but the critics are having a problem with gender polarity too. Even though the reviews are positive, they’re looking down on the sexuality of my films as something that’s kind of exploitative. That’s how difficult it is to get any kind of respect for female sexuality now- the fact that even if you put that as the content of your script, that it’ll get misunderstood, even if you explicitly make the text about it.

The LaVey viewpoint you present is fascinating, because it comes from both a man and a woman in the film.

It’s interesting because it sounds one way coming out of the high priest’s mouth and another coming from the high priestess. When I wrote that part, I didn’t write it for any gender. What I did was break it up so they could take turns speaking. So when he speaks, he sounds demonic, like he’s just trying to get girls and groom them for sex. And when she said it, it sounded empowering.

The manipulative, out-for-sex high priest felt very true to life, unfortunately.

That’s a little bit of a problem with covens. You’ve got these innocent women coming into it, who are getting into it for spiritual reasons and not realizing there may be predators involved in that world. I was just trying to make it as realistic as possible in terms of what can happen. Because the way men are — if you’re dealing with female sexuality and you’re trying to make it equal and goddess-like and wonderful, but they’re naked and having sex there, they will get exploited because of the way men are.

Reading some of the other interviews, you’ve done for this movie, I was surprised to hear that you didn’t intend to make the setting of the movie feel retro or ambiguous, regarding its time period. I was really surprised by that, cause watching the movie I felt like that timelessness was a very deliberate choice.

What happened was that I made a few other period films, and that’s how my style’s developed: to light and shoot things a certain way to create a period feeling. I tried not to do it this time, but I didn’t succeed. It’s partially because of the lighting that I like, which people just don’t use anymore: that hot, high-key lighting that makes it look like an older film. Even if you shot it digitally, it would look like an old film. ((Emma Myers, “The Love Witch Is a Seductive Revenge Movie for the Heartbroken.” Elle.com, 30 December 2016, and Samantha Robinson “I’m actually trying to create a film for women: Anna Biller on the Love Witch,” Filmmaker Magazine, 23 June 2016.))

I used new cars in the movie from the beginning, so I thought people would understand that it’s taking place now. But because we’re using rear-projection, high-key lighting, and the way the actors are using the space and how they speak… it reads as not being modern.

Speaking of the actors: They seemed to have a mannered, stilted way of talking. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though. The actor who played Griff seemed like he was straight out of a Dragnet rerun. Did you direct them to do that?

What’s weird is that was all in the casting. I just found these people – that’s how that guy actually is!

So, it was like a Robert Bresson thing, where they’re not acting so much as just being themselves?

That’s absolutely it. Isn’t it great? I didn’t train those actors. They read the script; I didn’t tell them anything about it being a period piece, I didn’t tell them about a style. That’s just who they are. ((Wikipedia, “Robert Bresson,” last updated 27 January 2017.))

Going back to the occult: I just have two more questions. I was wondering if occult filmmakers like Kenneth Anger or Maya Deren had any influence on your work?

Definitely Kenneth Anger. He was a big influence for the movie in terms of the visual world I was trying to create. I was trying to make it feel magical. His films are the only example I could find of magick just coming from the visuals itself, the feeling of magick being created in what you’re looking at.

In your past interviews, you talked about how you weren’t a magical practitioner before making The Love Witch, but how through your research and experiences you’ve come to become a part of that world. So I wanted to ask what your current experience with magick, and whether or not you’re still practicing.

Here’s the thing — I need to work a lot on myself. What happened when I started doing spells was that they were all dark spells. The only time I felt the urge to do a spell was when it was a negative spell. So, until I can work on myself and do more positive energy spells… That’s where I gravitated towards – I think I’ve got a lot of anger and things that I need to work out. It feels like that magick put me in a dark place. In that sense, it makes me feel like Elaine. She’s trying to do these positive spells to gain love, but they’re really destructive spells because that’s what her energy really is.

1. For more on the occult and the exploitation genre, check out Hathormetic’s post “Iconic occult documentaries of the ’70s.” [↩]
2. Wikipedia, “Radley Metzger.” [↩]

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The Love Witch (2016) Ending Explained

The Love Witch is a 2016 American horror movie that follows the story of a Witch who hypnotizes men to have sexual relationships with her. The ending explanation for the film is that it is an allegory for the power of love.

Through her use of various love spells and potions, she attempts to control the emotions and actions of her chosen partners, creating an artificial sense of love and desire. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Elaine's actions are driven by her own insecurities and the deeply ingrained societal expectations of women. She believes that true love can only be achieved through the complete submission and devotion of a man.

Where To Watch?

You can watch or get the movie from here.

This misguided belief leads her down a dangerous path, as she becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the perfect partner. The film not only explores the themes of love, desire, and power but also provides a critical commentary on gender roles and expectations. It challenges traditional notions of femininity and exposes the toxic effects of societal pressure on women. Elaine's pursuit of love and the lengths she is willing to go to achieve it ultimately lead to the destruction of those around her, serving as a cautionary tale about the dangers of obsession and manipulation. The Love Witch is visually stunning, with every aspect meticulously crafted to resemble classic Technicolor films of the 1960s. The vibrant colors, elaborate set designs, and attention to detail create a surreal and mesmerizing atmosphere that pays homage to the era it draws inspiration from. In conclusion, The Love Witch is a thought-provoking and visually captivating film that delves into the complexities of love, femininity, and power. It serves as a commentary on societal expectations and the dangers of manipulation and obsession. With its unique style and engaging narrative, the film leaves viewers with much to ponder and discuss..

Reviews for "Queer Perspectives in The Love Witch: A Closer Look"

- Sarah - 2/5 stars - I was really looking forward to watching "Love Witch Explained" because I am a big fan of psychological thrillers. However, I was sorely disappointed. The plot felt convoluted and the characters were poorly developed. I couldn't connect with any of them, which made it hard for me to invest in the story. The pacing was also off, with some scenes dragging on unnecessarily. Overall, I felt like this movie lacked substance and failed to deliver the promised explanation of the love witch.

- John - 1/5 stars - "Love Witch Explained" was a complete waste of my time. The storyline was confusing and I had a hard time understanding what was happening. The acting was also subpar, with minimal emotions and wooden performances. The special effects were laughable and made the movie feel cheap. Additionally, the dialogue was cringe-worthy and often felt forced. I would not recommend this film to anyone who appreciates a well-crafted and engaging movie.

- Emily - 2/5 stars - I had high hopes for "Love Witch Explained" as I am a fan of supernatural movies. However, this film fell flat for me. The execution of the plot was lackluster, with predictable twists and turns. The character development was also shallow, making it hard for me to care about anyone in the story. The pacing was slow and the movie dragged on, which made it difficult to maintain my interest. Overall, I found this movie to be underwhelming and didn't live up to my expectations.

The Love Witch: Examining the Power Dynamics in Relationships