The Love Witch is an underrated horror satire about, to borrow from Indie Wire, “a serial killer who thinks of herself as the star of a rom-com.” Elaine dreams about a gallant man who will sweep her off her feet and will give her eternal devotion, however, as men obsess over her, she gets rid of them, one by one.
Satanic cults, love potions made with menstrual blood, majestic costume design, and overall impeccable aesthetics — The Love Witch is visually stunning and whip-smart, contending with some of the best women-oriented comedies. Since there is a spark of interest in rebooting old Hollywood classics with feminist twists, perhaps the curiosity for this hidden gem will rekindle, as it definitely deserves public attention.
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A subversive look at the femme fatale trope and 60s horror that refuses to be preachy or woke for the sake of being woke, The Love Witch is a rollercoaster from start to finish, a loaded but indisputably fun watch.
Retro Chic Aesthetics of The Love Witch
Oscilloscope Laboratories
The Love Witch follows a young enchantress named Elaine (a truly bewitching breakthrough performance by Samantha Robinson) on her wild hunt for the perfect man in a coastal Californian town. American Horror Story does Lana Del Rey, and the result is Elaine, as dazzling as she is self-absorbed. As the movie opens, we see her driving, dressed as an impeccable 60s doll, including a babydoll dress, a beehive, and blue eyeshadow color blocking the eyelids. The scene emulates the era of Silver Age glamour, referencing the beginning of Hitchcock’s The Birds with perspective and a rear projection.
The set design has been meticulously controlled by the film’s director Anna Biller, with many pieces, like paintings at Elaine’s home, created by herself. Her attention to detail was one of the reasons why the movie took seven years to make. With retro chic aesthetics in mind, Biller painstakingly worked on creating an authentic visual, down to using patterns and colors particularly associated with the 1960s, as well as giving the final image its velvety démodé feel.
As a consequence, The Love Witch is not just a period piece set in the 60s. In fact, it is set in the modern time period. The film’s passé flair is a style of cinematography. Biller conjures a mix of old techniques and modern perspectives, and this concoction is magical. The Love Witch is an extravagantly stylized pocket universe that feels both faithfully reminiscent of the time and peculiarly anachronistic.
Femme Fatale Through the Female Gaze
In feminist film theory, ‘the male gaze’ is a part of an essentials kit. It is a term coined by Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in regards to how in the movie industry, where men exclusively are the creators and consumers, women are the objects and never the subjects. Female characters are often reduced to romantic interests or sexual objects for the male characters and by extension for the spectator, i.e. the viewer.
The femme fatale is an old archetype, but it really found its home in classic film noir. A femme fatale is dangerous because she defies male dominance and focuses on her own desires. The man tries to regain control over the dangerous woman, fix her, and return her to ‘normal.’ If a femme fatale rejects the ‘good side,’ she strays further from humanity, and thus loses her chance for sympathy and happiness. She is punished, often even killed.
The Love Witch is an attempt to construct this archetype through the female gaze. Witchcraft is used as a metaphor for lipstick feminism and the notorious sexual empowerment discourse. Biller wanted to explore the refusal for dialogue: if someone tries to point out the shortcomings of the sex-positive feminist movement, they are quickly labeled as a right-wing prude. Through its Wiccan coven episodes, The Love Witch imagines liberal feminism that at its basis serves patriarchal exploitation. Jyn Arro writes: “The Wiccan High Priestess, Barbara, is simultaneously delivering a deluded feminist manifesto that explains how female sexuality has been stifled and weaponized against them and proclaims women must reclaim their inner goddess as a means by which to achieve true equality with men.” The baseline is that to become a witch (to be a true feminist goddess), Elaine must sleep with the cult leader.
Elaine is, by the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “the woman in love” who “having no basis to form her own identity separate from her relationships … seeks subjectivity through the eyes of another, in this case, her romantic partner.” According to this existentialist theory, Elaine’s performance for men reduces her to being-for-others rather than a being-in-itself; therefore, she lives out an inauthentic experience. Her quest for love is doomed from the start.
The Love Witch and the Exploitation Genre
In her interview with The Guardian, Biller emphasized that reviving the exploitation genre of the 60s is not her goal. While many citing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as her inspiration, she vehemently rejects such assessments: “I just don’t really have a connection to exploitation, because I see it just as a precursor to pornography. I am in conversation with the pornography that’s all around us.”
Her work is then not a celebration per se, not even a critique really, just a reimagination in order to reclaim certain archetypes and tropes. Biller says to The Spectatorial: “While I am quoting genres, I am using them not as a pastiche, but to create a sense of aesthetic arrest and to insert a female point of view."
The Love Witch is an ingenious amalgam of the film noir, the Hammer horror, the 50s romantic comedy, and even the hey-nonny-nonny musical, drawing references from a range of texts such as witchcraft TV shows like Bewitched and Charmed, from psychosexual folk horror like The Wicker Man and Suspiria to witchy-woman rom-coms like Practical Magic and The Witches of Eastwick. This film exists at the intersection of two of the three ’lowest’ genres, incorporating major elements from the third one: horror, melodrama, and pornography — and is witty about it.
In the end, The Love Witch does not provide viewers with an answer but a comprehensive grasp of the intricate complexities of agency. Viewers can see Elaine as a girlboss who does whatever she likes. On the other hand, The Love Witch points out the problematic performative aspect of empowerment rhetoric and how her fantasies keep her from any genuine relationship.
