MAY 16: The Love Witch

 

           Some of my favorite movies from this lineup have been movies that I underestimated, movies that I expected to be dated or dull but instead rocked my world. The Love Witch was never going to be that. From the moment I saw the marketing material for this auteur gem, I knew it was a movie for me. And sure enough, I watched it, and it was a movie for me! Great when things work out like that, huh?

            The Love Witch is the story of young and beautiful Elaine Parks. After her shitty husband left her, the heartbroken Elaine needed to turn her life around. Like Joanie in Season of the Witch before her, Elaine turned to witchcraft. The movie begins as she yeets out of San Francisco to hang out with her witchy friends in small town California. Elaine has a very simple goal; she wants a man to love her, and she’s willing to use a little love magic to make that happen. But soon her string of unsatisfying paramours start dropping dead, and the town turns against Elaine.

            The Love Witch’s real draw isn’t its plot, which is slight but satisfying, but its artistry, which is breathtaking. There’s been a trend lately of movies and television that style themselves after the ‘80s, which can be a lot of fun, but The Love Witch, more eclectic in its stylings, is something more. When a movie goes all out to achieve its vision, it’s something very special, a cinematic fantasy world you feel like you could just crawl inside. Director Anna Biller, who also wrote, produced, edited, and scored the film, shot on 35mm using a technicolor palette. Every inch of the film – from the compositions of each and every shot, to the elaborate sets, to the drool-worthy costumes, to Elaine’s immaculate makeup – feel plucked uncannily from a candy-colored past, an exploitation film with an old Hollywood budget and aesthetic. It feels like the kind of movie I always wished existed, recreated with great care and love. The Love Witch isn’t set in the past – characters make cell phone calls and drive modern cars – but it creates a past-present hybrid, a feverish heightened reality. The 1960s can be a neglected decade for horror – pre-slasher but post-bug-eyed-monsters, before independent cinema took off and in-between Hollywood’s big horror moments. The Love Witch gives the ‘60s an homage without ever feeling slavish or derivative and makes me want to dig into the decade’s offerings, though I know I won’t find anything as special as this.

Hard to not just include every single frame of this gorgeous film

            But just like its heroine, The Love Witch isn’t just a pretty face. It’s also a cutting satire of gender roles and male gaze fantasies. Witchcraft isn’t perfect liberation for Elaine. Her coven is led by sleazy Gahan, who just loves teaching sex magic and kissing his female disciples, and who Elaine visible disdains. Gahan and his partner-in-witchery, Barbara, preach the inherent differences of men and women, the value of “polarity,” and the importance of women’s beauty. Elaine is like a Cosmo advice column on acid, dispensing advice on how to please a man with an eerie monotone and a smile. She is at once naïve, longing for fairy tales and affection, and sinister, ruthlessly intent on her quest to be loved. As Anna Biller puts it in a delightful tweet, Elaine “ADORES dressing up and wearing a wig; she LOVES being a man's stereotypical fantasy; she's just not that crazy about the MEN.” Indeed, Elaine sheds no tears when her lovers die but calmly, respectfully buries them. Death doesn’t bother her. Her men are interchangeable, disposable. They lose their minds around her; Elaine keeps perfect composure.

            The contrast between Elaine’s deadpan and her boyfriends’ mental collapse is one of the film’s great comic set pieces. It’s not your typical horror comedy, but it is immensely funny. Imbued with camp, from the coven’s rituals to the lacy Victoriana tearoom Elaine patronizes to the deliciously sleazy burlesque shows, the loving absurdity is funnier than most jokes. Everyone speaks like they’re in porn, which is kind of amazing. And Elaine has a perfect voiceover, where she sounds half like a poised and witchy influencer and half like an earnest journaler. It’s hard to say what makes this movie just so funny, but it hit my sense of humor just right.

            Elaine is the gorgeous, dangerous love interest you always wish would get more screen time, here rendered with interiority and depth. She is intentional artifice, a captivating self-construction, and in this movie, form follows function. The Love Witch is a luscious candy box of visuals. It’s safe to say there’s nothing like it. Just like Elaine, it’s the complete package – smart, sexy, funny, and dangerous.

Don't mess with the Love Witch (or her perfect apartment) 

Vibecheck: A TCM fever dream with a tarot card color scheme.

Scare Factor: Be assured, this movie features very few frights. I should note though, and I guess I might as well note it here, that there are a few brief scenes of threatened or implied sexual violence.

Pairs Well With: It’s not ~quite~ the same genre, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of Barbarella, another movie with an idealized woman working her way through a pile unpleasant dudes, without the interiority and the commentary. And if you squint, you could view this as a sequel to Season of the Witch, what with the similar black masses and blue eyeshadow.

But how gay is it?: A campy and misandrist satire in which heterosexuality looks not terribly appealing, this movie has that it factor that can only be called queerness

Girlfriend’s Corner: What I saw of this looked extraordinary and I’m very sad that I had to tend to dinner instead of watching it through with Sara! I really appreciate it when “stylized horror movie” doesn’t mean, like, Tarantino-style referential hyperviolence, but rather something way more interesting, like it does here.