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The Love Witch

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The Love Witch
Theatrical release poster
Directed byAnna Biller
Written byAnna Biller
Produced byAnna Biller
Starring
CinematographyM. David Mullen
Edited byAnna Biller
Music byAnna Biller
Production
company
Anna Biller Productions
Distributed byOscilloscope Laboratories
Release dates
  • January 31, 2016 (2016-01-31) (IFFR)
  • November 11, 2016 (2016-11-11) (United States)
Running time
120 minutes[1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$258,576[2]

The Love Witch is a 2016 American comedy horror film written, edited, directed, produced, and scored by Anna Biller. The film stars Samantha Robinson as Elaine Parks, a modern-day witch who uses spells and magic to get men to fall in love with her with disastrous results. Shot in Los Angeles and Arcata, California, it premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.[3][4] In May 2016, it was acquired for distribution at the Cannes Marché du Film by Oscilloscope Laboratories.[5][6]

The film received a limited theatrical release in the United States on November 11, 2016.[7] The Love Witch was shot on 35 mm film, and printed from an original cut negative.[8] The film was acclaimed by critics for its playful tribute to 1960s horror and Technicolor films, combined with its serious inquiry into contemporary gender roles.[9][10] In 2021, Robinson's portrayal of Elaine in the film was included on The New Yorker's list of the best film performances of the 21st century.[11]

Plot

[edit]

Elaine Parks, a beautiful young witch, is driving to Arcata , California for a fresh start in a town that tolerates witchcraft. Her husband Jerry has recently died, and it's heavily implied she may have murdered him.

Elaine rents an apartment in a Victorian building owned her mentor Barbara and maintained by the interior decorator, Trish Manning. In an attempt to befriend Elaine, Trish invites her to a Victorian ladies only tea room where they're surprised by a visit from Trish's husband Richard, who is immediately besotted with Elaine.

In the hopes of attracting a new lover, Elaine performs a ritual. She soon meets Wayne, a local professor. Wayne accepts Elaine's offer to cook him dinner, and they travel to his cabin. Elaine encourages him to drink a concoction of hallucinogens. She seduces him with a dance, and they have sex.

Wayne becomes emotional and delirious, which repulses Elaine.

The next morning Wayne has died, and Elaine buries him along with a witch bottle containing her urine, and a used tampon.

When Trish heads out of town for a few days, Elaine seizes the opportunity to seduce Richard.

She prepares another concoction, and seduces him with a dance after surmising he wants to have a sordid love affair. They have sex, and Elaine eventually breaks things off as Richard becomes clingy and emotional.

Unbeknownst to Elaine, Wayne has been reported missing. Officer Griff Meadows and his partner Steve travel to Wayne's cabin and discover his body, and the witch bottle which leads them to Elaine.

Griff initially expresses a low opinion of witchcraft but seems to soften after speaking with Elaine. Drawn in by her beauty and sex appeal, he invites her to join him horseback riding.

They come across a midsummer solstice festival held by members of a renaissance and medieval society, who are also the leaders of Elaine's coven. They propose a mock wedding to honour the gods of love, and Elaine and Griff are quickly dressed in fanciful costumes.A handfasting ceremony is performed and they're gifted matching rings.

Elaine's thoughts are consumed by her love for Griff, while his show he isn't in love, intending only to marry for real in the future when he's ready to have children.

Unable to go on, a morose Richard kills himself in the bathtub and is discovered by Trish. Devastated, Trish seeks comfort from Elaine and invites her to the tea room. Trish believes Richard had an affair, and the unknown woman drove him to suicide. Elaine appears apathetic, instead gushing about Griff. She shows Trish her ring, referring to it as her magic ring. Trish tries it on, and Elaine leaves without realising Trish is still wearing it.

Trish decides to leave it inside Elaine's apartment. Finding it empty, she tries on Elaine's wig, makeup, and lingerie. Perhaps in an attempt to understand the power over men Elaine seems to have that Trish feels she herself lacks. She discovers a shrine of Elaine's dead lovers, Richard being one. Elaine returns and is attacked by Trish who swears she'll burn for what she's done, leaving with evidence tying Elaine to Richard.

Much to Steve's ire, Griff states that their boss ordered they leave the witches alone, and drop the case. Steve queries the devil's weed in Wayne's system, and Griff responds that Wayne was known to experiment, and it was growing near his cabin. Steve reveals Elaine's ex-husband Jerry died of an overdose despite no prior history of drug use, and accuses Griff of letting his feelings cloud his judgement. Griff punches Steve, and storms off.

Later, Elaine meets Griff at the cabaret. Despite her earlier allure, he is unwilling to let her go unpunished. Due to the witch bottle the police have DNA evidence linking her to both Wayne and Richard, as well as items linking her to Richards suicide. Elaine claims she simply buried Wayne in line with her religious customs after a beautiful night of love making. Other patrons overhear the exchange, and attempt to sexually assault Elaine while chanting "burn the witch". Griff fights off the would-be attackers, and they flee.

At the apartment, Elaine presents Griff with a concoction and he promptly tosses the goblet to the floor. Elaine shrinks back, unable to comprehend his rejection. She sees a vision of her past lovers/victims confessing their love, and calmly retrieves an athame. Elaine stabs an unsuspecting Griff multiple times, mirroring a painting on her wall depicting a naked woman holding a dagger and the heart of a man who lies dead beneath her, an overturned goblet at his side.

Clutching the bloody athame to her chest she smiles, imagining the mock wedding. In her delusion Griff declares his love, and proposes, leading her away astride a unicorn.

Cast

[edit]
  • Samantha Robinson as Elaine Parks
  • Gian Keys as Griff Meadows
  • Laura Waddell as Trish
  • Jeffrey Vincent Parise as Wayne Peters
  • Jared Sanford as Gahan
  • Robert Seeley as Richard
  • Jennifer Ingrum as Barbara
  • Randy Evans as Steve
  • Clive Ashborn as Professor King
  • Lily Holleman as Shelley Curtis
  • Stephen Wozniak as Jerry
  • Elle Evans as Star
  • Fair Micaela Griffin as Moon

Themes

[edit]

The Love Witch uses the figure of the witch as a metaphor for women in general, as both an embodiment of men's fears of women, and of women's own innate powers of intuition and as mothers and sorceresses.[12] The lead character of the film is a young woman who uses magic to make men love her. Her character is an examination of the femme fatale archetype.[13] The film embraces the camp of 1960s horror,[14] examining issues of love, desire, and narcissism through a feminist perspective.[15] Anna Biller is a feminist filmmaker whose take on cinema is influenced by feminist film theory.[16]

Production

[edit]

While writing the script for The Love Witch, Biller had been reading relationship self-help books, and one particular piece of advice that stuck out to her was that if a woman wants to keep a man around, she should love him less than he loves her. She noticed a parallel between this advice and the female characters in classic cinema who love someone to death, such as Ellen in Leave Her to Heaven, so she decided to create the character Elaine in that same vein.[17] Biller also studied witchcraft as research for the film, including trying her own witchcraft practice, and ended up decorating Elaine's apartment with colors from the Thoth tarot deck.[18]

Casting for the film involved a typical audition process, and Biller has said that the most difficult role to fill was that of Trish. Even though she didn't intend for an English actress to play that role, she couldn't find any Americans who were right for it.

Biller chose Samantha Robinson for the lead role because she thought Robinson was "very poised and very self-possessed and she [had] a particular quality to her that’s very different from most people nowadays".[19] After Robinson accepted the role, she and Biller watched a series of classic movies featuring women with "great sociopathic performance". The two collaborated closely to develop the character of Elaine so that Robinson's own personality could shape the character, and after this workshop period Biller rewrote parts of the script to adjust for their discoveries.[20]

Filming took place on a sound stage for two weeks, and then on specific locations for the rest of the shoot, including Eureka, California.[21] The tea room scenes were shot in the Herald Examiner Building in Los Angeles.[22]

The film is highly stylized with elaborate set and costume design and a color palette to match the aesthetic of a 1960s Technicolor film.[23][24][25][26] Although the film emulates a 1960s look, the story is set in the present day and features modern cars and mobile phones.[27] One of Biller's stated goals is to bring "female glamor" back to films, and she believes that including stylish, detailed sets and props will fulfill women's fantasies rather than men's, and give viewers more to look at on screen, rather than focusing their attention on the female characters as sexual objects.[28] Anna Biller designed the sets and costumes to emulate the style of classic Hollywood films,[29] a years-long process that involved searching for the necessary vintage furniture at salvage stores or creating it herself if she couldn't find one. For example, it took Biller 6 months to make Elaine's pentagram rug from scratch.[30] Costume design was treated the same way: Biller found vintage pieces that worked well for the film, such as Gunne Sax dresses from the '60s and '70s, but many important pieces she had to make herself. In some cases, she found vintage clothing with fabric in colors that isn't sold anymore to rebuild as needed, in other cases she made pieces from scratch. She spent over a year working full-time designing and building the Renaissance costumes for the mock wedding scene.[31]

She also collaborated closely with her cinematographer M. David Mullen, who is an expert on period cinematography and who has been nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards,[32] to create the hard lighting style characteristic of Classic Hollywood films.[33][34] Diffusion filters were used on the lens for certain close up shots, and a special kaleidoscope lens was used for drug trip sequence.[21] For the driving scenes, rear projection photography was used to give glamour to the lead actress, and in tribute to the opening of the Hitchcock film The Birds.[35]

The actors also played their parts in a classic presentational acting style, with lead actress Samantha Robinson receiving accolades for her stylized performance.[36][37]

The Love Witch is one of the last films to cut an original camera negative on 35 mm film.[38] It was the only new (non-repertory) feature film presented at the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam on 35 mm film.[39]

Reception

[edit]

Critical response

[edit]

The Love Witch received universal acclaim. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 95% based on 114 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "The Love Witch offers an absorbing visual homage to a bygone era, arranged subtly in service of a thought-provoking meditation on the battle of the sexes."[40] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 82 out of 100, based on 27 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". The film is listed as a "Metacritic must-see".[41]

In a review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote, "Ms. Biller's movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly colored surface. What's underneath is marvelously dark, like love itself."[42]

The Love Witch is listed at number 41 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the Top 100 Horror Movies.[43] It also made Rolling Stone's list of the top 10 Horror Movies of 2016,[44] The New Yorker's list of the Best Movies of 2016,[45] and IndieWire's list of The Best Movies of 2016.[25]

Accolades

[edit]

The Love Witch won in a tie for the Trailblazer Award and Best Costume Design at the Chicago Indie Critics Awards,[46] and also won the Michael Cimino Best Film Award at the American Independent Film Awards.[47] The Dublin Film Critics' Circle awarded M. David Mullen Best Cinematography for The Love Witch.[48] Samantha Robinson was nominated for Best Actress for the 2017 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards for her performance as Elaine,[49] and Emma Willis was nominated for the Technical Achievement Award for her hair and makeup on the film by the London Film Critics' Circle.[50] In a New York Times editorial, A. O. Scott mentioned Biller as worthy of receiving an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Love Witch.[51]

References

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  1. ^ "The Love Witch (15)". British Board of Film Classification. Retrieved June 6, 2017.
  2. ^ "The Love Witch (2016)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved September 16, 2024.
  3. ^ Sims, Hank (June 14, 2015). "'Love Witch' Film Crew Invades Arcata Plaza". Lost Coast Outpost. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  4. ^ "The Love Witch". International Film Festival Rotterdam. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  5. ^ McNary, Dave (May 18, 2016). "Cannes: Oscilloscope Buys Anna Biller's 'The Love Witch'". Variety. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  6. ^ Erbland, Kate (May 18, 2016). "Oscilloscope Laboratories Picks Up Anna Biller's Spellbinding 'The Love Witch' – Exclusive". IndieWire. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  7. ^ DiClaudio, Dennis (October 22, 2016). "The Love Witch coming to theaters, won't tolerate your talking and texting". The A.V. Club. Retrieved April 10, 2019.
  8. ^ Biller, Anna (January 30, 2016). "The Death of Film". Anna Biller's Blog. Retrieved June 26, 2018 – via Blogspot.
  9. ^ Anders, Allison (January 11, 2017). "Fear of the Female Planet, or Why I Love The Love Witch". Talkhouse. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  10. ^ Walter, Brian (January 9, 2017). "THE LOVE WITCH: A Heady Brew". Film Inquiry. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  11. ^ Brody, Richard (March 6, 2021). "The Best Movie Performances of the 21st Century So Far". The New Yorker.
  12. ^ Feinblatt, Scott (April 4, 2016). "Sinister Seven: Anna Biller casts a spell on men in 'The Love Witch'". Rue Morgue. Archived from the original on July 26, 2017. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  13. ^ de Voogd, Barend. "Shocking News Interview with Anna Biller". Anna Biller Productions. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  14. ^ Pickett, Leah (June 2016). "The Love Witch". Chicago Reader. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  15. ^ Lucca, Violet (November 2016). ""Review: The Love Witch"". Film Comment. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  16. ^ Kreul, James (March 18, 2016). "Categorical Buzz: The Big Indies at 2016 Wisconsin Film Festival". Madison Film Forum. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  17. ^ "Behind-the-scenes". The Love Witch (Video). Oscilloscope. 2016. Event occurs at 0:07. Retrieved July 26, 2020 – via iTunes.
  18. ^ "The Love Witch's Plush Female Gaze". 25YL. January 11, 2022. Retrieved January 11, 2022.
  19. ^ Rife, Katie (March 17, 2017). "Director Anna Biller on the radical pleasures and subversive politics of The Love Witch". The A.V. Club. Retrieved July 26, 2020.
  20. ^ Macfarlane, Steve (June 23, 2016). ""I'm Actually Trying to Create a Film for Women": Anna Biller on The Love Witch". Filmmaker. Retrieved July 26, 2020.
  21. ^ a b Mullen, M. David (November 1, 2016). "The Magic of Hard Lighting for The Love Witch". American Cinematographer. Retrieved July 26, 2020.
  22. ^ Sarvady, Rebecca (March 27, 2017). "Director Anna Biller Talks Female Fantasy, Religion and The Love Witch". Paste. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  23. ^ Olsen, Mark (June 3, 2016). "Indie Focus: the Los Angeles Film Festival, 'Chevalier' and 'Popstar' keep the summer moving". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  24. ^ Alexander, Chris (April 4, 2016). "Review: Anna Biller's THE LOVE WITCH". ComingSoon.net. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  25. ^ a b Ehrlich, David (November 8, 2016). "'The Love Witch' Review: Anna Biller's Technicolor Throwback Is a Spellbinding Feminist Delight". IndieWire. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  26. ^ Collins, Sean T. (February 14, 2017). "This Valentine's Day, Watch The Love Witch". Vulture. Archived from the original on June 27, 2018. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  27. ^ Kaltenbach, Chris (May 9, 2016). "Dispatches from Maryland Film Festival: Sunday silent film is exhilaratingly odd". The Baltimore Sun. Archived from the original on June 27, 2018. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  28. ^ "Behind-the-scenes". The Love Witch (Video). Oscilloscope. 2016. Event occurs at 9:22. Retrieved July 26, 2020 – via iTunes.
  29. ^ "Love Witch, The". Maryland Film Festival. Archived from the original on August 9, 2016. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  30. ^ Turner, Gustavo (November 10, 2016). "L.A.-Bred Filmmaker Anna Biller Made a Witchy Retro Masterpiece That Straight Guys Will Misread". LA Weekly. Retrieved July 26, 2020.
  31. ^ Miller, Jenni (November 16, 2016). "This Retro Horror Movie Has the Sexiest Costumes You'll See All Year". The Cut. Retrieved July 26, 2020.
  32. ^ "ASC Close-Up: M. David Mullen, ASC". American Cinematographer. March 2006. ISSN 0002-7928. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  33. ^ "Shoot 35mm Film for a Vintage Technicolor Look [Tutorial]". Studio Daily. Access Intelligence. January 31, 2017. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  34. ^ Gelmini, David (April 21, 2016). "Exclusive: Director Anna Biller Talks The Love Witch". Dread Central. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  35. ^ MacFarlane, Steve. "Episode 74: The Love Witch". The American Society of Cinematographers. Archived from the original on February 24, 2017. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  36. ^ "The Great Performances of 2016". Balder & Dash. December 19, 2016. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  37. ^ Wixson, Heather (December 22, 2016). ""2016: A Landmark Year for Female Horror Performances"". Daily Dead. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  38. ^ Brody, Richard (May 9, 2016). "The State of Independent Film in 2016". The New Yorker. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  39. ^ "5 x 35mm". International Film Festival Rotterdam. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  40. ^ "The Love Witch". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  41. ^ "The Love Witch". Metacritic. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  42. ^ Scott, A. O. (November 17, 2016). "Review: 'The Love Witch,' Hell-Bent on Capturing Your Heart". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 28, 2018. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  43. ^ "Top 100 Horror Movies". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
  44. ^ Bramesco, Charles; Tobias, Scott; Grierson, Tim; Collins, Sean T.; Kern, Laura (December 15, 2016). "The Best Horror Movies of 2016". Rolling Stone. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  45. ^ Brody, Richard (December 9, 2016). "The Best Movies of 2016". The New Yorker. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  46. ^ Jevens, Darel (January 8, 2017). "Top Chicago Critics Circle awards go to 'Moonlight,' 'La La Land'". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  47. ^ Raup, Jordan (February 19, 2017). "'Krisha' Sweeps the Inaugural American Independent Film Awards". The Film Stage. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  48. ^ Clarke, Donald (February 26, 2017). "The DFCC Awards at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival". The Irish Times. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  49. ^ "Never mind Oscar, here's the 2017 FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards Nominees Ballot!". Fangoria. February 7, 2017. Archived from the original on July 29, 2017. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  50. ^ Lodge, Guy (December 19, 2017). "'Three Billboards,' 'Phantom Thread' Lead London Critics' Circle Nominations". Variety. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  51. ^ Scott, A. O. (January 6, 2017). "And the Nominees Should Be..." The New York Times. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
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