Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH (2016)

"Men are very fragile. They get crushed down if you assert yourself in any way." notes our love-junky Wiccan Elaine (Samantha Robinson), voiceovering in her vintage convertible down Highway 101 from San Francisco, flanked by gorgeous redwoods and crashing surf. We see her stubbing out cigarettes in the car ashtray. God, it's been so long since I saw anyone do that. This girl, we realize, has it going on - but what is 'on' and 'it' that she has? Her new apartment is popping with magical candy color, and herb jars aplenty. Interior decorator Trish (Laura Waddell) was told to paint it with the "colors from the fourth Tarot deck." They go to the 'Victorian tea room' where men are not allowed, and a lady faire harpist plays. "Giving men sex is a way of unlocking their love potential," counsels Elaine, shortly before eyeballing Trish's husband, Richard (Robert Seeley) with her painted lid magic stare.

Then the Ennio Morricone stings come wandering in, slyly, shyly, and this Wicker Mannered Kenneth Anger x Anton La Vey x Pedro Almodovar with a lovingly stilted acting style perfectly suited to the sense of ancient ceremony, culled through a kind of high camp soapy-Sirkianism to make a distilled beverage of strange potency. In other words, like the mind of a person being forced to watch that Taylor-Burton-Milk Train stoppage terrible hat monstrosity BOOM! while being slowly encased in a psychotropic pancake syrup that hardens to frozen in-the-belly-of-the-dragon amber, you cannot help but succumb to the film's cohesive unified weirdness, its adept deconstruction and Pagan rearrangement of the kind of pre-Quixote romantic blueprint for mythologizing reality girls, smitten with Disney and afternoon soap operas, make in a Brechtian dissolution of cohesive, eerily familiar beauty. Is that even a sentence? As Jimmy Stewart says in BELL BOOK AND CANDLE, who's to say what magic is?

What LOVE WITCH is, certainly, us the announcement of a major female filmmaking talent, or at the very least the female Ed Wood we've all been sorely craving. A CalArts grad wunderkind named Anna Biller, like Ed she's a true sextuple threat (she wrote, produced, directed, did the art design and costumes and composed several of the renaissance songs). Thematically, a fond ode to the early-70s 'suburban housewife joins witch coven' micro-genre, WITCH captures just the right kind of highly-stylized qua-feminist fairy tale revision / Satan's School for Gifted Youngsters' annual solstice pageant primitivism to keep it from being either campy or realistic, magic is allowed to be--as in ROSEMARY'S BABY--comfortably ensconced in the middle ground of 'becoming' and 'will' rather than mystical spells and levitation. As Morricone slinks around the piano and patches her remaining disparate pastiche elements into a coherent whole. Biller ointments up and flies herself up as point guard to this whole new flock of filmmakers, I've written lovingly about most of them, who use the 60s-70s 'Euro-artsleaze' genre as a palette from which to paint uncanny vistas, and in some cases--such as hers--even doing some 8th-wave gender re-appropriation.

A definite feminist statement is the WITCH that I now defend. Yet I defy any male not to be turned on by segments of this film and then to realize moments later just how thoroughly they've been tricked, dragged kicking and screaming to an Ikea of fantasy land fairy princesses, unicorns, and tea parties. Brilliant, this fantasia of a small witch-infested Northern California town also includes a burlesque house (1) and of course the ever-popular female obsession: seducing guys who belong to other girls, then losing interest once they've had them under their spell and they start crying and obsessively screaming her name, driving them to suicide or heart failure. When grown-up girls still want to be Maleficent or need to use magic herbs (like the powerful psychoactive jimsonweed AKA Datura root - which makes a rare 'appearance') to seduce their men, then woe to those men, for this herb makes comprehensible the very speech of witches, which as Banquo speaks of in MACBETH, "the insane root that takes the reason prisoner." And indeed, the bail money to get reason back is death.

The story of three or so conquests in the disturbed life of a dangerously powerful and intoxicatingly sexy 'love witch' - Elaine lets us know in the opening that she's leaving Frisco "after a nervous breakdown" - which she discusses matter-of-factly in a highly mannered theatrical voiceover with conflicting flashbacks in a way that connects the events to a host of female-driven films from the late 60s-70s, from PLAY IT AS IT LAYS to CIAO! MANHATTAN (1972) and even LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH. Echoes even of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (smoking calmly in the other room while her latest lover screams off camera), MESSIAH OF EVIL (especially when Robinson deepens and draws it her vocals on lines "The day Jerry left me is the day I died" she sounds eerily like Marianna Hill), and of course STEPFORD WIVES (in reverse). Rather than go down a Goodbar rabbit hole of sex and madness, as one might expect--especially if a man was directing-- there's sense of Elaine's almost supernatural ability to wreak pastorales and witchy fantasy from a simple colorful town.. Her ability to, in a sense, turn men into sobbing wretches "Just like a woman," Elaine notes. Then adds "I should have known; he's a Pisces."

As a Pisces I should resent that. But maybe she's right. After all, pre-existing hotness + love magic exerts a powerful toll on its target. If you've ever been seduced and abandoned yourself by a creature so lovely and damaged she hung around just long enough to wreck your home and work you over so well you're instantly addicted to her worse than any heroin and how easily death might result.

Biller's candy-colored solstice of love magick also explores and takes relatively seriously the world of the Wiccans (presumably) and probably explains the way young teens tend to get pretty warped when they happen to live in a town hosting the Renaissance Faire, and how Elaine's cracked determination to live life as a fairy tale seems to create first love so intense it blows men right out of their shoes, without consciously intending any malice. Magic, horses, princes, Tarot cards, strange sex rituals, it's all dangerous stuff, Elaine. It's not what little girls are made of! But hey, what's wrong with living mythically?

Is magic just the adult version of tea sets and stuffed animals and dogeared Disney disc? or "moonbeams and fairy tales / are all she ever thinks about." - Hendrix

In pointed shoe fact, this is Disneyland run amok in a kind of clockwork counter to what the sweaty dying dad experiences during his princess tryst in ESCAPE FROM TOMORRROW. Elaine has chosen to live in a world of horseback riding, mock marriages held in full 'witchy / renaissance' acoutrements; quaint 'girls-only' tea houses replete with beautiful "Victoriana" trappings (ala other female artists who use Victorian fairy tale motifs to tell blood and thunder tales to make a Bronte shudder--like Rasputina, Josephie Foster, and Dame Darcy), a 'safe space' for women-only, with girls in long blonde hair playing the harp or--at the burlesque house--twins dancing in unison with feather fans--it all coheres into a narrative that takes seriously (relatively) Elaine's drive to live life as a fairy tale, and to use magic to snare her Prince Charming. The acting is deliberately stilted enough to make us every fully immerse in the narrative, which adds to the feeling of Tarot card predestination, as if this movie has been one long strange ceremony of feminine rebirth through the seduction and symbolic castration of various Saturnalia king sacrifices.


Despite the weird disjointedness, rarely has so cohesive a vision emerged seemingly full-grown from the head of Athena so to speak. that Biller seems to exert the same kind of creative alchemy that usually takes a couple, like Argento and wife Daria Nicolodi in SUSPRIA and INFERNO, or Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani in AMER and STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS. In that sense its closest neighbor, as far as giving it a kind of priceless fairy tale moral apple corer, is Linda Hassani's DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, a film that begs rediscovery in the age of the kind of 'Sunday School Instructional Video from Hell' innocence that this new band of female auteurs is wreaking. Written and directed (and art directed) by a single female in a very visually precise Kenneth Anger-level mystic purpose, clinging to it way past the point of Brechtian dysfunction. The film itself announces in its own Wood-Wiseau weirdness there is a difference in male and female auteurship, and the polarity should be celebrated, even unto cutting out your male lover's heart and eating it. Or just looking at a painting of that action and holding the bloody knife in a rapture fit to unnerve Catherine Deneuve in REPULSION. Perhaps that's enough--I could have benefitted from an actual excised boy heart held up to Artemis in grand sacrificial tribute, but then again, I am a boy.

The main value here is that Biller can make a mark deep in the soft collective unconscious tissue that binds us along our collective Islets of Langerhans. Sofia Coppola came close a few times and might actually nail it at last with her upcoming remake of THE BEGUILED; Asia Argento was one of the first to try, with SCARLET DIVA in 2000, but you could tell it was a struggle, as if wading through the basement sludge of the male gaze like a harried plumber; Anna Lily Amirpour bit its finger off in the delightful A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT; Helene Cattet did the amazing AMER (2); Catherine Hardwicke did it in the first TWILIGHT, which was so good the terrified money men promptly turned the franchise over to male directors, none of whom matched the druggy electric drag of her original. Xan Cassavettes' ever-so-slinky KISS OF THE DAMNED is another where the men are arm candy Renfields in a matriarchal world held together by beauty, wealth, and discretion. They're all highly recommended as examples of women appropriating the genre in ways parallel to male-driven explorations of similar lines. Bitches may be strong in films by Tarantino, Rodriguez; Russo and Ashby of DANGER 5, etc., but are all susceptible to the male drive to action and violence. None would ever dare to, for example, show their starlet casually noticing a blood spot, inserting a tampon, and then later taking it out and adding it to a bottle of her own urine + a few wild grown herbs and placed on a man's grave, so a "part of her can stay with him forever."

If they did, truly kings of Saturnalia would they be.


Even more so than the all-female lepidopterist un-fantasia of Peter Strickland's DUKE OF BURGUNDY, an example of 'faerie bower cinema,' wherein chthonic overgrowth ensnares all chances for narrative phallic linearity, leading to a kind of feminine revere/stasis, mirroring the way sexual desire can hold a person almost in a state of paralysis, tapping into the state of powerless awe we as tiny children felt towards mom and her visiting lady friends, when we had them all to ourselves--and compared to us they were as giants--lavishing us with attention and expecting no corresponding action (we don't need to do anything sitting there in the dark -- Garbo's giant face loves us no matter what). We get some of that at burlesque clubs (where the male acts are all symbolically neutered - baggy pants comics or androgynes like Joel Grey in CABARET - thus posing no threat to our seat of pre-Oedipal spectral omnipotence). While when brought into actual play, sadomasochism and/or stripping often becomes merely tawdry. 

Not tawdry

I only refer to all that to contrast Biller's style, which exits the bower to pursue more the soapy backdoor histrionics of 'suburban swinger-turned-to-crime' films by mavericks like Russ Meyer, Radley Metzger, Arthur Marks, and Joe Sarno... These are male directors who love strong, proud empowered, sexually voracious females and who don't mind setting their stuff on fire wherever they're standing, turning any suburban backyard barbecue into a wild orgy of close-ups: batted eyes, licked lips, hemlines and sizzling symbolism. Her approach to female romantic obsession seems at first like, as one shocked listener declares, "Stepford wifey." But by turning the tables from normal third-wave feminism and acknowledging men are "like little boys" and granting them their craziest fantasies, a girl can gain enormous power and control over them, even to to the point where her absence can drive him to suicide. Considering the frequency of the reverse --the man as tomcat the woman, like Yvonne Furneaux in LA DOLCE VITA, tearing herself apart at home waiting for Marcello's call. That's a man's fantasy, the clinging woman issuing suicide threats through phone line apron string hydra tentacles. Here we see not stalking by these men but an acute melancholia -- her magic unlocks their "love potential" and the floodgates, once opened, cannot be closed til the whole lake's empty and his Piscean fishes flopping in tiny puddles of booze and old photos.
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Male or female, fans of revival DVD labels like Synapse, Mondo Macabro, and Blue Underground know well the genre Biller is exploring. In particular, the post-Ira Levin (STEPFORD WIVES, ROSEMARY'S BABY) female empowerment through cult ritual magic sub-genre of the late 60s-early 70s feminist horror boom (see Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition). A huge staple of the late 60s-early 70s, ranging from American 'woman's lib'-meets-cult magic tracts like Romero's 1972 SEASON OF THE WITCH, 1976's THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA, and to French fairy bowers like DONT DELIVER US FROM EVIL and THE GIRL SLAVES OF MORGANA LE FAY (1971), LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL, and of course the works of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. Biller evokes them all while never losing her own voice, one so strong I trusted it wasn't 'abdicating power' when the older coven male shows up like a leering dirty old Pan.

Anna Biller - thou art a badass

I was scoping photos of her for this post, and found an interesting response to a Coffee Coffee review of Biller's previous film, the lower budgeted scrappy VIVA.  Coffee's writer Peter suggested viewers be better served by BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS or Franco's VENUS IN FURS), presuming the intent on Biller's part was a kind of high comic camp, a satire of late 60s decadence:

Sexploitation films were based on real things, like sexuality between men and women. I would never be interested in critiquing them wholesale, because I don't find them stupid or inferior (you might). They are more for me like fascinating fragments of culture, all the more alluring because of their low status in today's culture. 

So again, you are making many assumptions. Those assumptions come from our need today to look back on history and laugh at it. They also come from a discomfort with the exploitation form because of guilt at male enjoyment of it. I am not critiquing those films, but I am critiquing cultural stereotypes. There is a big difference. 

The intention with VIVA was to make my own version of those films, to rewrite history as it were and place myself and my voice (as a female and an individual) within it. So in that sense it's pure fetishism, and comes much more from the place the original films came from (the desire to make a sexy film using fantasy and displacement). The confusion about my intentions may come from the fact that we have not seen many sexual fantasy films made by women, except by female directors who are working in entirely more "serious" forms.

Damn right, sister! Dig the way she defends her choices and calls Mr. Coffee semi-out on an ideological gender-based point, but does so sans knee-jerk third-wave malice? Her pride in wanting to make a "sexy film using fantasy and displacement" is a truly honorable ideal. Her response is free of browbeating. Such a combination is rare as buried treasure.

LOVE WITCH should satisfy VIVA critics as it's clearly a kind CITIZEN 9 FROM OUTER KANE breakthrough, its playful 'talent show from Summers' Isle' light/dark macabre counter-Christian pageantry mixes with genuinely erotic content in ways we don't really see in modern film; the closest we get is perhaps Shakespeare with his habit of fractal-dialing little bands of intentionally amateur-like players and diegetic songs deep within the main narrative. Shakespeare recognizes feminine erotic magic as a timeless (or lunar cycle-based) parallel to the 'normal world' of linearity and men. Biller enhances that, exploring the way becoming a man's every wish and surprising him with allure beyond what he can stand leaves him a sobbing wreck, and might leave her in the other room smoking a cigarette, listening to  his anguished infantile castrated bathtub sobs with the dispassion of Camille Keaton rocking in her chair downstairs (5). The closest I can imagine to one of her amazing psychedelic seductions is the opening swath of DUNWICH HORROR with smoov Dean Stockwell using that weird Corman prop from THE TERROR and TOMB OF LIGEA to hypnotize Sandra Dee.