#Love witch movie

You think about a show like Bewitched-and it's really almost like her magical powers were just in the fact that she was a woman. She used to be an old and ugly witch, but then, like in the '60s, the witch became like this figure of mystery and power and seduction and beauty. ', I started thinking about how the image of the witch has changed through the ages. It was a witchy cookbook, but you get inside and the recipes are actually pretty blah-you get like deviled eggs and stuff-but the cover is pretty amazing. It was a woman, wearing like high boots and a short outfit, sitting on a cauldron.

There's another that was a cover of a cookbook-that was great. There's another with a woman who's just a silhouette, holding a weapon. They're usually women that are naked or sometimes they're surrounded by a flame, or there's one with a woman sitting cross-legged on a circle. They had a lot of witches on the covers that were incredibly sexual. 'First of all, I got the image of the witch from '60s pulp novel covers. While making a film about a witch long coincided with the concept of Biller's project, how exactly did the idea exploring the subject of divine feminine come together? Witches historically have been a symbol of the all-powerful woman-a concept that's fearful to some, and aspirational to others.

So, here, to celebrate spooky and Scorpio season, the filmmaker explains everything that did inform the film-from tarot cards and her own witch craft practice to Hitchcock.

#Love witch movie

While many assumed she turned to sexploitation cinema when making the movie and likened her to Russ Meyer upon the film's release, she couldn't disagree with the comparison more. With so much concocted into the potion that is The Love Witch, we spoke to writer-director Anna Biller about all of her reference points and sources of inspiration. It's also an incredible and carefully constructed homage to '60s style that Biller went to great lengths to design, because although the film set in contemporary times, it's shown through the Gunne-Sax-wearing Elaine's eyes covered in powder blue eye shadow that see everything like out of a bygone era. That imagery is simply too entrancing to look past, and its commentary is just as bewitching.īehind The Love Witch is dozens of rich references-from Hitchcockian horror to tropes of the femme fatale-which writer-director Anna Biller can rattle off as seamlessly as Elaine might recite the contents of a spell. Since the film's release, it's only continued to grow in popularity, as fans still highlight the film's aesthetic and message on Instagram and TikTok where younger audiences end up discovering it in their feed. (Elaine literally couldn't be more of the male ideal, and yet men still won't love her half as much as she loves them.) The indie film was a hit among critics when it was released-lauding its style, Robinson's whip smart performance, and commentary on gender that explores how exhausting the objectification of women can be, and how not even the divine feminine can even shake the emotional limitations of masculinity. The film is shot in a splashy palette to match '60s Technicolor, features a highly curated aesthetic that's like a vintage lover's dream come true, and the occult-following a beautiful witch named Elaine's (Samantha Robinson) quest to find love (that ends in a whole lot of bloodshed). It's easy to fall under the spell of Anna Biller's 2016 horror-comedy The Love Witch.