As I’m writing this, it’s less than one week until Halloween, and SAG-AFTRA is currently back in negotiations, hoping to end the strike. As I continue covering independent films, I’ve branched out of YouTube and Instagram content, and instead, I’m covering a feature film distributed by the independent company Oscilloscope. I chose The Love Witch as it felt right on brand with the upcoming Halloween holiday.
The Love Witch premiered on January 31st, 2016, but the aesthetics of the film place it beside the iconic films of the 1960s. While many filmmakers have attempted period pieces, few have been able to capture different time periods quite like Anna Biller did with The Love Witch. From the bright eyeshadow to the colorful Victorian home, everything feels like it was taken from the archives of Hollywood’s past.
To briefly summarize, The Love Witch is about a woman named Elaine who uses her magic to make men fall in love with her, only to murder them when they become too obsessed and clingy. While I’ve seen several interpretations of The Love Witch online, I haven’t seen anyone dive into Elaine’s character or try to understand why she is the way she is. Maybe this wasn’t Anna Biller’s intention when she made The Love Witch, but it’s the part I found most compelling.
Elaine clarifies at the beginning of the film how important love is to her and how much she craves it. Unfortunately, throughout The Love Witch, she’s never able to find a man who loves her for who she is. Every man who falls in love with her experiences intense infatuation while Elaine is looking for true love. She almost finds it in the end with Detective Griff, who overlooks all the signs of her murderous past when he, too, begins to get lost in the fantasy she’s created for him. Unfortunately for Elaine, Griff ultimately does find out she’s the one who killed the missing college professor Wayne and all the other men in her past.
In the end, Elaine ends up stabbing Griff in the heart after he wouldn’t drink the poisoned drink she gave him. Elaine ends up alone, fantasizing about marrying Griff as if he were still alive. Unfortunately, The Love Witch doesn’t go too deep into Elaine’s past, though I wish it did. I found myself wanting to know what drove her to kill in the first place and what happened to her during her upbringing that made her so obsessed with being loved.
The closest thing we get to this is a scene about 50 minutes in where Elaine is experiencing flashbacks to her previous lovers. Her former husband Jerry seems endearing and kind until he starts nagging Elaine about making sure his dinner is on time and making herself look more presentable for him. There may be no excuse for murder, but I can see why Elaine didn’t want to be with Jerry anymore.
Next, a voiceover played as Elaine applied lotion to her legs. “I have a crazy b*tch for a daughter,” the voice said, suggesting Elaine was hearing the sound of her father’s voice. The man went on to criticize Elaine’s weight, telling us that her current thin stature was likely due to years of being bullied by her father for her appearance. This is about as much of a look into Elaine’s past as we get, though it’s enough to suggest the verbal abuse from her father growing up and the way her past husband mistreated her is related to Elaine’s dire need for love.
The reason this aspect of The Love Witch fascinated me more than anything anyone else pointed out is because it feels like an exaggeration of what our society is like. There are countless YouTube videos, podcast episodes, and books on finding love because it’s something everyone in society seems to be obsessed with. Like Elaine, a lot of people will go to extreme lengths for it. Also, like Elaine, many people are looking for what they can get from another person and not what they can offer in exchange.
Elaine had a very shallow and selfish idea of love, and I believe this is why she was immediately turned off when the men she longed for started acting needy. I would also leave if anyone started needing me the way Elaine’s partners needed her, but Elaine had no desire to give anything to her romantic partners in exchange for the love they were giving her.
It’s evident that in The Love Witch, Elaine possessed a deep feeling of unworthiness and was using men to fill a void within herself. Again, this is something we see often in society. No one ever wants to get to the root of the problem. They want to take the easy way out and then wonder why things aren’t working. Elaine was looking outside of herself for the love she never had growing up and the love she never learned how to give to herself. She could never find a man to love and value her true self because she didn’t love and value her true self.
Even though Detective Griff dies at the end of The Love Witch, there are still others who now know of her murderous past and will likely take her down. Ultimately, after all her efforts, Elaine still ended up sad and alone. The only way she knew how to cope with the situation was to create a fantasy in her head where she and Griff live happily ever after.
I found Elaine to be a pretty unlikable character throughout The Love Witch, but there were a few moments where I had compassion for her. One of them was after her friend Trish realized she had had an affair with her husband Richard and pushed him to suicide. Elaine catches Trish going through her shrine of murdered men and tries to kill Trish, but she’s able to attack Elaine instead. I felt a deep sadness for Elaine as she screamed and cried while Trish repeatedly hit her. After all, Elaine only ever wanted to be loved, and she just didn’t know how.
I’m predicting the SAG-AFTRA negotiations will continue for at least another week as long as the AMPTP doesn’t walk out again. For now, I’m gonna continue branching out to feature films from independent film companies like A24. I’ve been wanting to cover X and Pearl before the third film in the trilogy drops. However, I’m also hoping the AMPTP cooperates as soon as possible so everyone can get back to work and Movie Mondays With Gina can return to normal.
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