How can you not Love this Witch?

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When I first saw this one advertised, it sounded interesting, but something about the stilted style in the trailer just didn’t pull me in. I’m so glad I eventually gave it a chance. I’ve now watched it at least 4-5 times and I think it’s just great.

The Love Witch (2016)

This is a visually arresting film that is more than a little difficult to process.  One part early 70s pastiche melodrama, one part satire of persistent gender expectations, and one part art house flick, with just a dash of occult sexploitation, it is an exercise in deep criticism and deeper irony, asking us to both identify with its protagonist’s tragic tale of loves lost and loves murdered, and to question the often (self) destructive ways of thinking that she has come to espouse. It’s a heady, gorgeous, stylized piece of work that calls for critical response.

Written, directed, produced, costume designed, set decorated, art directed, scored, and edited by Anna Biller, this is a true piece of auteur cinema. It is clear that absolutely nothing appears on screen accidentally and that everything, from the hemming of a dress, to a musical quotation in the score, to the hint of discomfort on an actor’s face is fully intentional, often carrying consciously chosen meaning.  It invites the viewer to analyze what is presented, but it offers few obvious readings. 

Characters sometimes speak very explicitly, presenting ideas that sound like authorial voice, but the choice of the mouthpiece for those very ideas sometimes undercuts the sense that they should be trusted.  The narrative and focus on Samantha Robinson’s Elaine draws the viewer into her cool, love obsessed mania, but at the same time, other characters directly call out her seemingly patriarchy perpetuating views and much of the course of the story shows that this way to lead to madness—plus, she also comes across as quite the sociopath (as in the scene where she meets with a friend to theoretically comfort her after her husband’s lovesick suicide, but is cold as ice and unwilling to engage with any emotions that are not her own), so maybe not the best person to choose as a role model, even if charming and perfectly coifed. 

It feels so clear that Biller knows exactly what she wants to communicate, but at the same time, there is a constant irony, casting any interpretation of even the most seemingly on the nose symbolism into doubt.

The story follows Elaine as she relocates to a new town from San Francisco, following her husband “leaving her” (by ceasing to draw breath). 

A friend of a friend, Trish (Laura Waddell), shows her the house she’s arranged to stay in and takes her out for lunch at a tea room that seems to exist inside whatever it is that wedding cakes dream about.

 We learn of Elaine’s obsession with being loved by men and her insistence that the only way to find satisfaction is to give them whatever they want (food, beauty, sex, ect.) so that they will love her as much as she loves them. 

She uses “sex magic to make love magic” but that love magic never ends well, generally killing the targeted male by overwhelming him with emotions he’s incapable of coping with.  This plays out with a couple of men she sets her sights on, including the local professor/self-styled libertine, Wayne (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) and Trish’s husband, Richard (Robert Seeley), before locking firmly onto the particularly manly (toxically so) detective who’s investigating Wayne’s murder, Griff (Gian Keys). 

Unlike the others who have cracked, becoming blubbering messes in their newfound feelings for her, thus turning her off by being weak “like a woman”, Griff maintains a certain disdain for Elaine and her desire, both satisfying her with his overt masculinity and crushing her with his rejection.  In the end, claiming him for herself, she stabs his heart out, mirroring a tarot-inspired painting adorning her bedroom wall.

The story is fairly straightforward, but this short summary does it little justice, especially without presenting a sense of the overall style and stylization of the picture.  The whole film is made to look as if it were filmed sometime in the past (mid 50s, late 60s, early 70s perhaps—it’s never exactly clear), though the presence of cell phones situates it in the more or less present, resulting in the story feeling somehow outside of time, but rooted in old fashioned mores of masculinity and femininity. 

This presents itself in the technicolor-approximating film stock, the 50s era hard lighting, the sumptuous costuming and makeup and set dressing, and of course, the stilted, presentational acting choices.  This last aspect could certainly turn off a viewer, but is probably one of the most effective aspects of the film, allowing a clear analytical distance between spoken text and filmmaker intent, and underlining the absurdity of character relationships, such as the hyper-masculine, square jawed Griff being served constantly by other officers in his precinct who happen to be female or people of color (you can help him in this murder investigation by getting him a sandwich—you know how he likes it). And it is often very funny. 

This style allows for moments or scenes that in any other film would stand out as unrealistic, such as the scene in which Elaine meets Wayne and, in under two minutes of dialogue, has him eagerly take her to his remote cabin for dinner and sex.  It’s quick work and a nice spot of whimsy.

This style also lets Gahan (Jared Sanford), the leader of Elaine’s coven, spend nearly 4 minutes lecturing girls at a burlesque club on the importance of reclaiming and harnessing feminine sexuality in order to exert real power in life and have men finally see them as human beings while in the background, the men in the club go crazy over the performer on stage.  This is a great example of the dialectic of the film between spoken and visual text.  On one level, the words he speaks seem like they could reflect the filmmaker’s views, that the reclaiming of female sexuality and desire is empowering, but the fact that it is a man speaking them, and particularly this man, whose touch we see Elaine shrinking from and who elicits a cringe when he kisses her in greeting, who it seems might just have gotten involved with witchcraft because it grants him authority over a bevy of often naked girls who he can have sex with, because, um magic and stuff, really undercuts his words and, while aspects ring true, the dubious motives of their speaker makes them seem suspect.

And the style also makes it possible to include a fairly long scene at a Ren Fair hosted by the coven where Elaine and Griff are taken through a fairytale mock wedding after which voiceovers of their conflicting views of love (her: in time, a woman loves all of a man’s little foibles more and more and a love grows stronger and more grounded; him: love makes you weak and in time, any woman becomes irritating and trapping) overlaying scenes of their newlywed bliss. It’s a strange, funny, pretty-if-kinda-silly-looking, and it lays bare how doomed they both are in this relationship.  We know she will be hurt and we expect he won’t survive it (though I think we also don’t feel particularly bad about that).

Ultimately, this is an intriguing watch.  Especially on first viewing, the film’s approach provides a really novel experience, and it can be hard to know what to make of it. Some will be irritated and some will be enraptured, but it is inarguably unique and clearly expressive of a creative, thoughtful, and singular mind at work.

The Imp of the Perverse

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It’s a busy time for me right now. I’ve started this blog and besides writing, I need to stay on top of self-promotion. I’m working on a new show and there are texts to write and learn, rehearsals to organize and run, and tentacles and monsters to stitch together (more on that in another post). And of course, I also have to work (preparing and giving classes and doing proofreading) and earn money to keep myself in bandwidth, liquid latex, and fake fur. And yet, the other night I watched four episodes of a TV show that I don’t even really like that much. Argh.  Why? Why would I do something so pointless?

I think good old Poe put his finger on it in his 1885 story, The Imp of the Perverse, which puts into words so clearly, a human tendency at the heart of so much of his writing, a tendency which may often go unconsidered. The overwhelming urge to perform an act precisely because it is the wrong thing to do:

“I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse — elementary.”

Perverseness

The story is an odd one, but I love it.  For the first half, it comes across as a treatise on this psychological element, its narrator (who I had first assumed to be Poe-as-essayist) expounding upon history’s failures to account for irrationality before describing and naming this drive and giving three familiar examples: the urge of a usually succinct and generally kind speaker to irritate his or her listener by blathering on in a circuitous manner (an urge which my wife could attest I sometimes indulge in—though, to be fair, I could never claim to be laconic to begin with), the temptation, when standing on a precipice, to take the plunge, and the penchant to put off till tomorrow that which we most want to do today.  His characterization of this procrastination is, perhaps, most striking in how true it rings.

“We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer…”

I can only assume based on my own experience of living, that this is a situation everyone has been in.  But maybe it’s just me and old Edgar…

Shortly after, the story takes a turn and becomes, well, a story.  The narrator is telling us all this to explain how he ended up in this cell, condemned to die.  Having committed a very well calculated and painstakingly carried out murder, which had gone off without a hitch, and after which, he had acquired a large inheritance and lived comfortably for years, the narrator had realized that the only way that he could ever be caught would be if he “were fool enough to confess.”  Following that epiphany, he could not stop thinking about it until he finally snapped and publicly declared his wrong doing.  Thus, it was this imp of the perverse that has led him to his doom.

First of all, it is a tasty bit of irony that our example here of the imp is not the drive that led him to kill, which had been fully rational, but rather, that which has led him to confess.  You might take for granted that a devil on the shoulder is more likely to needle someone into crime, into “sin,” but in Poe’s conception it is simpler and more broad.  Simply the wrong act.  The one for which there is no good reason, no motive.  The motive for the killing had been obvious—money. The motive for admission is not so clear—but it surely wasn’t guilt.

Broader application

In this, I think Poe captures a human truth which, to this day, can still go overlooked.  How often are characters in books, in films, on TV, written to be internally consistent, psychologically understood characters, driven by clear motivations.  We criticize the writing when that lapses. And yet, I don’t think that’s who we always are.  And it’s not merely a case of some kind of Freudian death drive, but that sometimes we act with no clear motivation at all. Sometimes we do something stupid, something cruel, something self-defeating, or just something odd or nonsensical simply because that is the thing that we do.

And this is not only a literary concern.  I remember circa 2010, reading an essay reflecting on the economic crisis at the time, which criticized modern economists’ continued reliance on an outdated and inaccurate figure from classical economic theory, Homo Economicus. First conceptualized by figures like John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, this theoretical economic agent “acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for him or herself given available information about opportunities and other constraints, both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals.”  A great deal of economic models have been based on this notion that en masse, people act out of rational, informed self-interest.

While people may be essentially self-serving, I think it unrealistic to state that we are, as a rule, rational or informed. Thus, forecasts, economic or otherwise, based on such expectations seem doomed to inaccuracy.  To be fair, there are many competing theories and Homo Economicus was already being criticized in Mill’s day, but the idea persists. We still expect ourselves and each other to have reasons for doing what we do.

Horror

So what about horror? This is a horror blog, after all.

Beyond the fact that this qualifies as a horror story (murder, madness, and what not), I think that any time that horror (film, writing, etc.) falls into being too rational, it can ring false. Or at the very least, it can feel flat. But when a taste of mystery is sustained, when we can’t see the whole thing, when it feels that there are depths we cannot plumb, it is that much richer; it has a chance of delivering that delectable shudder of the uncanny.

I mean, of course, there should be motivations. I’m not saying that we should abandon all sense of psychological causality and lazily just offer up any old thing without thinking it through, but if at the end of the story, a killer can honestly and exactly state their motivation, whether it be revenge, money, fame, or love, it often underwhelms, not doing justice to the staggering inferences of a word like ‘horror.’ In counterpoint, think of the final moment of The Strangers when the killers, asked why they have done these horrible things, simply answer, “because you were home.”  Chilling.

Horror is best when there is an element of not just the unknown, but the unknowable. And that need not mean abstract, tentacled, ancient, evil gods from another dimension. Rather, if a work brings us into contact with that which is unknowable within the human heart and mind, it can be most effective.

Halloween approacheth

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Here we are in October. “Spooky season.” Pumpkin spice, if that’s a thing where you live. (I don’t think it’s quite so ubiquitous in Poland.) Let’s kick things off with a short look at one of the most iconic of the seasonal offerings:

Halloween (1978)

This is going to be pretty short—more of a blurb than anything else as I assume that everything that needs to be written about this one has already made it to print.  It may no longer have the power to scare me as I’ve seen it plenty of times, but it is surely a kind of comfort food, satisfying in so many different ways.

I like the characters.  I’m not rooting for them to bite it, as might occasionally be the case with the nameless casts of the many later imitators which would follow in Halloween’s footsteps.  I mean, they’re not exactly exercises in depth, but I buy them as people, as friends.  There are laughs to be had and their relationships are believable.  And at the same time, they are drawn with broad enough strokes that the dominant feeling when they die is the jolt of terror rather than the weight of mourning. 

The film making is confident and precise, while still operating on a tight budget, and makes economical choices that pay off in atmosphere and artistry. It’s really something how this movie, filmed in May in California, really evokes a midwestern fall.  Apparently it was too warm for real fallen leaves, so they scattered paper leaves around, which they had to collect after each shot so they could be reused. The score, while repetitive, is also relentless and so simple.  Both the film and its killer are playful with their scares, making it such a fun popcorn scary movie.

And, at the same time, it really contributed to placing horror in, and showing the lie of, a new setting—cozy, suburban, small town America, a place where your kids can feel safe walking to school and you don’t have to lock your doors, but when a teenage girl is screaming for help in the middle of the night, people will turn off their porchlights and pretend not to be home, rather than stick their neck out for someone else in need. 

Many things can be scary, but in this moment of seeing just how little these comfortable suburbanites are willing to go out of their way to help a terrified kid, it is really chilling, and it offers a moment of horror: the chilling comprehension that “this is probably true—this is how people would behave—I may greet my neighbors with a smile and a nod, but if I really needed help, there’s every chance that they’d close their doors, and if one is to be totally honest, if the situation were reversed, I may very well close mine.”  That realization—that confrontation with a terrible truth—is really the essence, I think, of horror as a concept and this is a good, simple, very effective example.

While this was certainly not the first slasher, it surely fixed the formulas, even when it did so inadvertently.  Laurie is the platonic ideal of the final girl archetype, down to and including the nigh Freudian way that she adopts a series of different sharp, long, pointy, penetrative objects to fight back with, but that all of them imply some kind of traditionally coded feminine element—the coat hanger, the knitting needle, even the kitchen knife—all of which can be read as markers of ‘women’s work’ and the domesticity that is being invaded by this very masculine-coded killer. 

And still, I take Carpenter at his word that he was not thinking about these things.  They just came out of the setting—out of the situation.  These are the available weapons in a home that doesn’t have guns.  Laurie doesn’t end up being the final girl because her friends are punished for being sexual.  Rather, she is alone, lonely, and paying attention.  They are distracted, having fun, fooling around and, therefore, easier targets.

And there are just so many standout moments: the opening tracking shot, featuring presumably the fastest off screen sex scene ever (the young couple leaves the living room to go upstairs and 85 seconds later, we see the boy coming out of the bedroom, putting his shirt back on—it’s fast!), so effective and chilling and clever; Dr. Loomis going on about “the blackest eyes, the devil’s eyes”; the growing irritation/comedy of Linda “totally” only seeming to know one word; the moment when the shape appears out of the shadows that Laurie had been backing into; Michael tilting his head to examine his handiwork after stabbing Bob to the wall; and of course, the final moments after the killer has disappeared and the camera shows us the empty hallway, the empty stairwell, the empty street—there are shadows everywhere and anything could be waiting in them—nothing will ever feel safe again. 

For all these reasons and so many more, this one is a classic which can really help set the tone any October.

An Under-Seen Italian Classic

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Sometimes there are those films that you really know you should have seen by now, but it’s somehow hard to finally pull the trigger on.  This was one of those for me for the longest time and I’m so glad that a few months ago, I finally remedied the situation:

Black Sunday AKA the Mask of the Devil (1960)

Mario Bava’s first directorial credit really stands the test of time as an (occasionally flawed) masterpiece of gothic horror. It exists in an interesting space between the old Universal classics of the 30s that preceded it and the rougher terrain the genre would come to tread over the course of the next couple decades.  If you’re looking for spooky old castles filled with cobwebs and riddled with secret passages, it’s got you covered. If you want to see a hot brand burning flesh, it’s got that too.  How about a carriage eerily racing through moonlit fog in slow motion? A giant bat attack in a ruined crypt? A young girl fearfully running through a dark forest, the spindly branches of trees seeming to reach out as if to grab her? This is your movie.  But what if you want needles being driven through eye sockets? The face of a loving father melting in a fire? A shambling corpse bursting out of wet earth? A spike filled metal mask being sledgehammered onto a witch’s face? But of course, Black Sunday, all things to all people, is there for you as well.

The story begins with a prelude set in Moldavia in the 17th century, two hundred years before the main action of the film. Princess Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele) is a witch (or possibly a vampire—the film plays fast and loose with its supernatural terminology) being ceremonially put to death by a robed and hooded inquisitorial mob for her wicked deeds, along with her brother and consort, Javuto (Arturo Dominici).  She is branded as a witch and a “Devil’s Mask” is hammered onto her face before she is set on a pyre to burn.  A storm prevents the job from being completed, but she is entombed in a coffin with a glass lid so that she can always see the cross above, which should theoretically keep her evil contained.

And so it does until a couple hundred years later when two doctors on their way to a conference happen upon her tomb, accidentally shatter the cross, break the glass atop her coffin (leading to a scratch on the hand that gives her a resuscitating drop of blood), steal a religious artifact that had been placed on her (it may have been helping to hold her down, but will also provide a useful user manual to defeat her later), and remove her Devil’s Mask (with some effort—it had been nailed on quite forcefully).  Then, having done everything wrong they possibly could, they have a chance meeting with the local princess (bearing a striking resemblance to the witch) whose family crypt they’ve been defiling and make their way to an inn for the night.

Said princess is Katja Vajda (also Barbara Steele), Asa the witch’s descendent, who has just turned 21 and is feeling some unnamable dread whose source she cannot identify. Long story short: Asa raises Javuto, has him kill and basically make vampires of one of the doctors, Katja’s father, and a few household servants, all so that Asa can steal Katja’s youth, beauty, and ultimately her life. 

Fortunately (I suppose), the younger of the two doctors and the inevitable romantic lead, Dr. Andrej Gorobec (John Richardson), teams up with a local priest to fight the vampires (dispatched by driving a spike through the left eye rather than a stake through the heart), defeat the witch, and save the girl (who has a real fainting problem—it’s a good thing she ends up with a doctor).

Bava based the story on a Nikolaj Gogol story, “Vij,” which I understand was far more faithfully adapted in the Russian film, Vij (another great movie). Here, the main points of connection seem to be the dark spookiness and folkloric quality of Eastern Europe, a witch, and, based on my viewing of the Russian film (not having read the Gogol), some kind of supposedly learned men who are actually quite useless. But the distance between source text and film is inconsequential.  This is Bava’s film, not Gogol’s, and as a piece of visual storytelling, it is significant.

On a compositional level, Black Sunday is decidedly effectual.  The lighting here is key—stark, casting heavy shadows in all directions, and creating striking looks throughout. In an early scene, the innkeeper’s daughter is sent against her wishes through the woods at night to milk the cow (who, for some reason is kept far from home, in a barn directly next to the cemetery where Javuto was interred beneath unholy ground and is now due to rise).

As she makes her way, terror-stricken to this ill-placed shed, she appears somehow lit from below, such that her face seems to be this one point of light and the darkness seems to close in on all sides.  It isn’t realistic if you stop to consider it, but it succeeds in evoking a very active darkness and her fear is contagious.  The camera frames spaces claustrophobically; the elegant clutter of a palatial manor or the shattered remains of coffins in an abandoned crypt are both used to create a sense of an invasive space. Elements that surround figures seem to move in on them, as with the darkness and creeping branches hunting the dairy seeking adolescent.   

In addition to being Mario’s progenitor, Eugenio Bava was also known as the father of special effects photography in Italian cinema, and his son carries on the family business admirably here.  By today’s standards, some of these effects might look a bit obvious, but in 1960 they were apparently truly shocking (the film was heavily edited when released in the States and was banned for years in the UK before the edited American version was allowed to be released) and some of them still offer a visceral kick in the 21st century.  When the Devil’s mask is hammered onto Asa’s face and blood spurts out, or when a spike is driven through the ocular socket of a sleeping vampire with a sickening squelch (followed by the priest delicately wiping his hand with a handkerchief) , even a modern horror viewer, well inured to viscera, might still find themselves cringing a bit with appreciative disgust.

And there are some truly arresting sequences, such as a frightening scene in which Katja is hounded by some unseen menace that appears to chase her through the castle, upturning everything in its path as she shouts for help. Finally, she comes to her father’s room, where he still lies, recently dead, awaiting funereal rites. We know that he has been turned and that the sun is about to set, but she has no inkling of what’s about to happen. She falls on his berth, calling out for his support in the face of the horrors that beset her and as she lowers her head, the light can be seen disappearing from the sky. It’s a delicious moment. If only it didn’t result in her fainting again, but you can’t have anything.

The only thing that really stands out as unsuccessful is a romantic subplot between Katja and Gorobec. They’ve known each other for perhaps 36 hours by the end of the movie and it’s a big leap of faith to go along with their relationship.  It doesn’t help that the dialogue is so very over the top.  A certain degree of verbal extravagance is welcome in such a film when it pertains to vengeance and undying evil, but an otherwise milquetoast love scene featuring such florid text as, “Even if all Mankind abandons this castle, or even deserts these grounds, there is no reason why you should do likewise with your life and your youth” is just a little hard to buy. 

Though, honestly, the language of the film plays better when watching it dubbed in Italian with English subtitles, rather than having to hear these clunky lines spoken in English (as with all Italian horror of this time, it was filmed without sound and all voices were dubbed later for different markets, often utilizing multi-national casts with each actor speaking their own native tongue).  But these are small gripes in the face of the total effect of the film.

I don’t know that there is much to read into the story of the film itself.  The witch is bad. Her victims are good.  In the end, love triumphs and the dead die once again.  The sun will shine.  But in its simplicity, it well houses an effective and historic horror piece that honors what came before it and prefigures what was soon to come.