Creeptober Day 9: The Love Witch

Yesterday for Creeptober we watched House, a movie about lost love. Today, for day nine of Creeptober, we’re watching The Love Witch, a movie about searching for love in all the wrong ways. It’s a wonderful back-to-back for the hopeless romantics out there!

Read on for our thoughts on The Love Witch as well as a recap of the movie, and join the conversation on our Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram!

Reacting to The Love Witch

The first thing most people will notice about The Love Witch is its fantastic aesthetic. The look and feel of the movie is meant to evoke the horror and thriller movies of the 1960s, and it does a remarkably good job of it. It was shot on 35mm film, and that helps the color and lighting choices stand out as a spot-on tribute to the era. The Love Witch looks amazing, and that’s what drew my attention to the film in the first place.

Then, once I watched it, I saw that there is a great story supporting the beauty of it all. The Love Witch is a supremely smart movie that provides a great deal of depth within every scene. Sometimes the message is subtle, sometimes it’s blatantly obvious, and it all works together to create a dark, funny, and even sad experience. There is a lot to break down about The Love Witch, but I won’t make an attempt to cover everything here since this is merely meant to be a quick reaction and not a full analysis. Instead, I’ll just cover a few of my favorite details.

In the earlier stages of the movie (while I was still getting a feel for the story), I noticed what I thought were anachronistic items in the background. With the movie being a visual tribute to the 1960s, before I watched it I just assumed it was set in the 1960s. But throughout the film you can see modern cars, flat-screen computer monitors, and other seemingly out-of-time items in the background. After thinking about it, I thought this was a brilliant way to subtly suggest that Elaine is living in a fantasy world long before we realize how much of a dreamer she is.

This is how I interpret the conflicts between its period aesthetic and its contemporary setting. The Love Witch is set in modern times, but in Elaine’s head she is living in an earlier time period where she has an idealized view of male-female relationships (idealized for her, not for the rest of us). After the death of her husband and her nervous breakdown, she escaped to a time period she romanticizes heavily. As the audience, we see most of the movie from Elaine’s perspective, so we also see most of the world in her romanticized way. But at the edges, where Elaine’s focus fades, modern reality encroaches on her fantasy. We are in the present, but Elaine imagines it as the past. In the end, Elaine has to imagine going back even further in time (and even further into her own mind) by imagining herself living in a time of chivalry.

More to the true point of the movie though, I love the way The Love Witch utilizes stereotypical male-gaze from a female perspective to illustrate how harmful that way of thinking is. Due to years of abuse and being told how to be a “better” woman from a male point of view, Elaine has fully embraced those ideas. Her entire personality is built on pleasing men, and she thinks that will fulfill her own desires. This is how she defines her own power, by conforming to what she believes men want. Her friend Trish speaks very bluntly for the audience when she says to Elaine, “it sounds like you’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy.”

By focusing on a woman like Elaine, The Love Witch also exposes stereotypical male insecurities. In Elaine’s mind, men are not supposed to be emotional. But her love spells work too well, making the men around her emotional messes. As she puts it, one of them is “like a little girl.” It’s also questionable whether or not Elaine’s spells and potions are actually doing much. The men Elaine meets are attracted to her even before she gives them a potion to drink. The hallucinogens in the potions are obviously doing something, but the lust from the men’s point of view was there from the start. Regardless of magic, men can be overwhelmed with emotions. That’s not a big revelation for many people, but for Elaine it is a big deal. It’s also a deal-breaker.

Ultimately, the idea of Elaine being a witch is less about the actual magic and more about the metaphor. The witch represents the vilification of women for trying to be the exact type of woman stereotypes tell us that men want. She is the femme fatale who seduces men into danger, but told from the perspective of the woman which highlights the absurdity of the concept. I might not be the best person to analyze some of the intricacies of the experiences portrayed in The Love Witch, but to me, the film presents the absurdity of the male gaze in the best of ways.

The Love Witch – A Recap

Elaine Parks is the focus of The Love Witch. When we meet Elaine, she is in the process of moving to a new town for a fresh start after her husband Jerry, as she says it, “left” her. Brief flashbacks show us that Jerry actually died after drinking from a goblet, but Elaine avoids using the word “died” in her inner-dialogue. She does acknowledge having a nervous breakdown after Jerry “left,” but she insists she’s fine now.

Elaine’s sole purpose in life is to find a man who will fulfill her ideal fantasy of true love and fulfillment. To accomplish this, she turns to witchcraft. As soon as Elaine settles into her new home, she starts looking for her true love. First, she meets a teacher, Wayne, who is a self-professed libertine. He is instantly entranced by Elaine, but she insists on him going through her own love ritual which includes making him dinner, dancing for him, and giving him a potion she’s concocted that contains powerful hallucinogens. The two of them spend a torrid night together, but Wayne is overcome with emotions so strongly that he dies of heart failure. Elaine buries Wayne, leaving with his body a piece of her in the form of a “witch bottle” containing, among other things, her own bodily fluids.

Elaine then sets her sights on Richard, the husband of Trish, the first woman Elaine met when she moved into her new apartment. Elaine became friendly with Trish, but when Trish is away on a business trip, Elaine swoops in. She uses the same love ritual on Richard: dinner, dance, and a love potion. The spell works in a similar way as before, giving Elaine a single night of passion before Richard is overcome with emotions so strong that they push her away. To Elaine, a man should not be so emotional, so she breaks off her relationship with him.

Meanwhile, Wayne’s body is discovered by police. The witch bottle at his grave leads a police detective named Griff to Elaine. He can’t be sure she made the bottle, so she is not arrested. Instead, Griff becomes smitten with Elaine and asks her out on a date. The date consists of horse riding, but it turns into a mock wedding when the couple stumbles upon a midsummer celebration run by witches from Elaine’s coven. Through narration but remaining unspoken to each other, we learn that Elaine has fallen in love with Griff, but Griff does not—and perhaps cannot—truly love Elaine.

Soon after, Richard, overcome with grief over Elaine leaving him, kills himself. Trish knew he was having an affair, but she didn’t know who the woman was. She discovers that Elaine was the other woman, leading to a confrontation that leads to violence and the women going their separate ways. Elaine then goes to her coven for a ritual meant to bind Griff to her.

Afterwards, Griff confronts Elaine about her role in Wayne’s death. Their conversation is in public, leading the patrons of a bar to assault Elaine with chants of “burn the witch.” Griff whisks Elaine away from the mob, and the two of them end up back at Elaine’s apartment. Griff angrily stares at Elaine. In a moment of passion, Elaine takes a knife and stabs Griff in the chest. As he dies on her bed, Elaine holds the bloody knife to her chest and becomes lost in fantasy. She imagines herself and Griff wedded in the mock ceremony from the witch’s festival. They both wear crowns of gold as Griff leads Elaine away while she sits atop a unicorn.

Keep Up with Creeptober!

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