The Love Witch in a World Without Love (Patreon)

The Love Witch was met with both rave reviews and a wealth of critical commentary. There has already been so much said about this film—a film that I totally slept on—so I wanted to try for an angle I haven't seen discussed yet: How do we escape The Love Witch? 

The Love Witch is the tragic story of Elaine, a witch who has been psychologically abused and can only see the world through a hyper-feminized lens. We see this abuse through flashbacks. Her father, and later her husband, abuse her over her looks and her coven pushes her into a sexual “initiation” ritual. Elaine’s actions are shaped and distorted by this abuse. Elaine is on a broken quest to find her perfect man—someone masculine and not “clingy.” Sarah Marrs wrote a great article on how these gender norms are central to the discourse in The Love Witch. 

Elaine leaves a string of dead lovers in her wake whom she kills with a “witchcraft” that amounts to poisoning. We are left with the ambiguous tension of a movie with a protagonist, but no hero. Anna Biller’s decisions to shoot on film and recreate the aesthetics of 60’s Hammer Horror echo this ambiguity. It’s a movie with modern cars and cell phones, but with the looks of a 60’s exploitation film. Aesthetically, it makes sense when characters give more contemporary feminist critiques of Elaine, but it also makes visual sense when Elaine comports to the role of a 60’s exploitation villainess who is offered no redemption. 

This is a social vacuum longing to be filled. Horror, as a genre, has a diagnostic effect. It is able to look out to the world and point out that which is creating agony. Elaine, like many of the witches and monsters of Hammer films, is both our protagonist and our monster. We, as an audience, are on her side as we watch her dig deeper and deeper into an intractable tragedy. We can readily imagine alternate timelines where nothing bad ever happened to her and she uses her powers for good, but imagining our way to that place means that we need to restore the justice that is missing from her life. 

Restorative Justice, in brief, is an approach to crime that shifts the focus away from revenge and incarceration and towards healing. Victims of crime are brought into dialogue with perpetrators in hopes of reaching mutual understandings and creating a path forward. This not only does the obvious in giving victims agency, but also exposes systemic causes to all manner of crime. Elaine is denied this at every turn. 

The horror in The Love Witch is the absence of Restorative Justice. At no point was Elaine allowed to heal and find justice for her abuse. She internalizes this violence and, in turn, projects it back out onto the world. Catching relatively innocent characters like Trish in the wake of her sublimated rage. At the end of the film, Elaine collapses into a fantasy of a better world—suggesting that this peace can not be found in our reality. But it can. We need only be bold enough to restore it to our own witches.