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Hey Fleshbot fans! It’s October, and that means Throwback Thursday is crossing over to the spooky and darker side for the month, beginning with a movie you may not have heard of. I love me some witch movies -- Practical Magic and The Craft are screened at least once a year in our house. Bell, Book, and Candle is a charming classic. Yes, even The Worst Witch with baby Fairuza Balk and Tim Curry counts as a classic witch movie for me. When The Love Witch, directed by feminist filmmaker Anna Biller, came out in 2016, it surprisingly kind of didn’t make it onto my radar. It’s got a 95% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t easy to get! I figured I would check out this decidedly adult witchy film and tell y’all about it!
The Love Witch opens with our beautiful witch, Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson), a young widow who practices witchcraft, who has just moved to the town of Arcata, CA, and rents an apartment from an interior decorator named Trish Manning. Elaine has definitely caught the wandering eye of her landlady’s husband, Richard, as well. One thing you notice immediately is that the film, despite its 2016 release, has an “old-fashioned” look to it in terms of the photography. I thought that was very interesting and added a layer of “atmosphere” is how I can best describe it. This was achieved by shooting on 35 mm film and printing from an original cut negative. Special lighting techniques and painstaking work on set and costume design make it look like 1960s Technicolor.
Elaine is lonely and works a spell to attract a new lover. She reels in a local professor named Wayne, and she slips him a hallucinogenic mickey before a night of passion at his cabin in the woods. Wayne just happens to die, and she buries him at the cabin the next morning. People are now looking for Wayne and suspecting foul play, and Trish is getting wise to Elaine’s feminine wiles, Elaine being a stereotype femme fatale. Things are starting to unravel for our potion-mixing temptress. Officer Griff Meadows and his partner Steve find Wayne’s body, and when the tox screen comes back, well, looky here, there’s jimsonweed in his blood. Ruh-oh, Elaine! I’m not going to spoil the rest of the film, but I do recommend it as a great Halloween season horror-comedy offering with some very pretty people in it to boot. Enjoy with some wine and maybe your favorite witchy herbs.
The Love Witch is available to stream for free (at press time) on Tubi, PlutoTV, and many other free streaming channels, as well as on Peacock for paid subscribers.
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