Watching The Love Witch is stepping into a spellbound lineage of cinema that treats color, femininity, and ritual as narrative forces. Anna Biller’s film pulls from decades of obsession with witches, desire, performance, and the illusion of control, blending horror with melodrama and a handmade, almost devotional visual language.
If you want to fully immerse yourself before revisiting (or discovering) The Love Witch (which will be playing at The Hollywood Theatre on March 9, presented by Vast Territories & Retro Release Home Video with Lowbrow Antics in attendance!), these five films offer essential context. Each explores power, beauty, and female interiority through heightened color, swooning atmosphere, and mythic storytelling.
1. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
Few films capture feminine rage and erotic mysticism as boldly as Belladonna of Sadness. This psychedelic animated reimagining of a medieval witch trial transforms trauma into a surreal, painterly descent into power and rebellion.
Its lush, hand-drawn visuals and dreamlike pacing echo the emotional logic of The Love Witch: desire as both liberation and curse. Like Elaine, Belladonna’s Jeanne navigates a world that punishes female autonomy — and answers it with spectacle, sensuality, and transformation.
Check out my Belladonna of Sadness pieces here.
2. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)
This Czech New Wave fantasy feels like a fever dream pulled from a storybook left in the sun too long. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders explores adolescence, sexuality, and fear through folklore imagery, soft-focus cinematography, and fairytale logic.
Though more innocent on the surface, the film shares The Love Witch’s fascination with feminine transformation — particularly how young women are shaped, watched, and mythologized by the patriarchal world around them.
Check out my Valerie and Her Week of Wonders pieces here.
3. The Red Shoes (1948)
Not a horror film, but still an essential piece of the puzzle. The Red Shoes is about obsession — artistic, romantic, and self-destructive — rendered in lush Technicolor excess. Its ballet sequence dissolves the boundary between reality and fantasy, much like The Love Witch dissolves the line between romance and performance.
Both films understand femininity as spectacle and labor. Love, art, and devotion demand sacrifice — often from women first.
4. Black Narcissus (1947)
A study in repression, obsession, and visual seduction, Black Narcissus uses color not as decoration but to bring forth psychological tension. Its saturated reds and suffocating atmosphere mirror the emotional volatility beneath its restrained performances.
Like The Love Witch, the film weaponizes beauty — lush environments become sites of madness, longing, and loss of control.
5. Suspiria (1977)
It’s impossible to talk about technicolor horror without bowing down to Suspiria. Dario Argento’s supernatural ballet of witches, violence, and sound design prioritizes sensation over logic — an approach that The Love Witch modernizes through playing with retro aesthetics.
Both films treat witchcraft as wholly atmospheric. Reality bends to color, sound, and ritual.
Check out my Suspiria pieces here.
Final Thoughts
The Love Witch exists at the crossroads of these films — pulling from fairy tales, melodrama, psychedelic fantasy, and technicolor excess to create something that feels both familiar and deeply original. Watching these films beforehand sharpens your eye to its references and enriches its themes: love as performance, power as illusion, and femininity as something endlessly constructed and consumed by anyone caught in its path.
So light a candle, turn off the lights.
Let the colors do the talking.
If you'd like to snag a ticket to see The Love Witch at the Historic Hollywood Theatre, you can purchase them here. Be sure to be on the lookout for new art and jewelry pieces inspired by the film, which I will be selling at the screening. Should there be any leftovers, they will go up on the site for those who are unable to attend!