“I think there’s a kind of neo-misogyny now that’s very medieval,” says filmmaker Anna Biller. In her new film, The Face of Horror, there are caddish knights (Jonah Hauer-King) and a forsaken, then disfigured, bride (Kristine Froseth), forced to enact her bloody revenge from beyond the grave. Rendered in sumptuous technicolour, it reveals a patriarchal society in miniature; lucid and eerily beautiful. But the real horror? Its 14th century setting might as well be today.
Of course, this is the auteur’s much-anticipated, starrier follow-up to 2016’s The Love Witch, a film where the heroine, Elaine, uses magic to make men fall in love with her, to disastrous ends. In our glamour-starved world, it’s no wonder it has become a cult classic, with its sexploitation-era references and eye-popping colour palette, drawn from the Thoth tarot deck.
Elaine remains a Halloween favourite amongst the indie crowd, while gen Z has found the film anew, with clips racking up billions of TikTok views. So why the decade-long wait? “It’s sort of scary to make a feminist film and have to own it… Plus, no one really wants to make them,” she tells Dazed. Working as an overtly feminist filmmaker is becoming more challenging, and then there’s her prodigious attention to detail.
While, this time, she didn’t sew the costumes herself, it’s hard not to gawp at the Russian doll-like sets and nods to 60s Hammer melodrama. The Face of Horror is a midnight movie, sure, but with a beating heart. Ahead, we dig into the push and pull of making feminist pictures, and Biller’s relationship to beauty, in all its fleetingness, coercive power and monstrosity.
I was struck watching The Face of Horror, because it feels so relevant to today, but it’s based on Japan’s most famous ghost story, Yotsuya Kaidan, which was written 200 years ago.
Anna Biller: The way men’s rights activists behave feels very medieval to me. There’s been such an upsurge in extreme misogyny that it feels like we haven’t progressed at all.
It’s interesting because when The Love Witch came out in 2016 there was a sense of hope among women; it was the start of the #MeToo movement, for example. Now we don’t have that.
Anna Biller: We’re in a completely different landscape, and we thought it would be the opposite. Women are frightened of speaking out because the backlash is so extreme. I think making a medieval movie about patriarchy and misogyny felt safer. It felt safer to make it about this very distant era, and to adapt a story that’s been around for two hundred years, from a tradition that’s over a thousand years old, so as not to be blamed in a way. But people are still going for me as if I wrote the original story. It’s interesting that a Kabuki play that was extremely popular in Japan, a very patriarchal culture, now seems dangerous to adapt. We’re living in a more misogynistic world, in a way, because even sympathising with a woman’s plight feels radical. People who don’t like The Face of Horror are calling it a campy joke, which I think is very frightening. The lack of empathy for what [the lead] Eleanor goes through is sickening to me. Every time I make a movie, it’s deeply polarising.
In the story, Eleanor becomes disfigured, which essentially ends her life; she sees little reason to live without her beauty. Exploring beauty, and its power to coerce and inspire lust, seems central to your work.
Anna Biller: In many ways, things haven’t changed since the medieval era. Women are prized mainly for their beauty and youth, while men are prized for what they can accomplish, despite us gaining so much power in recent years. The emotional core of how we operate is exactly the same.
It’s almost as if beauty is a form of magic – and we know you’re very preoccupied by magic.
Anna Biller: Yes. In The Love Witch, the spell was created with her beauty. I wanted the audience to know how constructed it was. In its original Scottish usage, the etymology of “glamour” actually refers to a form of bewitchment. The film is about a woman who felt so powerless that she uses witchcraft to reclaim her power and glamour – it’s something positive, not something that chains her to toxic men. In The Face of Horror, Eleanor’s beauty gives her status in the world. She says, “My face and figure are my fortune.” It’s so true for young women. It’s taken away from her, and she owns a different kind of power.
Beauty is also presented as ritual in your work: Elaine in The Love Witch meticulously applies her iconic blue eyeshadow, and one of the first shots in The Face of Horror is Eleanor applying lipstick and blusher.
Anna Biller: I love the idea of women constructing themselves and their beauty, rather than seeming like they have it naturally. When you own your glamour, it stops being about the male gaze and what people are projecting onto you. You’re creating the artwork yourself, so it’s empowering. I feel like the most horrible thing is being a teenager and not wanting to be looked at, and men are still looking at you. It’s their fantasy. The film starts with the woman creating her own image, so that we don’t feel like we’re projecting onto her. I don’t want women to be passively consumed.
How did you land on the beauty looks in The Face of Horror? There’s a very distinctive pink lip that all of the women wear.
Anna Biller: Medieval women didn’t wear very much make-up. I was going for that kind of 60s glamour for them, with a lighter pink lip and eyelashes. Of course, you can’t do eyeshadow in the medieval era, as they didn’t wear it. For The Love Witch, there was also 60s glamour, but you could go much bigger. For Elaine, that blue lid is literally what she would have been into, because she’s a retro girl. That was the make-up that was in back then: that whole Twiggy look, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale… High-glamour make-up.
You have a male POV in this, which is quite unusual for your films.
Anna Biller: You’ll notice that the men in this are super hot as well [laughs]. That was conscious. I wanted attractive, charismatic men because that was a way of creating sympathy for the women. Rather than people thinking the women are pathetic for loving these men, you can see why. They’re complex. None of the men are fully evil. They all have nuances, levels and layers. That's what we have in our lives: men who are complex.
Who do you make your films for?
Anna Biller: When I was in high school, I hung out with a large group of men. I learned how powerfully men bond, how suspicious they are of women, and how deeply incurious they are about our experiences. These were nice people, not primitive in any way, just ordinary nice boys. But they were raised in a patriarchy, and it made them this way. My films are a way of teaching men what women go through, to expand their empathy. I also make movies for women, especially young girls who are confused about this strange thing called womanhood, where you are constantly being demonised and put on a pedestal, and having sexuality, purity, stupidity, and evil projected onto you. I make films for cinephiles, because I myself am a cinephile. And lastly, I make films for myself, to learn about myself.