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“Joan of Arc versus Jesus.”
That is how Anna Biller, the auteur behind “The Love Witch,” describes the climax of her arresting new film “The Face of Horror” — a Medieval tale of a chauvinist knight, Edward (Jonah Hauer-King),
desiring to leave his hopelessly devoted wife, Eleanor (Kristine Froseth), for Isabel (Bella Heathcote), a glamorous queen who can give him the life he thinks he deserves. The only things standing in his way are Eleanor’s self-possessed sister, Beatrice (Ellie Bamber), and… Eleanor’s ghost. Written and directed by Biller, and adapted from the Japanese ghost story “Yotsuya Kaidan,” the uproariously entertaining film will make its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it’s hoping to attract a distributor.
“The Face of Horror” comes a decade after Biller’s previous film, cult favorite “The Love Witch,” and like its predecessor tackles themes of courtship, power and traditional gender roles through a female lens. It’s also bursting with color and gleefully fun performances, whilst showcasing Biller’s unique command of mise-en-scène, from its sumptuous sets and dazzling costumes to the jewelry she says she spent two years sourcing.
“I’m so fascistic about my sets and location,” she tells Variety. To capture the vintage look she wanted, Biller opted for sets with high ceilings in order to bathe her troupe in soft overhead lighting, and no wide-angle shots. The result is an old-school epic that still feels refreshingly modern.
Biller spoke with Variety about “The Face of Horror” and so much more head of its TIFF debut.
“The Love Witch” was a feminist twist on serial killer films. What do you see “The Face of Horror” as?
“The Face of Horror” is still a twist on contemporary horror films. I always try to think about how we talk about this stuff without women objectified and without it being a spectacle of women’s suffering. The movie could have been a lot scarier, but it was a choice to make this movie not about Eleanor’s monstrosity, but a lot about her relationship with her sister. We don’t get to watch the spectacle of an abject, suffering woman for the majority of the screen time, as that’s something I refused to do. I’m such a huge fan of noir films. What changed? The spectacle of a powerful, disruptive woman changed into the spectacle of a woman running, crying and screaming, and the woman isn’t self-possessed in beautiful makeup and clothing but falling down in the mud. Why didn’t we continue with the strong, dangerous woman that was powerful? Why do we have these women who are either cartoonishly evil or weak and suffering? As a fan of classic movies, I miss all those characters that we don’t have anymore.
I was picturing Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity” while listening to you.
Exactly. Barbara Stanwyck would never be dragged through the mud looking awful. You could never do that to her. So, Eleanor is a monster, but she’s a powerful monster. It’s always, “Let’s punish all these ‘bad’ women for their sexual power and reward the one woman who’s a tomboy,” which is a slasher trope. I always think, “What are we looking at? What is the fantasy onscreen? Who’s watching it and who’s it benefiting?” People don’t like to imagine themselves being murdered or dragged through the mud, so these slasher films that would otherwise be enjoyable are hard to stomach sometimes. I wanted to make a horror film that I could watch over and over again that wouldn’t turn my stomach.
What inspired you to adapt the Japanese ghost story “Yotsuya Kaidan?”
A tragedy happened to a friend of mine, and I wrote my last script, “Bluebeard,” about it. It wasn’t a murder, but her life was destroyed by a man, and she will be confined to a hospital bed in a near coma for the rest of her life. I couldn’t get the “Bluebeard” script made, so I wanted to come up with a similar story that would be more marketable. “Bluebeard” was a Gothic romance with some horror, but I felt the new script should be more of a straight horror film. While I was casting about for ideas, I watched the movie “Kuroneko,” which is about a mother and a daughter who are raped and murdered by group of roving samurai. They return as ghosts and haunt the forest, killing every samurai who comes by. I thought, that’s great, I want to do a Japanese ghost story like that. So I did some research and I found “Yotsuya Kaidan,” and I moved it to feudal England instead of feudal Japan.
“Yotsuya Kaidan” is similar to “Bluebeard” in that it’s about how women’s lives are carelessly thrown away by selfish or thoughtless men. I think a lot about horror films where women are killed for entertainment. And I think back to earlier eras where movie murders were scarier and sadder because they emphasized human elements above special effects and gore. So, my project for both “Bluebeard” and for this film was to have the audience really feel the murder and grieve as if it was happening to someone they know, the way I felt it with my friend. I love Greek tragedy, Shakespearian tragedy, psychological realism in filmmakers like Pasolini, and I wanted to make a horror film with that kind of weight.
The performances in both “The Love Witch” and “The Face of Horror” are all pitched at the same heightened tone, and I’m curious how you capture that harmony?
The actors tell me it comes from the script — either that or I’m a spirit medium who’s pulling these performances out of them and they’re intuiting what I want. Nobody is trying to do anything stylized or performative; everyone is trying to get at the truth of the character. I encourage them to not be self-conscious or campy; and, interestingly enough, when the actors are fully committed to roles that are so incredibly dramatic with stakes so incredibly high and aren’t trying to be cool or detached but are fully immersed, that’s what creates the quality. Jonah Hauer-King, especially, gives a very modern performance. He depicts the knight as a spoiled, modern man-baby. He’s giving it full drama and putting it to a high pitch, and that’s what creates the comedy. And it is very funny, I have to admit. But that’s never the intent.
Speaking of casting, I know it took you a long time to find your “Love Witch” in Samantha Robinson. What was the casting process like for “The Face of Horror?”
Kristine [Froseth] came in at the very last minute right before filming because we had another actress that dropped out at the last minute. Kristine was still shooting “Her Private Hell,” so we had to push our schedule a couple of weeks for her to come on. She was filming that movie in Copenhagen on a Friday and then came to us in Prague on a Monday. And then she stayed in Prague to film “The Age of Innocence” with Ben Radcliffe, another actor in this film, which is interesting.
Who dropped out?
I don’t really want to say who dropped out because that doesn’t make her look great… She was committed to us for a year and then took a bigger movie about five weeks before shooting. But Kristine was so perfect for the role that once we got her, I didn’t care anymore about losing the other actress. It was scary before we found Kristine because it was very difficult to get the right person that was also available, and we couldn’t afford to postpone it because we’d already built the sets. But it all worked out in the end; I met Kristine and fell in love with her. And she was really funny because she went through the script very meticulously with me and picked out about 40 places where she wanted the dialogue to be changed. I’ve never had an actor do that with me before and I agreed with everything she said.
You are so heavily involved in the construction of your films. I read that you were in pre-production on “The Love Witch” for five years because you sewed all the costumes and sourced the materials.
I was sewing for two years on that, so I didn’t have to sew for this! I designed the costumes but I wasn’t sewing and just doing sketches, which was incredible. I sourced over 100 pieces of jewelry for this film and was gathering the jewelry for a couple of years. We started getting the cast together for “The Face of Horror” in 2022 and then started shooting in 2025, so two and a half years of prep. Everything felt really cohesive and everyone caught on to some magical wavelength, and that usually happens for me. I think when I create an atmosphere with sets, costumes, lighting and dialogue, it creates a world in and of itself that’s so powerful that everybody fits into it. Everything is so intense that if you don’t rise to the occasion then you’re being drab. All the actors came in a bit timid and I had to say, “Do it as big as you want and I’ll pull you back if I need to,” and I never pulled them back. They loved doing it big.
You put so much care into crafting your films and they’re so handmade, so I’m curious what your thoughts are on AI, which is very much the opposite of that.
It is absolutely, one hundred percent the opposite. One reason it looks so handmade is I hand-draw every storyboard and I do them over and over and over again because I want to make sure that things can be cut together. I’m an editor, so I know when scenes don’t do that. We had no reshoots for this — not even ADR — because it was storyboarded. The graphic designer was watching the opening battle scene and said, “This looks just like your storyboards.” It’s almost like my mind created what’s there.
I use AI for legal questions and contracts. I use my lawyer, don’t get me wrong, but I use AI for clarification because I get confused about things. Sometimes it can be a psychotherapist, although it’s weird because it’s a bit like a psychopathic therapist. If I ever give it a prompt to write something — just for fun — that’s where it fails so radically for me. It’s so bad. I don’t see how people can use AI to write because it’s so awful. I’m very into originality. A friend of mine uses AI to create art and I just never like it. It feels oppressive on some level — and demonic.
What made you so fascinated with witchcraft?
A witch is a metaphor for a woman. When you’re a woman you always feel like an outsider or different in some way — abnormal — because the male is seen as the standard human being. That can be good or bad, like you can bewitch a man or curse a man, you can be put on a pedestal or burned at the stake. But I think men essentially see us as witches, and I wanted to go into how that feels, that experience of being treated like a dangerous outsider with every little thing you do. I feel like that especially when I’m directing, like people are looking at me askance because there’s a right way to make a film and I’m doing it wrong, and some more normal, reasonable person needs to step in and save me.
How did you become interested in vibrant Technicolor films from the ‘60s?
I think I was born with it. Children love color and maybe I just never grew out of that. My father is also a painter who paints with lots of color. Eisenstein wrote in his book “The Film Sense” that if cinema is going to use color, then it has to use it in a purposeful way, and when I was in film school I really, really thought about that a lot. You have to use all the tools to say something, and color is a tool. Most people don’t think about the color and treat it as an afterthought; but for me, the color is like a lens through which to tell your story.
Did your time studying film at CalArts also inform how you want to depict women onscreen? I remember how Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” opened up my eyes in film class.
That was a key text for me as well. What I got from that text was that I should make movies the way the movies I like are. Laura Mulvey’s argument held up well for modern movies, but it didn’t hold up for classic movies because those films very much had a female gaze. So, I thought, “You know what? We’ve already solved this problem. We’ve just lost the art of respecting women and giving them a proper place in film. We’ve lost the art of wanting to tell women’s stories.” I felt, I can’t be as clever or I can’t be as slick as other filmmakers, but I can be true to myself and what I like and what I want to see. I want to see movies like “All About Eve” or “Vertigo.” When I was starting out, I didn’t have the budget, so people were comparing my films to Jack Smith because they were so crude.
What are some ways Hollywood can improve when it comes to its depictions of women?
Everything feels very packaged right now. I was getting scripts from my agent that were the “female” packaging, which I don’t like any more than the “male” packaging. There’s a template. It would be “four badass girls with weapons” or the pitches all say “‘Gossip Girl’ meets ‘The Social Network’ meets ‘Mean Girls.’” They’re referencing women’s pictures from the ‘90s and wanting to still sell on those. We’ve got a new “Legally Blonde” and a new “Practical Magic.” Everyone’s trying to push franchises and vehicles that made a lot of money instead of original content. Everything is like a TV commercial. Everything is product. It’s all product. I read these scripts and I’m like, “What is this even about?”
Have you thought about the world you’re releasing “The Face of Horror” into as opposed to “The Love Witch,” which hit theaters three days after Trump was elected but before he took office and a year before the #MeToo Movement?
It is different, and not just because of those things you mentioned, but what’s happened in cinema is different. This is going to sound egotistical, but before “The Love Witch” came out, it didn’t exist yet. I think “The Love Witch” itself has changed cinema because now I’m releasing “The Face of Horror” into a world where not only have people accepted that kind of color and they’ve accepted my work, but my work has become viral. In that atmosphere, I can release another movie and not feel like such a niche weirdo. Nobody else is making movies like me, but other directors have embraced color since then.
People have been very critical of the lack of color in superhero movies, which tend to look quite drab.
Yeah. People are tired of that and people are embracing color. Directors like Ti West in “Pearl” is using the same kinds of color ideas I have. When “The Love Witch” came out, people were really afraid of color and upset about it, but now they’re not saying that anymore. There are also many more women filmmakers and it doesn’t feel as weird to be a female director who’s creating a space for a female point of view. It feels like it could be commercial. There are a lot of independent horror films that are doing really well, particularly “Obsession.”
What did you think of “Obsession?” There are certain similarities to “The Love Witch.”
Well, the thing is: I haven’t seen it yet. And I’m afraid to see it. From what I’ve read about it, it sounds like it’s a reversal of “The Love Witch” about a woman who loves too much, but it’s doing the thing I try not to do where, even though it’s got a message that favors the woman at the end, as far as I understand, the actual spectacle you’re watching is the objectification of the woman throughout almost the entire run time. I’m a little afraid to see it because of that. It’s almost like the male point of view of “The Love Witch,” right? So, the question is: Why didn’t “The Love Witch” go that viral? The male point of view is always going to sell better.
