The Face of Horror Is A Feminist Art-Horror Fairytale Like No Other
Based on an iconic Japanese ghost story, the heightened aesthetics and tragic fatalism of Anna Biller’s latest feminist art-horror film are nothing less than sublime.
Anna Biller doesn’t agree with the idea that her movies are “camp.” This can be difficult for some viewers (and reviewers) to understand, given the heightened melodrama and stylized filmmaking that define this all-in auteur’s work. But — whether intentional or unintentional — camp has a winking detachment to it that doesn’t jive with Biller’s sensibilities. Are her films extravagantly rendered? Yes. Old-fashioned? Sure, in some ways. But insincere? Never.
Biller is all in, both in terms of the minute technical aspects of her work and in the operatic gender dynamics of her plots. In Biller’s films, beautiful women suffering for the love of selfish, craven men is just the way of the world. It’s true in 14th-century England, where her latest film The Face of Horror takes place, just as it was in ‘70s suburban L.A. in her debut feature Viva (2007) and in the timeless alternate San Francisco of The Love Witch (2016).
The women in her films want to be taken seriously as fully realized human beings — multiple characters explicitly say as much in The Face of Horror — but they also want to be loved by men. The tragic incompatibility of these goals within her narratives is a core tension of Biller’s work, making her popular cinema’s premiere poet of heteropessimism — a term coined in 2019 by theorist Asa Sesserin that, broadly sketched, refers to the ambient dissatisfaction heterosexual women feel towards love and romance, given that they’re dating, well, men.
The Face of Horror begins with a betrayal that underlines this theme in blood, as the dastardly Edward (Jonah Hauer-King) and his accomplice Richard (Leo Suter) murder the father of Edward’s lover Eleanor (Kristine Froseth) in an impulsive act of derision and rage. Edward not only manages to keep this secret from Eleanor, but uses it to convince her to marry him, and her sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) to marry Richard, under the pretense of “protecting” them, giving these duplicitous and ambitious men access to the sisters’ family manor house and farm in the process.
Edward is handsome, and Biller’s camera seems to take great pleasure in gazing at him as he lies shirtless in bed with his wife. But he is in no way gallant. Not only is he lazy and ungrateful and takes Eleanor’s love completely for granted, he then has the gall to cheat on her with a married noblewoman, Lady Isabel (Bella Heathcote). Isabel is an intelligent woman. But she, too, has a weakness for Edward’s curly hair and blue eyes — note that Hauer-King also played Prince Eric in the live-action The Little Mermaid in 2023 — and so she gifts him with a tiny vial of a formula that women in her family have used for generations against their female rivals. Without giving away too much, it glows, is supposed to be rubbed on your face, and will end one life and ruin several others.
The Face of Horror is based on the iconic Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, which first appeared on the kabuki stage in 1825 and has been adapted for the screen multiple times since then. And while the primary aesthetic touchstones here are Western — the theatrical staging in the period horror movies from U.K. studio Hammer Films, the glorious Technicolor of Powell and Pressburger, and Roger Corman’s similarly Black Plague-themed The Masque of the Red Death — the supernatural sequences in particular also have a retro Japanese influence to them. Part Mizoguchi and part Daiei gothic, these scenes are so gorgeously realized that they’re positively transcendent, as the film’s vengeful female ghost floats through misty graveyards and cold stone bedchambers with grotesque prosthetic makeup on her face and a green light illuminating her long hair from behind.
But we would not expect anything less. It takes Biller a long time to make a movie, at least in part because of her intense attention to detail. (One can also assume that getting investors to put money into projects by visionary female filmmakers is an uphill battle.) She famously sewed the costumes and created the props for the The Love Witch personally and by hand. And while she had a team of seamstresses to help create the lush medieval wardrobes worn by the cast of The Face of Horror, she designed the costumes for this film as well. That’s along with credits as the film’s writer, director, editor, co-producer, and music supervisor — Biller loves her musical interludes — suggesting a devotion to craft that’s almost like a religious vocation.
Aside from the director herself, however, the MVP of The Face of Horror is cinematographer M. David Mullen, who also worked on The Love Witch. Both of those movies were shot on 35mm film, but Biller and Mullen must also have some sort of magical potion of their own, because the look of these movies is like nothing else. Shooting in real medieval castles and churches in the Czech Republic undoubtedly helps in terms of production value. But that doesn’t account for the fact that you’ve never seen grass so green, hair so golden, silk so pink, or velvet so red as you’ll see in The Face of Horror. The sublime intensity of the ultra-saturated color palette is a stunning rejoinder to the washed-out sameness of digital color grading, something that’s become depressingly common in recent years. (Looking at you, Wicked.)
The Face of Horror goes against the grain of contemporary cinema in almost every way: The acting style also calls back to an earlier era in film history, one before silent-era theatricality was eclipsed by Method-influenced naturalism, for example. Anna Biller’s films are anti-naturalism, in form as well as content. Their feminist messaging is the most modern thing about them, but even that is pared down and refracted through the lens of style to transport the viewer to a heightened (if binary) realm of men and women, good and evil, doomed romance and burning, righteous rage. And if you can’t let down your guard long enough to engage with that anything but ironically, that’s a you problem.
