Filmmaker Anna Biller Returns With ‘The Face of Horror’: Exploring Medieval Misogyny and Modern Parallels

“I think there’s a kind of neo-misogyny now that’s very medieval,” says filmmaker Anna Biller. In her much-anticipated new film, The Face of Horror, audiences are introduced to a world of caddish knights, played by Jonah Hauer-King, and a forsaken, then disfigured, bride, portrayed by Kristine Froseth, who is forced to enact her bloody revenge from beyond the grave.

Rendered in sumptuous Technicolor, the film reveals a patriarchal society in miniature; it is lucid, eerily beautiful, and deeply unsettling. Yet, the real horror at the center of the project is how easily its 14th-century setting could pass for the present day.

This new project serves as the auteur’s follow-up to her 2016 breakout hit, The Love Witch, a technicolor fever dream where the heroine, Elaine, uses magic to make men fall in love with her, only for the endeavor to lead to disastrous ends. In a cultural landscape starved of genuine glamour and distinct stylistic authorship, it is little wonder that the film has achieved cult classic status. With its explicit sexploitation-era references and an eye-popping color palette drawn directly from the Thoth tarot deck, it continues to resonate deeply.

Elaine remains a Halloween favorite among the indie film crowd, while Gen Z has discovered the movie anew, with clips racking up billions of views on TikTok. Given this massive cultural footprint, audiences have spent nearly a decade wondering why the follow-up took so long to materialize.

“It’s sort of scary to make a feminist film and have to own it… Plus, no one really wants to make them,” Biller tells Dazed. Working as an overtly feminist filmmaker has become increasingly challenging, a hurdle compounded by her famously prodigious attention to detail.

While she did not hand-sew every single costume this time around, viewers will find it hard not to gawp at the Russian doll-like sets and the deliberate, reverent nods to 1960s Hammer Horror melodrama. The Face of Horror functions as a midnight movie in the truest sense, but one anchored by a fierce, beating heart.

The Roots of the Story and Modern Misogyny

Watching The Face of Horror, viewers are immediately struck by how relevant its themes feel to contemporary society, even though the narrative is based on Japan’s most famous ghost story, Yotsuya Kaidan, written two centuries ago.

Reflecting on the parallels, Anna Biller notes that the behavior of modern men’s rights activists often feels distinctly medieval. She points to a sharp upsurge in extreme misogyny that gives the unsettling impression society has made very little actual progress.

When The Love Witch was released in 2016, it coincided with a tentative sense of hope among women, marking the very beginning of the #MeToo movement. Today, however, that landscape has shifted dramatically.

“We’re in a completely different landscape, and we thought it would be the opposite,” Biller observes. Women are increasingly frightened of speaking out because the institutional and social backlash has become so extreme. For Biller, setting a film about the patriarchy and misogyny in the medieval era felt paradoxically safer. By adapting a story rooted in a tradition over a thousand years old and drawn from a text written two hundred years ago, she hoped to insulate herself from direct attacks.

Yet, the reception proved otherwise. People are still targeting the filmmaker as though she personally authored the original source material. She finds it fascinating that a Kabuki play, which was wildly popular in Japan—a historically patriarchal culture—now appears dangerous to adapt in the modern West.

“We’re living in a more misogynistic world, in a way, because even sympathising with a woman’s plight feels radical,” she says. Critics who dislike The Face of Horror have dismissed it as a campy joke, a reaction Biller finds deeply frightening. The profound lack of empathy for what the lead character, Eleanor, goes through strikes her as sickening. Every time she releases a movie, the response is intensely polarized.

Beauty as Currency, Glamour as Magic

In the narrative, Eleanor suffers a devastating disfigurement that essentially ends her life as she knows it, leaving her with little reason to live in a society that values her solely for her appearance. Exploring beauty—along with its powerful capacity to coerce and inspire lust—remains a central pillar of Biller’s cinematic work.

In many ways, the filmmaker argues, fundamental human dynamics have not changed since the medieval era. Women are still prized primarily for their youth and beauty, whereas men are judged by their accomplishments, even as women have gained substantial societal power in recent decades. The emotional core of how society operates remains stubbornly static.

This transactional nature of appearance makes beauty function almost identically to magic, a concept that frequently preoccupies Biller.

“Yes. In The Love Witch, the spell was created with her beauty. I wanted the audience to know how constructed it was,” Biller explains. She points out that the original Scottish etymology of the word “glamour” actually refers to a form of bewitchment. Her previous film centered on a woman who felt so powerless that she utilized witchcraft to reclaim her power and glamour—framing it as something positive rather than a tool to chain herself to toxic men.

In The Face of Horror, Eleanor’s beauty grants her status within her world, prompting the character to declare, “My face and figure are my fortune.” It is a stark truth for many young women. Once that asset is violently stripped away, Eleanor must tap into a different, more formidable kind of power.

Ritual, the Male Gaze, and Cinematic Craft

Beauty is consistently presented as a ritual within Biller’s filmography. In The Love Witch, Elaine meticulously applies her iconic blue eyeshadow, while one of the opening shots of The Face of Horror features Eleanor carefully applying lipstick and blusher.

Biller loves the idea of women actively constructing themselves and their glamour, rather than perpetuating the myth of effortless natural beauty. When a woman owns her glamour, Biller explains, it ceases to be about satisfying the male gaze or internalizing outside projections. By crafting the artwork herself, the process becomes genuinely 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,” Biller notes. By starting the film with a woman creating her own image, the audience is prevented from passively consuming or projecting fantasies onto her.

Discussing the specific aesthetic choices for The Face of Horror, Biller notes that medieval women wore very little makeup, so she instead channeled a 1960s aesthetic characterized by lighter pink lips and pronounced eyelashes. Traditional eyeshadow was avoided because it did not exist in the medieval period. By contrast, The Love Witch allowed for much bolder 1960s choices, channeling the retro high-glamour looks of Twiggy, Brigitte Bardot, and Claudia Cardinale that suited Elaine’s character.

Unusually for her filmography, The Face of Horror incorporates a strongly developed male point of view. Biller ensured that the male characters were exceptionally attractive and charismatic, a deliberate choice designed to build audience sympathy for the female characters. Rather than dismissing the women as foolish for falling for these men, viewers can understand their complexity. None of the men are portrayed as purely evil; instead, they exhibit the nuanced, layered flaws common to real human relationships.

When reflecting on her target audience, Biller looks back to her high school years, when she spent time observing how powerfully men bond, how suspicious they can be of women, and how incurious they often are about female experiences. These were ordinary, pleasant boys, yet the patriarchy shaped them in specific ways.

Her films serve, in part, as a tool to teach men what women endure, with the goal of expanding their empathy. Simultaneously, she creates films for women, particularly young girls navigating the confusing realities of womanhood—where they are constantly demonized, placed on pedestals, and burdened with societal projections regarding sexuality, purity, intelligence, and morality. Above all, she makes films for fellow cinephiles, and for herself, as a means of continuous self-discovery.