You clicked it anyway! This is on you, now!

Regular Outpost readers will recall that Humboldt was constantly required to be ready for its closeup in 2015 when a number of films with actual budgets utilized our fair county as their what-a-weird-place movie sets. Remember that? When Daniel Radcliffe and Kirsten Dunst walked among us — The Shanty! Denny’s! — while shooting their art house-y films Swiss Army Man and the yet-to-be-released Woodshock, respectively? Yeah. Big fun. 

Oh, but there was another movie! Maybe it was the absence of comparable star power that allowed The Love Witch to slip our minds for a spell. It wasn’t until the psychedelic, retro-looking trailer popped up in our newsfeed that we remembered we’d crashed a few days of shooting on the Arcata Plaza and at The Carter House Inn back in June 2015. 

Above and below: Filming in front of The Carter House Inn and on the Arcata Plaza, June 2015

“My boyfriend used to live up here and he said it was very witchy and Victorian,” director Anna Biller told us at the time about why she decided to film in Humboldt. If you were hoping for something spooky for family movie night, maybe don’t pop that popcorn just yet. Much like the Radcliffe and Dunst vehicles, this film sounded like one to shield the children from. Here was the synopsis we had last year: 

THE LOVE WITCH is a film about a woman who becomes a witch in order to get love into her life. The script was originally inspired by pulp novels and cult films from the ‘60s and ‘70s. There was a lot of prurient curiosity during the sexual revolution about naked witches and their rites and orgies, as people became both curious about and afraid of women’s new sexual powers. But the main character, although a “sexy witch,” is mostly interested in the thing that has traditionally been every witch’s real specialty – love.

Great! Well, over a year later, we have a The Love Witch trailer and, yup, everything you read above seems to be present and accounted for. LoCO will label it NSFW to placate a few of you, we guess, but, yeah, whatever. Behold!: 

Humboldt shot in 35mm! Love it. That’s relative newcomer Samantha Robinson in the title role. While The Love Witch is set to open in select theaters on November 11, the film has been screened at a few festivals which earned it — and Robinson, in particular — a generally positive review in Variety. They say:

Robinson does a great job encapsulating another era’s kitten-with-a-whip affectations, and Biller drenches her star turn in all the date-appropriate accoutrements: not just the expected over-the-top splendors of retro costume and production design (by Biller herself, natch), but zoom lensing, prism effects, gauzy soft focus, garish lighting gambits, and so forth.

Read the full review here, and then get back to your alleged “W.”

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