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The Love Witch & The Autopsy of Jane Doe: Power, Torture, and the Cost of Desire
Two 2016 horror films, two naked witches, two radically different outcomes. This week on The Witch Movie Project, Blane and Courtney Pearl unpack the visual feast of The Love Witch alongside the suffocating dread of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, films that arrived within months of each other yet occupy opposite ends of the witch-horror spectrum.
The Love Witch is a meticulously crafted homage to 1960s cinema, built from Thoth tarot symbolism and color theory that separates masculine sun energy from feminine moon energy. Samantha Robinson's Elaine is a woman emerging from mental health crisis, using witchcraft to manufacture love through desperation, and the film asks whether her power is genuine empowerment or a trap she's building for herself. The tarot cards she pulls (Five of Cups, The Tower, Three of Swords) telegraph emotional ruin before it arrives.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe inverts the formula entirely. A corpse that never moves, a 17th-century witch tortured into existence by the very people who feared her. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch navigate an isolated morgue where the weather itself becomes a character, where isolation breeds terror, and where the discovery of Leviticus verses and ritualistic wounds finally names what they're facing. Steven King called it worthy of Alien.
Both films weaponize nakedness, symbolism, and the female body, but one uses it as seduction, the other as evidence of systematic torture.
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