Interview: Anna Biller

“The unwanted male gaze is bad enough, but what about the gaze you respond to? That gaze can ruin your whole life.” - Bluebeard’s Castle, Anna Biller 

In her committedly feminist body of work—which includes Viva (2007) and The Love Witch (2016), for which she served as writer, director, producer, composer, art director, costume designer, and editor, as well as several surreal shorts—Anna Biller plays with genre tropes, transforming misogynist fixations into sly commentary on contemporary patriarchal society. Biller’s films are self-aware and wickedly funny, yet full of heart. They center the interiority of their female protagonists, treating their fears and desires with the utmost gravity. 

This past October Biller published her debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle, with Verso Books. Just as The Love Witch juxtaposed ’60s iconography with a 2010s setting, Bluebeard’s Castle upends the tropes of the thriller from across the decades, scrutinizing both the brooding Gothic lover whose transgressions are excused by his passion and the final girl whose survival depends on her sexual purity. The book is a retelling of the titular folktale about a woman who discovers that her husband is hiding a murderous past. Judith, the protagonist, is a romance novelist who has never found love herself, always dwindling in the shadow of her perfect sister, Anne. When the dashing Gavin expresses interest in her, she allows herself to be swept off her feet and inducted into his world of glamour and secrecy—but at what cost? 

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Biller about her new book. Over the course of our conversation, we discussed the challenges and rewards of prose writing, the public’s fascination with true crime, and the limitations of the romance and horror genres, among other topics. Proceed with caution, intrepid reader: spoilers for Bluebeard’s Castle lie ahead.  

Britt: I’m aware that you originally intended for Bluebeard’s Castle to be a screenplay. I’d love to hear about how you translated the story into the novel format. Did you try to transpose dialogue and action scene by scene, or did you start your novel draft from scratch? 

Anna: I copy and pasted the screenplay from Final Draft into Microsoft Word, and then I took the names out and typed in, “he said,” “she said.” I did that so I would have a skeleton and I wouldn’t have to do so much work going back and forth. Then I took the scene descriptions and expanded them. My first draft was pretty mechanical; it wasn’t really like a book yet, even though I fleshed it out a lot. Then I did another draft where I tried to really make it into a novel. I added a lot of things and played with structure. 

When I wrote the screenplay, I was mainly watching movies—women’s pictures from the 40s, gaslighting pictures like Gaslight and Rebecca, and all these suspense dramas where a woman’s with a terrible man and she’s not sure if he’s a monster or the love of her life. When I started writing [the book], I tried to read all the most famous Gothic novels one could possibly read. I listened to a lot of audiobooks so I could walk and do things while listening. I worked really hard to make it a novel—I wrote at least ten drafts.  

Britt: I’m curious about your Gothic romance influences. Obviously there are notes of classic novels like Rebecca, but are there any lesser known works that you drew upon and would like to recommend to readers? 

Anna: I really like Dragonwyck by Anya Seton. That’s from the ’40s. That was also made into a movie, but the book’s much better than the movie. The villain’s a complete Bluebeard-type character—he’s extremely evil. I love The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe—maybe the very first literary Gothic novel ever written. It has an incredible heroine. I love the older novels, 18th-century novels especially. They’re so frank andmorally didactic, but they’re also super naughty—like de Sade, Dangerous Liasons. I was reading that stuff too. I reread Clarissa, one of my favorite novels, which is also kind of about a Bluebeard. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was key to me because it’s another tragedy. I wasn’t reading too many actual romances. There’s Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt, which I thought was pretty good… I read Flowers in the Attic, which I just loved. I didn’t read it as a kid; I only read it recently. That’s about child abuse, and I have a lot of child abuse in my story.I thought the way it was treated was interesting. It’s melodramatic but also quite serious, and that’s the tone I was trying to achieve—making the novel kind of pulpy and fun to read and dramatic and a page-turner, but underneath that quite serious. And I was reading all the classics—Dracula, Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, Jekyll and Hyde. I think my novel might have an 18th- or 19th-century sensibility in the end because I was reading so many of those novels, getting the language in my mind, but also trying to make it modern. And the modern stuff just came from my experience. I feel like it’s a mix between the 1850s, the 1950s, and today.  

Britt: I have two sisters, so I was particularly intrigued by the relationship between Judith and Anne. Sometimes they’re surprisingly tender with each other, but most often Anne comes off as cold or out of touch. What inspired their dynamic? 

Anna: There can be a very negative or combative relationship between sisters who are envious of one another. Anne never says it, but she’s probably envious of Judith’s brains. She’s probably defensive that she only has her beauty, so she really pushes that. Sibling rivalry is so common. I have sisters. (Laughs) With a family dynamic where you have narcissistic parents, they control the children’s lives, so the children can’t ever really be friends. I explain that very briefly in the beginning when Judith is complaining about her childhood. She says that because the mother rejected her, the whole family needed to reject her, or else the mother would turn against them. Anne has that embedded in her. Even though the mother is dead, she’s afraid of supporting Judith too much because Judith has been shunned by the clan and can’t really ever be allowed back. Sometimes some humanity shines through, where she’s kind to her and feels for her, but the second Judith does anything she dislikes, she just rushes back to her initial position, which is “You’re a freak, I don’t like you.” Also, some people are just selfish. I’m trying to do psychological realism here, even though it’s a fanciful setting. I did read some contemporary romance novels, and I found some of the relationships in them unrealistic. Girlfriends and sisters, everybody is all loving and I didn’t find that too realistic.  

Britt: There’s a tendency in a lot of modern romances to have sisters or friends who are just there to boost up or criticize the protagonist—and that was definitely not the relationship between Judith and Anne, which I appreciated.  

Anna: I don’t relate to that when I read contemporary novels about female friendship. I love My Year of Rest and Relaxation partly because of how mean the protagonist is to her friend. It was really over the top—like, I don’t think anyone would be quite that mean—but it was refreshing as a departure from the cliche of supportive female friends. 

Britt: For sure—everyone has their moments of selfishness and cynicism. On the note of romance—there’s a scene in Bluebeard’s Castle where a journalist asks Judith why she writes Gothic romances. She answers, “Romance is written by women, for women. My books pose the questions: Is it a crime to be a woman—to be feminine? Is it a crime to desire the wrong man—or desire sex at all?” In many ways, Bluebeard’s Castle is a love letter to the romance genre, but it’s also very critical of it—after all, Judith’s fascination with tropes from romance novels is partly what keeps her coming back to Gavin. I’d love to hear more about your relationship with the romance genre overall. 

Anna: What’s fascinating to me is that the old Gothic romances—Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights—have a lot of cruel behavior from men, but the language is coded because women were not allowed to criticize men, even if they were using pseudonyms. You probably couldn’t sell a novel criticizing men at the time. Even a book depicting a relationship where a woman was criticizing a man would be unthinkable. I think of Jane Eyre, Rochester is a monster but she’s not really allowed to tell us that. He’s got his wife locked in the attic. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is torturing his second wife… There’s a lot of cruelty in these men. These women are telling us stories about these toxic, cruel men, but they’re not being overt about it.  

What’s interesting is that in this day and age when we’re allowed to criticize men, the romance novelists refuse to do it—and it’s for a different reason, for marketing reasons. For example, I think the most interesting thing about Fifty Shades of Grey is how cruel and toxic that man is. And I think that is the major appeal of the book—going through that with the heroine. But in the end, he ends up not being judged by the writer. Before, I think writers were being policed through the mores of the 19th century, when you couldn’t criticize a man. Now it’s through the mores of the book industry. And it’s really the readers policing it. It’s the readers who will not accept an abusive relationship where it turns out that the man really is abusive. The readers want him to be rehabilitated and tamed by the woman.  

I was wondering why I couldn't find any romance books where the man wasn’t able to be tamed, because I know in real life dominant men can’t be tamed. Maybe it’s possible, but I think that the way to tame a dominant man is to be submissive to him, which is what Judith tries to do. And that sometimes can work—but it also means that you’re living a life of total submission to another human being, and that’s not good for everyone. 

Britt: And in the end, Judith fails to escape, even though she tries those strategies. 

Anna: I’m getting a lot of flak for Judith being submissive. But she’s submissive because it’s a ploy. And it’s the only ploy that works with a man like that. It works for a while—she keeps him for a long time. It’s when she tries to leave… When women try to leave a controlling man is usually when they get killed. He knew she was trying to leave, and he wasn’t going to let her leave. I was trying to mix up the Gothic with realism. And that’s what I appreciate about Flowers in the Attic. I think that’s what literature does, and I was trying to make this a literary Gothic novel. And I don’t think those exist so much anymore. And the reason is, again, because the marketing determines the end of the book. If you’re solidly working within a genre, the genre has requirements, and you have to conform to the genre instead of telling the story you really want to tell. I was trying to go outside of genre and just write something real. I started studying femicide, how many women are really murdered by their partners and how widespread it is. It’s not really reported on anymore—it’s just too common. There was this woman last year… Do you remember this? She was really young, she had a boyfriend, she went missing… 

Britt: Gabby Petito? 

Anna: Yeah, yeah. The thing that was so weird about that story is not only that it was true that she was murdered by him, which everyone suspected—but when they were combing the woods, they found several other bodies of women who had been murdered by their partners. They just happened to find them because they were combing the woods more than they usually do. And they caught some of the guys who did it. 

Britt: I had no idea about the other bodies. I just knew about Gabby’s case because that’s the one that was so widely publicized. 

Anna: Those other cases weren’t really publicized. We only know a fraction of the women that are murdered, because the other bodies are so successfully hidden that the women just go into the missing persons files. And if the families don’t have the money or the resources to get an investigation like that going—it’s usually rich people, white people, who do—it’s very easy to kill a woman and hide the body. A lot of the submissive behaviors that we as women adopt unconsciously, or the “nice” behaviors that we adopt with strangers, [come from] the fear that you could make a man angry and end up dead. I’m very shocked at some of the early responses to my book that hate Judith for being weak, or ridicule her or say they wish she would die already. I’m really shocked that a lot of this hatred of women is coming from women. 

Britt: There’s been a lot written about women’s obsession with the true crime genre—some people see it as self-protective or empowering, while others view it as paranoid or psychically damaging in some way. What do you personally make of it? 

Anna: Well, I’m personally fascinated by true crime, which is one reason I wrote a story like this. But I noticed that [while I was conducting research for the screenplay] I couldn’t bear to watch most true crime dramas because they were all so dreary and cheaply made. They’re all about the detectives and the victims are kind of just numbers, which really bothered me. I wanted to tell a story from the victim’s point of view—and I wanted to make it really good. People like a good crime novel or detective novel or Gothic novel because it’s fun to read, and then they get the message from it. But if you write something that’s boring or didactic or clinical, no one’s going to read it.  

Britt: In Bluebeard’s Castle and also on your blog, you write about your discomfort with certain aspects of the horror genre, particularly how it sensationalizes and fetishizes women’s suffering. How do you prevent yourself from falling into these historic tendencies when you’re playing with the horror genre? 

Anna: One thing I always think about and actually wrote about in my novel is the idea of the final girl. People think that a movie’s empowering if there’s a final girl—but if somebody has seen like, seven of their friends murdered and they survive, is that really a triumphant ending? (Laughs) 

Britt: They’re not really gonna walk out of that experience unchanged. 

Anna: Yeah! You’re gonna be terrorized for life. When I’m watching certain slasher movies, even the ones that people are calling feminist movies like Halloween, I feel this cliche of the genre in my gut: the girls who are acting up, talking back, kind of bitchy, having premarital sex, dressing slutty are the ones that are killed. The final girl is kind of androgynous, a little bit like a man. She doesn’t show her emotions. She’s calm under pressure. She dresses in an androgynous way, or at least not sexy. She’s not rude to men. It feels to me like the patriarchy saying, “Girls, watch out, because this is what’ll happen to you if you step out of line and don’t do what you’re supposed to do. Be a good girl, don’t talk back to men, don’t dress slutty, and we’ll let you live.” I don’t see how these movies are feminist. They could be fun to watch or entertaining, but I don’t think they’re feminist. I think they’re pretty sexist, most of them. 

Britt: What makes a horror film feminist, in your opinion? Do you think it’s possible to have a horror film that’s truly feminist? 

Anna: Feminism has to be in the text. People hate that sometimes about my work—that I actually put feminism in the text. They’re like, “That’s so obvious,” “That’s so stupid.” But to me, it’s only feminist if there’s feminism in the text. There are some feminist horror movies but not many that I can think of. The major one that I can think of is the original Stepford Wives. That is about the women’s movement and the men killing the women and creating robots in order to replace women, because all of the women are becoming feminists. That’s a dystopian nightmare, but it’s very real in terms of the issues of the time. Men were feeling extremely angry and frustrated at women. They wanted women to behave like they did before the women’s movement. They wanted them to be passive and submissive and loving and servants, and the women weren’t going to do that anymore so the men had to get rid of the women. That’s a very strongly feminist text. If you’re just saying, “This movie has some women with speaking roles, and not all of them are murdered,” that doesn’t qualify as feminist to me. 

Britt: What are some of your other favorite feminist horror films? 
 
Anna: Jennifer’s Body is feminist, right? Certain revenge movies… I tend to like old movies in general, so I tend to like old horror films. Whether or not they’re deliberately feminist, they’re definitely not as misogynistic. It’s not about having fun at the expense of women getting murdered. The older films have more discretion. I love Carnival of Souls, Horror Hotel, Horror of Dracula, Eyes without a Face. I like the Japanese movies like Kwaidon, Kuroneko… Those have really interesting female characters in them. I love Peeping Tom—it has so much compassion and empathy for a serial killer but in a really interesting way.  

Horror is a genre, and the genre has required for a few decades now that you get some sexual titillation from watching women be murdered. Maybe some of the newest ones are not like that, but starting in the ’70s, it was just decades of that kind of horror. It’s from the sadistic killer’s point of view. Even with Psycho, although Marion Crane is murdered halfway through, the rest is from the point of view of her surviving sister and boyfriend. Norman is a curiosity, but it’s not from his point of view. After that, you started to get movies from the killer’s point of view—or movies where the killer becomes the hero. I feel like this coincided with women disappearing from cinema—not just from horror but in general. In action pictures, in thrillers, women are kind of sidekicks or invisible. I love these older movies because women are great characters. I prefer a movie like Sudden Fear with Joan Crawford to even the ’60s horror because the woman is really driving the action. It’s about this man she marries who wants to kill her, and how she gets revenge, and it’s just amazing. Those movies to me are a pinnacle of women’s cinema, feminist women’s cinema. Most people haven’t even seen them. Those are my favorite movies—the ones that people aren’t seeing, which is so sad… People know about Rosemary’s Baby. That’s a great feminist horror film to me. It’s all from her point of view; it’s her nightmare. It’s really beautifully filmed and really scary. That to me is one of the best. 

Britt: Rosemary’s Baby stands out to me, as well as Repulsion. 

Anna: Repulsion, too—that’s another great one. Those are really great films and they have so much from the interior of the woman, which is what I was trying to do, too. Something is happening to the woman that’s a nightmare, but she’s unable to see it until towards the very end. In Repulsion, her mind is thinning there, but… In Judith’s case, her mind is also part of the nightmare. It’s half what’s happening to her and half what her own mind is doing to her. I was very much influenced by those movies. 

Britt: You mention Joan Crawford. There’s a passage in the book where you write about Judith’s goddesses—women she looks up to and desires to emulate. You list Aphrodite, the Virgin Mary, Joan Crawford, and Ingrid Bergman as those inspirations to her. Who would you consider your goddesses? 

Anna: Not the Virgin Mary. (Laughs) I’m not Catholic. But definitely the classic movie actresses I mention. I also mention Marlene Dietrich and Mae West a couple times. All the screen goddesses are my personal goddesses. 

Britt: On the note of Catholicism—I thought it was interesting how both Bluebeard’s Castle and The Love Witch immerse themselves in these very involved belief systems. In The Love Witch Elaine has the world of the occult, whereas Judith is Catholic. While you were studying these belief systems, did you notice any interesting parallels or contrasts, particularly in terms of how they treat women? 

Anna: There’s definitely a strong parallel between Catholicism and witchcraft. Paganism actually came first, but a lot of people who come into neo-witchcraft are ex-Christians and Catholics who imitate the rituals. When people are really at the end of their rope, they often turn to some religion to help them understand their life. Both of those characters have a belief system they found to help them survive. And they both saw some sort of a goddess… a potential for women… It wasn’t really about how women were treated. Judith ignored how women were treated in the Catholic Church. She didn’t really care about that. She was trying to just focus on the parts that she liked. And she liked that Catholics worshipped a woman. She just thought that was incredible. In this world, we’re not really worshipping women… there are the pop stars and the film stars, but they’re often torn down. There’s no sense of worshipping women the way we used to in the past. The screen stars of the past—people just loved them. They weren’t being torn down and laughed at and picked apart.  

With the Virgin Mary, there’s this veneration that goes back hundreds of years. They worshipped this woman that wasn’t really a real woman, because she was a virgin and a mother—this impossible woman, a symbol of a woman. That’s always dangerous, to worship idols, I think. I’m not for or against religion, but I’m interested in how people have a confirmation bias. They believe those things that align with what they already think. And Judith just loved the pageantry of Catholicism… in a way it was part of her narcissism.  

Britt: Last but not least, as a major admirer of your work, I have to ask you—what’s next? 

Anna: I’m working on a movie set in Medieval England that’s adapted from an old Japanese ghost story. We’re casting it now.  

Brittany Menjivar was born and raised in the DMV; she now works and plays in the City of Angels. With her partner in crime Erin Satterthwaite, she runs Car Crash Collective, hosting late night literary readings at Footsies Bar in LA. Her poetry and fiction have been featured in HAD, Dream Boy Book Club, Spectra, and Dirt Child, among other publications. Additionally, she was named a 2023 Best of the Net Award Finalist. You can stream her short film “Fragile.com” on YouTube’s ALTER Channel, where it has nearly 2 million views.