Related Images invites readers behind the scenes and into the sketchbooks of working filmmakers to learn more about their creative processes.
Elizabeth Sankey’s Witches is now showing exclusively on MUBI.
Witches (Elizabeth Sankey, 2024).
Title cards are an underappreciated art and a powerful tool for every director. They can punctuate a moment, make it more comic, shocking, or beautiful. They can hold your hand and lead you sweetly down the garden path of the story you’re about to experience, or they can undermine your expectations and throw you for a loop. Even their placement in the runtime can have a huge impact. In the black-metal revenge thriller Mandy (2018) Panos Cosmatos waits 75 minutes before abruptly kicking his title card onto the screen. Conversely Luca Guadagnino places the card for Call Me by Your Name (2017) at the end of the film to enhance Elio’s heartbreaking stare into the fire, intensifying his crushing sadness over the relationship he has lost.
My new film, Witches (2024), uses clips from lots of different films, alongside filmed interviews, to depict what it felt like to lose my mind and end up on a psychiatric ward after the birth of my son. What it felt like to rediscover myself as a mad woman, a witch. In the process of making the film I watched a lot of horror films from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and as I cut clips from them I would save screenshots of their title cards. I loved the frequent use of glowing scarlet font in films such as The Witchmaker (1969) and The Devils (1971), the saturated lime greens and yellows in The Witches (1966) and Secret Rites (1971), and the cool blues and grays of Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and Possession (1981), in which the creamy font fills the screen as the camera speeds along a Berlin street. There was something so bold but also naïve about the way titles were used in these films; there was no winking, no tongues in cheeks. And I love that.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) did away with the dramatic artwork completely, leaving understated white text on a black screen, as it ushered in the hugely popular trend of found footage–style terror. And I enjoy the simplicity of that title; it reminds me of the understated cards for Burn Witch Burn (1962) and Häxan (1922). I also have a soft spot for modern films that evoke vintage horror titles, such as The House of the Devil (2009), which even includes the copyright information for the film, a trend that had all but died out by the 1990s.
These are the title cards that I returned to again and again as I was thinking about how I wanted our film to look, the tone I wanted to set for the audience. I have also included my title card for Witches, made from some grainy Super-8 footage of a moon reflected in a puddle, some The House That Dripped Blood (1971)–red font, and of course, the copyright notice published under the title, Roman numerals and all.
Häxan (Benjamin Christensen, 1922).
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).
I Married a Witch (René Clair, 1942).
Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958).
The City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1961).
The Mask of Satan (Mario Bava, 1960).
Burn, Witch, Burn (Sidney Hayers, 1962).
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962).
Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1965).
Kill, Baby...Kill! (Mario Bava, 1968).
The Witches (Cyril Frankel, 1966).
Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968).
The Witchmaker (William O. Brown, 1969).
Cry of the Banshee (Gordon Hessler, 1970).
Secret Rites (Derek Ford, 1971).
The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971).
The House That Dropped Blood (Peter Duffell, 1971).
The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos, 1971).
Daughters of Satan (Hollingsworth Morse, 1972).
Race with the Devil (Jack Starrett, 1975).
Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981).
The Witches of Eastwick (George Miller, 1987).
Teen Witch (Dorian Walker, 1989).
The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996).
The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999).
The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009).
The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016).