“But Then I Was Reborn… As A Witch!” - The Love Witch, Modern Femininity & Dark Eyes.

The best kind of art, to me, is the kind you have to revisit. The kind that reveals new details each time, with hidden meanings and Easter eggs you only spot later. When I made the video for Dark Eyes, I wanted to create that kind of world. My main inspiration came from Anna Biller’s cult classic The Love Witch. You really have to see it to appreciate its genius, but in short, it follows the downfall of the protagonist, Elaine (the Love Witch). After having her heart broken, she turns to witchcraft and casts love spells that make men fall obsessively in love with her, and then…she kills them.

On first watch, you might think, “Well, that’s just a campy film about a witch who kills men.” But on reflection, you realise Elaine isn’t the villain - she’s the fantasy. The whole film is a hyper-stylised mirror of how femininity is constructed. Everything about it looks like an old Hollywood dream, but it was made in 2016. That time gap is the point. The director uses nostalgia to show how little has changed. The Love Witch is a caricature of male desire: beautiful, submissive, always in control, but only inside a system that’s designed to destroy her. The more she becomes what men want, the less likeable she becomes to the audience. By the end of the movie you feel something between a mix of hating her and feeling sorry for her. Her desperation is tragic, and her relentless pursuit of male validation is a betrayal to the other women in the film. And that's the point. The more desirable she is to the male gaze, the less likeable she is to the audience. Anyway, that’s the deeper layer of the movie, and the thing that makes it so interesting. To understand why I wanted to use that story in Dark Eyes, I should probably explain a bit about the song itself.

Dark Eyes samples a 19th-century Russian melody of the same name. In the original composition, the lyrics describe a deep love for someone with dark eyes. My version is a bitter, tongue-in-cheek and slightly camp song about unrequited love with an unvailable man:  “I love his dark eyes, I bet he never dreams of mine.” "I think of him all the time, hopefully his wife don't mind."

So my idea was to parody the plot of The Love Witch, but to plant clues throughout that hint back to the Slavic roots of the song’s melody and connect the story to the wider mythology of my Black Sea album, which was heavily inspired by Eastern European folklore.

 Easter Eggs You Might Have Missed:

1. In the scene where I’m making the love potion, there’s a little shot glass with a Soviet propaganda image that says “No drinking”, and a calendar that reads “Drinking will make you go crazy.” Both are real USSR-era warnings - strange, ironic, and borrowed directly from my parent's house. (Don’t ask me why they even have those!)

   
   

2. At the start of the video, you see the cartoon Nu, Pogodi! playing as I sit in a pink dressing gown and white boots, eating crisps. It’s basically the Soviet version of Tom & Jerry (except the wolf smokes and drinks). And I think that explains a lot about Eastern European culture... (when you realise that’s what the kids grow up watching.)

   
   

3. The packet of crisps is actually a handmade prop designed by my best mate, Juan Daleas. In the UK, the most famous crisps brand we have is Walkers is so he redesigned the packet to say Stalkers. Genius, I know.

   
   

4. All the pages in the spellbook were individually stuck in and handmade. We designed spell pages and then generated fake AI images of men that I could cross out. (We didn’t want to use real men - that would’ve been too mean. But obviously dragging a guy through a forest in a body bag was totally fine and normal…)

   
   

5. And then there are the sunflowers hidden throughout the video. The sunflower is an important symbol for me: it’s the national flower of Ukraine, where my grandparents were born near the Black Sea. It also symbolises hope. When I perform live, I usually drape a few sunflowers over my mic stand as a quiet nod to that.

Aesthetically, Dark Eyes also pays tribute to The Love Witch through its makeup, costumes, and colour grading. The opening pink bedroom scenes are a nod to the Love Witch’s pink tea room scenes. The bright, colourful eyeshadow, white go-go boots, and beehive hairstyle were all intentionally picked to stay true to that vintage world.

All the female characters in The Love Witch are portrayed through different lenses of femininity - but all are portrayed in an unflattering light. The point is that women can't win. They will always be perceived as too sexy, or too unattractive, or too in control, or too weak. Dark Eyes, is a fun, visual homage to the The Love Witch that also points to some deeper and darker points about our society. Sometimes, to reclaim your story - you have to play the role they gave you, and then turn it inside out.