When someone becomes sufficiently famous, the idea of them can eclipse their actual self. The Elvis that lives in your mind has at least as much to do with Elvis impersonators as with the actual person of Elvis Presley. When you know them second-, third-, or thousandth-hand, the famous can become as archetypical and abstract as Roman gods or fairytale princesses, instead of humans who lived and breathed and bled and sneezed.

Ayn Rand is, by rights, not famous enough for this to happen to her. Selling thirty million books or so makes you a popular novelist—bigger than Sally Rooney, even!—but it doesn’t exactly mean anyone can recognize your silhouette. Yet Rand is envisioned, almost exclusively, as a caricature. Part of the reason why is that Rand is absurdly easy to caricature: unyielding, austere, and emphatic, she never seemed to doubt herself or change her mind. “I have been asked whether I have changed in these past twenty-five years,” she writes in the preface added to The Fountainhead on its anniversary. “No, I am the same—only more so.” Yet the popular image of Rand feels like it’s not just riffing on her public persona, but is the end result of those riffs passing through a game of telephone. This version of Rand is a crank and a crackpot, archly unsympathetic in the manner of Disney’s evil queens, and devoting her one precious life to advocating the patently bizarre morality of Opposite Land, in which black is white and selfishness is virtue. It’s a version of Rand that seems more based on Danny Lavery’s posts on The Toast a decade ago than anything she actually wrote. And while “This movie was a disappointment. The Muppets do not take Manhattan at all. They merely visit it” is a spectacular joke, it does not double as a useful substitute for reality. Reading about Ayn Rand on the internet and thinking you understand her work is like buying an off-the-shelf Halloween costume and imagining yourself an authority on Marilyn Monroe.

For the left, Rand is a boogeyman, the harbinger of the rise of the radical right, and a case-in-point of the intellectual and moral stuntedness of that political movement. She is at once ridiculous and terrifying, the latter in no small part because of how many people take her seriously. “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged,” John Rogers wrote in 2009, “One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." For the right, Rand is a prophet, ruthlessly exposing the falsity of left-wing promises as not just incorrect, but morally unjustifiable threats to human freedom. She holds the same pride of place for libertarians as Karl Marx does for communists. (And much as Marx famously said he was not a Marxist, Rand disdained libertarianism.) These takes on Rand are perfectly compatible with one another: reactions to the same basic stimulus, filtered through one’s political tendency. But that basic stimulus does not appear to be the life and work of Ayn Rand. Both left and right overstate her influence, flatten her philosophy, and use a particular image of Rand for their own advantage. But most egregiously, she is so rarely thought about as a novelist, despite that being her primary work. Reading her most famous novel, The Fountainhead, I was constantly struck by the yawning gap between the Ayn Rand everyone talks about—including, perhaps especially, her supposed acolytes—and the contents of the book.

The poster for 1976's The Witch Who Came from the Sea shows a woman with ample breasts and a bare midriff wearing a dark, flowing cape. In one hand, she holds a bloody scythe above her head. In the other, she holds a man’s severed head. Blood drips onto the rocky islet where she stands, waves breaking around her, her long hair swept up in the wind. “Molly really knows how to cut men down to size!!” the tagline reads in bright yellow letters, “cut” underlined with a stroke of red.

It’s a great poster, both trashy pulp advertising and beautiful painting, with impressionistic brushstrokes blurring the boundary between the turbulent sea and sky. It promises a supernatural fantasy with gratuitous nudity and pleasingly gory vengeance. The Witch Who Came from the Sea is not that movie. It’s something so much better.