In cinematic terms, it wasn’t a good time to be a witch in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Between 1968 and 1972, more witches were put to death on film than at any time before or since. It truly was the Dark Ages of horror.
Of course, there had been witch-hunts on film before: Benjamin Christensen’s Haxan (aka Witchcraft Through the Ages) is a cheerful romp through the world of the occult dating from 1922, and features plenty of inquisitorial torture by witch finders. This notorious Swedish film caused outrage on its original release, with salacious scenes of Satanic orgies and daring nudity, and even now packs a real punch. A heady mix of documentary, surrealism and sensationalism, the film remains one of cinema’s most unique moments.
1937 saw Maid of Salem, directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Claudette Colbert. The film used the Salem witch trials as the setting for a drama that reflected Arthur Miller’s famed play The Crucible to a large degree. The Witches of Salem (confusingly retitled The Crucible in America, despite not being based on Miller’s play) appeared in 1957 from France. Director Raymond Rouleau adapted a story by Jean-Paul Satre, and the cast was headed by Simone Signoret. But it was the appearance of Matthew Hopkins – Witchfinder General (to give the film its full title) in 1968 that was to open the floodgates to a mini-boom of witchfinder films over the next few years. Michael Reeves had previously directed the Italian horror film Revenge of the Blood Beast and the British made The Sorcerers , starring Boris Karloff. Both films were effective shockers that marked Reeves as a talent to watch. With Witchfinder General, his talent peaked. Sadly, he took an overdose – whether by accident or design -a year after making this film.
Witchfinder General
The film is loosely based on the true-life story of Matthew Hopkins (the screenplay being adapted from the historical novel by Ronald Bassett), who terrorised East Anglia during the Seventeenth century. Together with assistant John Stearne, Hopkins moves from town to town, extracting “confessions” from those accused of witchcraft, before hanging them. Woven around this real life horror is the fictional story of Roundhead soldier Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), who is part of Cromwell’s army fighting the Royalists. He is soon to marry sweetheart Sara, the niece of Father John Lowes, but whilst he is away on duty, Hopkins arrives in town, summoned by villagers who distrust the priest because of his Protestant leanings. Lowes is tortured, but allowed to live for a while after Sara seduces Hopkins. However, when Hopkins is called away on business, Stearne rapes the girl, and once Hopkins discovers this, he orders the death of the priest.
Witchfinder General
Marshall arrives at the church to discover a distraught Sara, and vows vengeance. He sets off in pursuit of Hopkins, leading to the inevitable showdown. The ending of the film is one of the most powerful moments in horror film history: After being captured by Hopkins and seeing Sara tortured, Marshall escapes and attacks Hopkins with an axe, literally hacking him to death. A Roundhead colleague (Nicky Henson) stumbles onto the scene and, horrified, shoots the witchfinder. The film ends with Marshall’s screams: “You took him from me!” Ironically, this scene was the result of a continuity error. The original script had Henson shooting both Hopkins and Marshall, but Reeves realised that previous scenes had shown Henson to only have a single flintlock pistol. A hasty rewrite brought about one of the great moments in cinema! Witchfinder General is a stunning film. Utterly nihilistic in approach, it has all the power and inevitability of a Shakespeare tragedy. Reeves’ direction is confident and flawless, making a mockery of the low budget. He makes excellent use of the English countryside, contrasting the beauty with the horror that takes place.
Of course, a film like Witchfinder General was bound to run into problems. After all, British horror in 1968 meant The Devil Rides Out, not a brutal, realistic and shockingly angry film like this. Reeves had no time for traditional horror films, as evidenced by a legendary exchange between the director and his star, Vincent Price. Price, well known for hamming it up, was instructed to play the role straight. According to legend, bristling at being told how to act by this twenty four year old director, Price complained “I’ve made eighty-seven films, what have you done?”. Reeves looked at him and replied “I’ve made three good ones.” End of argument! The British censors felt that Witchfinder General was too much to take. The whole despairing atmosphere of the film worried them, as did the effect of Paul Ferris’ haunting score, which censor John Trevelyan felt heightened the violence even further. Major cuts were made, much to the consternation of Reeves, who had stated that “violence is horrible, degrading and sordid. It should be presented as such, and the more people it shocks into sickened recognition of these facts, the better.” Trevelyan accepted Reeves’ arguments, but most of his outraged BBFC staff felt the film was exploitative and needed cutting.
Despite these cuts, the film still caused critical outrage at the seemingly unprecedented violence. In America, the film was retitled The Conqueror Worm by AIP, as a desperate attempt to milk the Vincent Price/Poe connection for all it was worth. To justify the connection, a new prologue was shot with Price reading Poe’s poem. As its reputation grew over the years, many attempts were made to restore the missing footage to Witchfinder General, but to no avail. So it was a major surprise when Redemption announced the release of a restored version in 1995. And not only does this print contain all the cut scenes, but also has some additional nude scenes that were shot by Tigon head honcho Tony Tenser for export versions of the film. This longer version is now widely available.
The film also inspired Witchfinder General, a 1980s British heavy metal doom band, who named themselves after it and courted controversy with sleazy album covers. Sadly, their music did not match the imagery used to sell it!
The success of Witchfinder General inevitably led to imitations. The best known of these was Mark of the Devil, a West German production from 1969. Like its inspiration, Mark of the Devil was directed by a young British director, Michael Armstrong, who had previously made the violent psycho film The Haunted House of Horror. Mark of the Devil tells the story of Count Cumberland (Herbert Lom), who arrives in an Austrian village to become the official witchfinder. At first, his presence seems to bring a degree of justice after the excesses of Albino (played by Reggie Nalder); however, he soon proves to be just as cruel and corrupt. Whilst powerful and well crafted, Armstrong’s film is nowhere near as good as Witchfinder General, though it does share many of its elements. The film has a strong sense of indignation and anger at what it portrays, and is certainly unflinching in its approach: American distributors rated it “V for Violence” and offered vomit bags to patrons, while the BBFC refused a certificate outright (a ban which held until recently; even now the DVD release has around thirty seconds cut). It also makes use of haunting music to contrast with the extreme violence.
Mark of the Devil
Current prints of the film all end rather abruptly. For some reason, the original ending, which featured the dead returning to life, has vanished and cannot be found (although stills exist showing what it looks like). This might not be such a bad thing: a supernatural conclusion would have damaged the story considerably, and the brutal manner in which the film now finishes is strangely in keeping with the cold tone of the movie as a whole. Mark of the Devil started life as a project by ex-matinee idol Adrian Hoven, who had written a screenplay entitled The Witch-Hunter Dr Dracula, which featured the Count as a witchfinder, and which Armstrong describes as “almost hard porn.” Hoven’s producers, Gloria Film, refused to let him direct, and Armstrong was brought in. He immediately rewrote the script (using the pseudonym Sergio Cassner), much to the anger of Hoven, who ended up with a small part in the movie and directed his own scenes after a number of shouting matches with Armstrong.
Mark of the Devil
The success of the film led to a sequel, and this time Hoven did direct. Starring Erica Blanc and Anton Diffring, the film was little more that a lurid rehash of the profitable elements from the first film (i.e. the torture of scantily clad women), without any of the intelligence of power.
Following Witchfinder General and Mark of the Devil, a number of other films would deal with the “witch hunt” theme. However, these differed from their predecessors by giving the witchfinders some justification for existing: in these films, the witches were real. Tigon Films followed Witchfinder General with an unofficial sequel, Satan’s Skin (better known as The Blood on Satan’s Claw) in 1970. Director Piers Haggard follows the visual style of Reeves quite well in this effective study of corruption and evil. Popular jailbait exploitation queen Linda Hayden played the leader of a teenage cult that spreads throughout a village after a demonic skull is unearthed in a field. With some graphic gore and frank sexuality (Hayden strips to seduce a priest in his own church), the film makes a more than adequate companion piece to its more illustrious predecessor.
Blood on Satan’s Claw
The same year saw Cry of the Banshee, with Vincent Price returning as a sadistic witch-finding magistrate. A mixed affair, the film is not without effective moments, but often descends into silliness, with rather contrived orgies and clumsy attempts at shock sequences. Nevertheless, the film remains interesting throughout. Witchfinder General star Hillary Dwyer appeared in the film, adding to the feeling that these movies were all somehow inter-connected (Patrick Wymark appeared in both Witchfinder General and Satan’s Skin).
Cry of the Banshee
Jess Franco, perhaps inevitably, made a couple of witchfinder films. The more “respectable” of the two, The Bloody Judge (1969) starred Christopher Lee as Judge Jeffreys – like Matthew Hopkins, a notorious real life witch hunter of the Seventeenth century. The film is well shot, and dwells more on the historical elements of the story than the exploitational ones. That said, there were a number of gruesome torture scenes in the German version that didn’t appear in other cuts. Lee claims that the scenes were added without his knowledge. Perhaps he would prefer the American version, retitled Night of the Blood Monster, which removed all the nudity and violence to obtain a PG rating, leaving the film little more that a worthy but dull low budget historical drama. The current UK and US DVDs are restored versions with the extra sex and violence inserted into the longer, tamer edition.
The Bloody Judge
A couple of years later, Franco returned to the theme with The Demons (1972). Here, he again uses Judge Jeffreys, but there the similarity ends. The film was a sleazy, tacky and thoroughly ludicrous slice of sexploitation sleaze, with naked women undergoing various tortures and satanic rituals. Entertaining nonsense for the broad minded, one dreads to think what Christopher Lee would make of it! 
Even Hammer dabbled with the witchfinder theme. Twins of Evil was the final film in the Karnstein trilogy, and featured Peter Cushing as a puritan witchfinder who rampages across the countryside burning innocent women at the stake. When one of his twin nieces becomes a vampire, life takes a “difficult” turn for him! One of the best films to emerge from the famed studio, Twins of Evil also starred Playboy centrefolds Mary and Madeline Collinson and David Warbeck.
The best known, and still the most controversial of the witchfinder films, was Ken Russell’s The Devils, based on Aldous Huxley’s historical novel The Devils of Loudon. There can be few of you that haven’t seen this film, which continues to split critical opinion to this day. Russell didn’t shy away from showing excessive scenes of torture and sexual mania, and the film suffered a number of cuts at the hands of the BBFC. Some of this footage has since emerged and appeared on a Channel 4 documentary, but amazingly, Warners still refuse to restore the film to its blasphemous glory, and the recent BFI release is the cut X-rated version that first played UK cinemas.
The Devils
By 1972, this mini genre had burnt itself out (no pun intended). Witch trials still crop up now and again in films, but usually only at the opening of some supernatural tale, setting the scene for the vengeance of the witch’s spirit years later. There have been cinema and TV productions of The Crucible, and the 1985 TV film Three Sovereigns for Sarah starred Vanessa Redgrave and Kim Hunter in the story of a woman who attempts to get a witchcraft verdict against her overturned. At three hours long, this worthy but dull tale often felt like torture itself.
Three Sovereigns for Sarah
Inevitably, the only place left for the witchfinder to go after this was into comedy. As early as 1974, Monty Python and the Holy Grail included arbitrary witch hunting amongst its comedy targets, with the revelation that a witch weighs the same as a duck, and the final significant appearance of the witchfinder came in the form of Frank Findlay, who cropped up during the first series of Black Adder, playing the Witchsmeller Pursuivant, falsely accusing Rowan Atkinson of black magic! A witty spoof, it managed to show the insanity and maliciousness of the witch trials as effectively as any serious exposé.
But after this satire, it seems unlikely that the witchfinder film will make a comeback.
In 2001, the BBC showed Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible, a British comedy-horror anthology series created by Graham Duff, and co-written with its star, Steve Coogan (Alan Partridge). The episode ‘Scream Satan Scream!’ directly spoofs Witchfinder General (1968) and Cry of the Banshee (1970). Witch locator Captain Tobias Slater travels the north of England accusing beautiful young women of being witches and to avoid the pyre they must sleep with him, until he runs across a real coven and Slater is cursed. After all this TV satire it seems unlikely that serious witch finding will ever be in vogue again in cinemas.
In many ways, these films were typical of the horror movies of the time: cynical, hard, cold and dark… a far cry from the glossy shockers of today. The closest we’ve had in recent years seems to be the critically mauled Season of the Witch, with Nicolas Cage as an unlikely medieval soldier transporting a woman who may or may not be a witch to trial. It’s not very good. But with the appearance of more and more of the classic titles on video, a new generation can at least appreciate one of horrors briefest, yet most interesting periods.
David Flint, Horrorpedia
PS. Since this article was posted, in October 2013, news emerged that newly-invigorated British production company Hammer has acquired film rights to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate, a 2012 novella that is based on an English witch trial from the 17th century. Simon Oakes, Vice-Chairman of Exclusive Media and President & CEO of Hammer, commented on bringing this novel to the big screen:
“The Hammer imprint has really delivered some fantastic new writing and shows the vibrancy and variety of the modern day horror genre. The books under our Arrow Books deal are in themselves a fantastic extension of the Hammer brand, and Jeanette’s novella ‘The Daylight Gate’ is a fresh, exciting and compelling fictional work.”
Here’s the official synopsis for The Daylight Gate: “Set in seventeenth-century England during the reign of James I—the monarch who wrote his own book on witchcraft—The Daylight Gate is best-selling writer Jeanette Winterson’s re-creation of a dark history full of complicated morality, sex, and tragic plays for power.
This is a world where to be Catholic is a treasonable offense. A world where England’s king vows to rid his country of “witchery popery popery witchery” and condemns the High Mass and Black Mass as heresies punishable by torture, hanging, and burning.
Winterson’s literary suspense tale takes us deep into a brutal period of English history, centered on the notorious 1612 Pendle witch trials—an infection of paranoia that crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and set the scene for the Salem witch hunt.
Good Friday, 1612. Pendle Forest. A gathering of thirteen is interrupted by local magistrate Roger Nowell. Is this a coven or a helpless group of women trying to save their family from the stake? Already two stand accused of witchcraft. The wealthy, respected Alice Nutter tries to defend them, haunted by her own past entanglement with magick. She doesn’t believe in the Devil, but as she fights for justice, her life is endangered by forces visible and invisible.”
Source: Hammer press release
