Witchfinder General (1968)

dir. Michael Reeves cast Vincent Price, Ian Oglivy, Rupert Davies, Hillary Dwyer, Rupert Davies

It is 1645. As the English Civil War rages, Matthew Hopkins (Price) travels the countryside accompanied only by his servant, John Stearne (Russell). Hopkins is authorized by Parliament to arrest, try, and execute witches and is paid for every witch that he finds and puts to death. With the cooperation of local magistrates, Hopkins goes from village to village, arresting unpopular locals, allowing the sadistic Stearne to torture confessions out of them, and hanging or burning them. In the village of Brandeston, he accuses the unpopular local priest, John Lowes (Davies) and has him tortured. Desperate, the priest's beautiful niece and ward, Sara (Dwyer), offers herself to Hopkins if he will end the torture and spare Lowes. Hopkins agrees, but eventually loses interest in Sara and has Lowes executed. Soon after, Sara is visited by her lover and fiance, Richard Marshall, a young cavalry officer fighting on the side of Parliament against the King. Furious when he finds out that his oath to protect Sara has been broken, Marshall swears vengeance on Hopkins and Stearne.

When Michael Reeves made this film, he was considered one of the most promising young British directors. He was only 25 when the film was released and had already directed a well-received horror film called The Sorcerers, co-starring Oglivy and Boris Karloff. However, in February 1969, having started work on his next film, The Oblong Box, with Price and Christopher Lee, he died of a drug overdose. It was a tragic loss to horror cinema because Witchfinder General is an outstanding film.

The film is a profoundly pessimistic one, with no really sympathetic characters except Sara. Hopkins is a cold, heartless man who craves power and money and who is entirely insensitive to the suffering of people whom he knows to be innocent. Stearne is simply a sadist. Marshall starts out as a sympathetic character, but as his obsession with killing Hopkins grows, he becomes more and more like his target. In the end, we see that he is capable of the same savagery as Hopkins and Stearne, though not directed against the innocent. Reeves shows us a time and place where people, surrounded by violence, have lost their humanity in the quest to fulfill their own selfish desires.

This is one of Price's greatest roles. He had gained fame for his flamboyant performances in the Roger Corman-directed adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories in the mid-1960's. In fact, AIP, the studio for which Corman directed those pictures and the US distributor for Witchfinder General, retitled the film The Conquerer Worm (a Poe poem) for US showings, hoping to tie it to the Corman-Price-Poe series. However, Price plays this role completely straight with none of the theatrics he brought to the Poe films, or to later films such as Theatre of Blood. Hopkins (who was an actual historical figure) is portrayed as a dead-serious, even understated man, who is never emotional. Price, with his sneering voice, is perfect for the role of a man who is contemptuous of everything and everybody around him. This role proves that Price was not only a horror star, but a good actor.

Witchfinder General was popular enough that it started a disreputable sub-genre of witchcraft/torture movies that are, in some ways, precursors of the recent "torture-porn" films birthed by the success of Saw. Among these were The Devils (1971-directed by Ken Russell), Mark of the Devil (1969), and Mark of the Devil, Part 2 (1972). These films, particularly the latter two, existed basically to titillate viewers with scenes of sexuality and torture. Although Witchfinder General includes these elements, it is much more and stands as one of the best horror films of the 1960s.