Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) and The Witch Trials of J K Rowling (2023)
Please be warned, spoilers for Witchfinder General (1968), and The Wicker Man (1973) lay within (and if you’re one of these people who thinks that there’s some kind of time limit on spoilers, well… that doesn’t make sense. People can only watch a movie when they watch a movie, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a day old or 100 years old, if they’ve not seen it, then they’ve not seen it, end of).
‘They swim… the mark of Satan is upon them. They must hang.’
So, J K Rowling’s having a bit of a… er, a time, amirite? I don’t wanna rehash it all and go over it from the start, but suffice it to say for now that in recent years the Harry Potter author has found herself at the centre of a storm of controversy involving her… views on trans people. Right now, I wanna make it clear that I’m not a psychic, and therefore I have no way of knowing for certain what good old J K Ro’ actually thinks. I don’t know what the f goes on in her head. But, I do have some interpretations about what’s happening that I think it’s worth looking at and discussing, and a part of that will involve needing to make assumptions about how she feels and what she thinks. I hope these assumptions are drawn not from a place of overt bias or bad faith, but from a logical progression of ideas drawn from her own words, but I’m a person, and one pretty damned close to this whole thing, so my own personal thoughts will ultimately factor into how I do this. There’s not a lot I can do about that… sorry.
Anyway, for those of you who don’t know, the author sometimes known as Robert Galbraith (irony is dead) recently made some claims that are, well… they’re a bit weird. Primarily, she made the claim on her twitter feed that she has “never once [said] that I’m the victim of a witch hunt by trans people”. Now, on a surface level, I suspect this is probably true; she hasn’t ever said those exact words. But… here’s the thing, context matters. Bigotry doesn’t always take the form of overt and out loud ‘I hate’ statements, and in fact more often than not it comes in far smaller, less recognisable forms. But, as Alexander Tsesis points out in their book Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, “when hate speech is systematically developed, it sometimes becomes socially acceptable, first, to discriminate and, later, to oppress identifiable groups of people” (Tsesis, A. 2002). To demand, as Rowling did over her detractors on that twitter convo, to be shown the “actual words” is to argue in bad faith. It is to purposefully ignore and dismiss how hate movements grow and how bigotry can present itself.
More importantly, perhaps, however, came the response to the author’s demands that her detractors “show the actual words […] where I said I’m the victim of a witch hunt by trans people”. As twitter user @arsonistalien pointed out, she is quite literally on a podcast called The Witch Trials of J K Rowling. What’s more, this is a podcast, as Nicholas Quah of Vulture puts it, that “purportedly seeks to engage with the Rowling controversy as comprehensively as possible” (Quah, N. 2023). Now, look, if we’re to take Rowling at her word, then I’ll accept that she’s not actually claiming she is the “victim of a witch hunt by trans people”… but — okay, she’s brought up witch hunts. She has. No one else. The title of the podcast is The Witch Trials of J K Rowling, so not only has she brought up witch hunts, she’s also linked herself to them. But she’s now saying she doesn’t view herself as the victim. So, my question is; how is she viewing herself here? And with all of that in mind, let’s talk about Witchfinder General.
My horror journey started young. I couldn’t have been much older than eight or nine when I first discovered the Hammer Horror films, most often played late at night on BBC2. I used to stay up and watch them whenever I could, and even if I didn’t manage to catch them live, I would tape every single one on glorious VHS for consumption later. I loved the lavish colors, over the top production, the classic feel and prestige that came with the likes of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. To me, the camp and excess was all part of the fun. And soon, I was busy seeking out other films of the kind. Of course, the first port of call here was Amicus Productions, because — as Peter Hutchings writes — “of all the British film companies that sought to emulate Hammer’s success in the horror genre throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Amicus was one of the most prolific and distinctive” (Hutchings, P. 2021).
But my journey to find all the media I could from this era would take a somewhat surprising turn when my dad introduced me to Robin Hardy’s musical masterpiece of paranoia and terror, 1973’s The Wicker Man. The Wicker Man blew my head off, I didn’t realise movies could end like that... I mean, wtf??? I rememer waiting for the cavalry to show up and save the day, but instead just stuck there watching as Edward Woodward’s arrogant and puritanical police sergent was left to burn to death inside the titular efigy, the folk of Sommerisle blissfully singing in unison, drowning out his horrified, painful screams. It was shocking. I needed more. I had discovered ‘folk horror’!
The Wicker Man had sparked my interest, but my quest for more of this sort led me nowhere, really. The truth is the subgenre now called ‘folk horror’ is one that’s pretty hard to define, and back then I didn’t even have a name for it. For one potential definition, we can look to Adam Scovell’s excellent book, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, in which the academic writes that folk horror “can be considered a channelling of any of the following formal ideas: A work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes. A work that presents a clash between such arcania and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity, often within social parameters. A work which creates its own folklore through various forms of popular conscious memory, even when it is young in comparison to more typical folkloric and antiquarian artefacts of the same character” (Scovell, A. 2017). Of course, to me at the time, that didn’t mean anything.
Folk horror is actually a relatively new subgenre of horror in the grand scheme of things. According to the ever-reliable Kevin Lyons, the first use of the term seems to date back to 1970, when “reporter Rod Cooper from British trade journal Kine Weekly filed a short report on the film under the headline Folk horror study from Hemdale and Chilton” (Lyons, K. 2018), in which Cooper was discussing director Piers Haggard’s iconic and controversial 1971 horror flick, The Blood on Satan’s Claw. For most of us, though, it was Mark Gatiss’ excellent three-part BBC documentary, A History of Horror, where the phrase would really take hold. Gatiss used it to describe a trio of British films he said “shared a common obsession with the British landscape, it’s folklore, and superstitions” (Gatiss, M. 2010). Alongside The Wicker Man and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the third film mentioned in Gatiss’ so-called ‘Unholy Trinity’ was Michael Reeves’ 1968 historical drama/horror, Witchfinder General, a flick I had never heard of until watching the doc on TV, but one that I knew immediately I just had to get ahold of as soon as I could.
And let me tell ya, folks! I really fucking liked it! Witchfinder General is a difficult film to watch, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s also an incredibly well made, incredibly effective one. It is one of the few flicks I can honestly say sits with me constantly, whirring around in my head. Arguably it has influenced my very view of the world. Witchfinder General tells the story of Matthew Hopkins, played in the film by horror icon Vincent Price, who murders and blackmails his way across East Anglea in 1645, under the guise of interrogating those accused of witchcraft, using violent and abusive methods of torture — and sometimes outright death — in an effort to prove that they have made a covenant with the Devil (Thomas, K. 1971). Hopkins was a real-life English witch-hunter, perhaps best known as the author of his book The Discovery of Witches, in which he describes his work in great detail. He reportedly “had around 300 women executed in East Anglia during the turmoil of the English Civil War in 1645 and 1646” (British Library, 2023), and — I think it’s fair to say — was all round just kinda a dick.
Upon first watch I was shocked. I knew about the witch trials here in the UK, but I had never really given it much consideration, and learning that this kind of horrific and nightmarish stuff happened, and was carried out by people of an official capacity, really was quite the gamechanger for me. But there’s something else about Witchfinder General that stuck with me, and that’s something a little deeper. Beneath the gorgeous yet gritty landscapes and the visceral, violent nastiness lay something far more insidious and far closer to home. It’s one thing being terrified of literal witch hunts — and they truly are terrifying — but Matthew Hopkins, the flick’s antagonist, is a different beast altogether. His villainous presence spreading and infecting the very landscape and people around him. He is legitimately scary, and he is so because he’s all too recognisable and real. As Adam Scovell puts it, “unlike the villagers in the towns that he pollutes with his ideology of fear and misogyny, he is an evil seemingly born of some other force” (Scovell, A. 2017).
Reeves’ film explores Hopkins’ as a character, however, plays it pretty fast and loose with historical accuracy. As Q. Turnour notes, “neither Hopkins or [his assistant] Stearne were historically the sort of melodramatic “anti” Don Quixote and Sancho Panza sketched in the script” (Turnour, Q. 2004). But, then, I don’t think Reeves or the movie is all that interested in being accurate to the historical events so much as they are concerned with capturing and presenting a sense of historical ‘truth’. Witchfinder General isn’t a step-by-step account of all that happened, but rather a cautionary tale and a warning, framed through one of the darkest and most horrific periods of our history. The film is here to remind of us of just what nightmares opportunistic monsters can be capable of, and that these opportunistic monsters come in the form of society itself, and the people within in. Rather than lay out a perfect recreation of events, Reeves and co. have got a far bigger axe to grind.
The film was produced by Tigon Productions — a British production company — on a budget of reportedly under £100,000. Reeves, having just finished production on his 1967 movie The Sorcerors, starring Boris Karloff, produced an outline of the movie for Tigon’s founder and chief executive, Tony Tenser, after having discovered the 1966 book of the same name by British writer and novelist Ronald Bassett sat within the studios library, after Tenser had purchased the rights to it before publication, feeling that the story “had some scope, had some breadth to it; there was canvas for a film” (Halligan, B. 2003).
The original script was described by the BBFC censorship board as being “a study in sadism in which every detail of cruelty and suffering is lovingly dwelt on” (Halligan, B. 2003). By all accounts, the shoot was pretty nasty too, with the legendary horror icon, Price, and relatively young and inexperienced director, Reeves — who was at the time only 24 — repeatedly butting heads. The director had originally saught to cast Donald Pleasance in the Hopkins role, and felt Price’s “tongue-in-cheek approach to horror during that period in his career was completely wrong for the role”. Despite their constant fights while working together, after the film’s release and Reeves’ tragic death of an accidental overdose, Price admitted that the director helped him deliver “one of the best performances I’ve ever given” (Biodrowski, S. 2005).
Upon its release, Witchfinder General was the subject of much controversy, most of it directed toward what critics and audiences perceived as the film’s “nastiness and gratuitous violence” (Brown, G. 1968). Infamously, English actor, author, playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett called it “the most persistently sadistic and rotten film I’ve ever seen” (Scovell, A. 2018). It’s unsurprising, the film remains a grim watch, from its opening pre-credits sequence in which a supposed witch is hung atop a hill, through to its viscious and scream-filled closing sequence. When I first saw it I was left unsure how to feel. It’s not a pleasant watch, and Reeves’ direction, far from being — as Variety put it in their review of the flick — “ordinary” (Variety, 1968), is unflinching in its portrayal of the horrors Hopkins inflicts upon his victims.
The level of horror on display can perhaps best be seen in the way the film has been handled by the BBFC here in the UK. While in the States the film remained uncut and released on a double bill with Antonio Margheriti’s 1968 giallo The Young, the Evil and the Savage (Stafford J. 2019), here in good old Blighty we wouldn’t get to see this version until 1995, when it was eventually released on home video (Petley, J. 2023). Even as recently as this year — 2023 — the film’s violence has been under discussion, with The Telegraph running a piece titled Witchfinder General on trial: folk-horror classic or ‘nasty, violent piece of stuff’? (Fordy, T. 2023).
For all its violent nihilism, gore and its reputation as “the original torture porn” (McDonagh, M. 2007), Witchfinder General’s true horror, for me at least, lay deeper. Hopkins’ methods are horrific and nasty, to be sure, but the real terror is in the film’s — dun, dun, dunnn — message! It’s a film not about the violence so much as it is the methods by which the violence is allowed. The manipulation and weaponisation of societal fears, the sinister and frightening ways in which people will seize their opportunity for self-service and prey upon and stoke divisions and concerns for their own selfish ends. As Adam Scovell writes in his piece The Terror of the Old Ways: 50 Years of Witchfinder General, the flick “is chiefly a film about belief, or at least the harnessing of belief’s power in order to fulfil other terrible needs and desires. If its political message could be boiled down to one idea, it would be that belief can allow and excuse the most alarming of atrocities” (Scovell, A. 2018).
Hopkins and his like prey upon this belief — it’s notable that his actions in the film seem at odds with one who truly believes what he espouses, he uses the accusations against her Uncle to blackmail the soon-to-be married Sara Lowes (played by English actor and producer Hilary Dwyer) into sex, his ‘assistant’ (Robert Russell’s slimy and insidious John Stearne) rapes Sara in Hopkins’ absence, and Hopkins — upon learning of the rape — then renegs on his agreement with Sara and begins torturing her accused Uncle once more. This suggests quite clearly, I think, that Hopkins considers himself to be above the rules, beliefs, and ideals he purports to uphold. He is using the social fears and uncertainty for his own gain. This falls in line with the writings of historian Sir Keith Thomas, whose work on the witch trials — outlined in his 1971 book Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England — alongside that of his student, Alan Macfarlane, are “still influential, although it has been subject to criticism” (Jones, K. & Zell, M. 2006). As Professor Malcolm Gaskill writes, “Thomas and Macfarlane linked the rise of the witch trials to wider changes, specifically post-Reformation orthodoxies, population increase, inflation and the growth in poverty” (Gaskill, M. 2013). Sound familiar? It should do.
Witchfinder General takes place during the English Civil War, a period of social and political upheaval and uncertainty for the people of England. The opening narration of the flick informs us, “the structure of law and order has collapsed”, and, as critic Jerry Whyte writes, “such circumstances created the perfect breeding ground for witch-hunts and witchfinders: established ideas and the established order were being challenged, the widespread violence and political turmoil of the time provided cover for the settling of old scores. Among the complex cocktail of ingredients that underpinned witch-hunts were mass hysteria, a heightened misogyny linked to repressed Puritan sexuality, the susceptibility of children and a desire for scapegoats” (Whyte, J. 2011). There is, undeniably, I think, a clear modern parallel here to the turmoil faced within the society of Witchfinder General and the society of our world today. We too seek scapegoats — from the EU (‘European Bureaucrats’) to immigrants (‘Stop the Boats’) — and trans people also fit the bill. And, as Witchfinder General’s opening narration so handily informs us, in such an atmosphere, “the likes of Matthew Hopkins take full advantage of the situation”.
Allow me, for a moment, to compare and contrast. Gaskill cites “population increase, inflation and the growth in poverty” (Gaskill, M. 2013) as major factors, according to Thomas and Macfarlane, in the rise of the witch trials. According to the United Nations official website, “the world’s population is more than three times larger than it was in the mid-twentieth century. The global human population reached 8.0 billion in mid-November 2022 from an estimated 2.5 billion people in 1950, adding 1 billion people since 2010 and 2 billion since 1998” (UN, 2023). Meanwhile, in the UK inflation “rose by 9.2% in the 12 months to February 2023, up from 8.8% in January” (ONS, 2023) and income inequality “increased by 1.3 percentage points to 35.7% when comparing financial year ending (FYE) 2021 to FYE 2022” (ONS, 2023). Poverty is also on the rise, with the ongoing cost of living crisis leaving 22% of people living below the poverty line (JRP, 2023). All in all, it’s a bit shit here, folks!
And what’s more, there are further parallels to be drawn between the “collapsed” society of Witchfinder General and today’s modern Britain. As John Spurr points out in his book The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714, “England […] was a jittery country. Long term trends such as inflation and population growth had unsettled the nation: prices roared ahead of wages, and a national population of 4.1 million in 1603 would reach 5 million by mid-century”, he notes that the country was “racked by plague, crime and disorder” and that “the last fifteen years of Elizabeth’s reign [she died in 1603] had been overshadowed by economic depression” (Spurr, J. 2006). Again, if all that sounds familiar, it should do. And it’s worth noting that many social science theories draw a connection between hate movements and violence with economic downturns and harship. To quote Donald P. Green, “in sociology, intergroup hostility is frequently attributed to competition for scarce material resources, the effects of which are exacerbated during periods of economic retrenchment” while “a variant of this hypothesis common in studies of comparative politics focuses on the manipulative role played by political leaders, who encourage out-group hostilities by playing upon economic resentments” (Green, D. P. 1998).
Of course, if the circumstances are aligned, then what of the actions? If one were looking then for the modern parallel of the witch hunts, where do we go? J K Rowling would have it that we look toward the trans community. Sure, she may claim that she has “never once [said] that I’m the victim of a witch hunt by trans people”, but, well… as I already pointed out, she makes that claim while defending a podcast called The Witch Trials of J K Rowling, that is pitched specifically as “an audio documentary that examines some of the most contentious conflicts of our time through the life and career of the world’s most successful author […] Rowling speaks with unprecedented candor and depth about the controversies surrounding her — from book bans to debates on gender and sex” (TFP, 2023). I don’t think it takes a genius to see why what she’s saying is total nonsense.
The witch hunts were, in my opinion at least, an example of the “intergroup hostility” Green describes, and as in that case and in the case of many, many others, “history shows that when bigotry develops over an extended period of time, it often leads to crimes against humanity. Hatreds directed against members of a community significantly influence peoples’ perspectives, attitudes, and interpersonal relationships […] the persecution and total annihilation of outgroup members are, then, rationalized by the fervent desire to rid society of undesirable and supposedly deleterious groups” (Tsesis, A. 2002).
In Witchfinder General, Price’s Hopkins seizes upon this growing persecution against a specific group for his own personal gain. He becomes something of a celebrity, we see that people know his name, he is paid for his ‘efforts’ up front and gets the best rooms and nicest food and so on and so on. He directly profits from the persecution of the accused ‘witches’, and so he pushes the rhetoric. As Adam Scovell puts it, “there’s a knowingness to his actions, brought out by the performance of Price” (Scovell, A. 2017). I already noted, though, his willingness to chop or change his approach based on what he can gain — he agrees to stop torturing Sara’s Uncle for sexual favors, then begins torturing him again once he learns of her rape — suggests that he doesn’t entirely believe in his cause, just in his ability to benefit from it, hence the “knowingness” Scovell mentions.
So… if Rowling doesn’t believe she considers herself the “victim of a witch hunt by trans people”, then does she consider herself the Matthew Hopkins-esque figure of a witch hunt against trans people? She has purposefully drawn the comparison to the witch trials, after all, but she openly rejects the notion that she herself claims victimhood… it’s very confusing. Truthfully, I suspect she doesn’t know what she thinks. My personal interpretation is that she’s kinda pitched a flag, but she’s realised she’s on a side that includes rampant misinformation, bigotry, and that has, well… “attracted a diverse group of far-right individuals and groups” (NZ Herald, 2023) and is now too proud to back down but too uncertain to admit her error, likely even to herself, and so is desperately clutching at straws in a wild attempt to find something that sticks. To go on a podcast titled The Witch Trials of J K Rowling and then claim you’re not playing the victim of a witch hunt is madness. But all of this is speculation. Still, it does beg the question; if she’s not, in her own words, claiming she’s the victim, then… is she the villain?
Look, full disclosure, obviously I think she is. I’m a trans woman and I see her spreading hate and it frightens me. She has a massive following and so pushing such rhetoric is dangerous and scary, and that’s even before we get to the point where she’s aligning herself so overtly with people who have stated that anyone who stands in their way in their anti-trans campaign “will be annihilated” (Chudy. E. 2023). There are shades of Price’s Hopkins here. Indeed it would be hard to deny that she doesn’t benefit from her continued involvement in the controversy — there’s no such thing as bad news, as they say. Her Cormoran Strike series has hardly set the world on fire, and yet the novel Troubled Blood remains, according to The Bookseller, the most profitable of the Strike novels, “near-doubling the launch week volume of its predecessor” (O’Brien, K. 2020) despite the controversy surrounding its depiction of a “notorious serial killer who once tricked some of his female victims into his van by wearing a wig and a woman’s coat to appear unthreatening” (Flood, A. 2020). It’s also worth noting, I think, that the follow-up novel, The Ink-Black Heart, despite hitting the best-seller list, “was 21% in volume down on Troubled Blood’s launch” (O’Brien, K. 2022), and also lacked the same level of controversial chatter around it. It had some…but nowhere near Troubled Blood.
In the sense that Price’s Hopkins benefits from the social panic around supposed witchcraft, so to then does he have motive to continue fuelling the fire of said panic, while his actions are “morally reprehensible, there’s little doubt that he is also acutely aware of it” (Scovell, A. 2017). I think Hopkins uses his position to his own ends, not driven by a true belief in the hate and evil he pushes. He only ‘fuels the fire’, so to speak, because it keeps him in a job and in a position of relevance and, perhaps most importantly, power. And he does so continuously throughout the film. To quote Scovell once more, “the violence seems to sustain him, in terms of his power and his own pleasure. He wields irrationality for political power, at a time when there was a deep-seated belief in the occult, which explains in part why so many people stood by and allowed women and men to be killed” (Scovell, A. 2018).
In the way Price’s Hopkins remains relevant through his work and through the continued fear-mongering he himself indulges in to continue on in his relevancy, Rowling’s relationship with the ‘trans debate’ takes on similar form; a circle of controversy that keeps her in the public consciousness and keeps her work and output front and centre. The podcast, existing as it does specifically to capitalise on “the controversies surrounding her”, stokes the flames and receives backlash to which she responds, further fanning the flames, the result of which is that people are drawn to the podcast, which stokes the fire, and so on and so on. And perhaps this can be best seen in how the podcast itself works… that’s right, folks! I listened, so you don’t have to (send help, plz… or cash).
There’s a sorta sickly nature to the podcast itself; most of it plays like a gushing celebration of all things Rowling and all things Harry Potter, and the attempts to appear to be diving deeper are very surface level in their approach. The first episode — titled Chapter 1: Plotted in Darkness — tackles the story pre-Potter, and presents itself as a frank discussion on Rowling and her abusive relationship with her ex-husband. It’s quite a difficult listen, and I can honestly say that I felt Rowling’s pain while listening, and then I remembered… that’s the point. Despite its promise of “unprecedented candor and depth”, the truth is The Witch Trials of J K Rowling presents a carefully constructed narrative that serves to continuously position the author as a struggling hero, battling against the odds and coming out on top. Sometimes, as is in the first episode, this is a fair framing, othertimes, however… it’s pure self-serving drivel. The third instalment, Chapter 3: A New Pyre (the witchy titles get old fast, and then the pod just gives up on them altogether) features a few examples of this; while discussing the joys of discovering the website ‘mugglenet’— complete with tales of people meeting their loved ones over a shared passion of all things Hogwarts (like I said, sickly), Rowling reveals she once headed online anonymously, where she was “rounded on by users” for sharing what she herself describes as “an opinion that was very bland” (Rowling, J. K. 2023).
Now, I don’t know exactly what a “bland” opinion is, but I think it’s interesting that this is how she chooses to describe what she said, because that’s a) a fairly subjective descriptor and b) unverifiable anyway. I’m not saying she’s lying, I’m just pointing out that the language she uses says pretty much nothing. All we know from this story is that Rowling perceives the subsequent user response as bullying behaviour, and we know this because she goes on to claim that at that point in time she had written three books “where bullying is such a theme from the very first page” and yet “these people who call themselves such fans of this franchise […] are behaving in a way that I depict as one of the worst and most dubious human behaviours” (Rowling J. K. 2023).
I can’t help but take issue with this; firstly, the Harry Potter books’ attitude toward bullying seems to boil down not to behavioral factors but rather what ‘team’ someone is on — perhaps the most obvious example of this is the brazen fatphobia thrown at the character of Dudley Dursley by both the heroes and the author herself, which is mostly played for laughs, contrasted against the fatphobia toward the character of Molly Weasley by the villainous Draco Malfoy, which is depicted as being, well… “one of the worst and most dubious human behaviours” — but also, I’m not sure how Rowling defines bullying, but I personally would consider purposefully sharing tweets from random people with opposing views to your rabid army of fourteen million followers to be a pretty solid example of it. This particular incident displays an incredible double standard on the author’s part, with the apparent biggest issue for her being the fact that she could’ve been “some twelve year-old who’s excited to go into this room and is immediately, caustically chastised for not belonging”… fuck me, Joanne. Look in the goddamn mirror!
In the fifth episode, aptly titled Chapter 5: The Tweets, Rowling discusses her now infamous tweets regarding her views on trans people. What I find especially interesting about this is how it frames the context in which these tweets were shared. In 2019 Rowling tweeted, “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya”. She explains her reasoning for this; “I believe there is something dangerous about this movement and it must be challenged”. But one has to question the validity of such a ‘challenge’ coming in the form of a tweet. Surely even the author herself must admit that this was a bad move. After all, she’s now spent several years, a lengthy blog post, and a podcast, trying to explain it. I can’t help but feel that anyone who has, as Rowling herself claims to have done, “thought about it deeply” would likely have drawn the conclusion that Twitter was perhaps not the best way to go about it. But she did so anyway. It’s petulant at best, at worst… well, she’s just a liar.
It’s also important to understand that Maya Forstater was not forced out of her job for claiming sex is real, but rather because she “will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” (Tayler, J. 2019). To this end, Rowling is clearly spreading misinformation, and, as Alexander Tsesis writes, “orators and authors strategically exploit embedded cultural meanings not just to create grammatical sentences, but also to persuade their audience” (Tsesis, A. 2002). And to me, this purposeful twisting of the truth to push her own agenda can’t help but conjure up images of Vincent Price’s Matthew Hopkins looming over the helpless victims of his ‘interrogation’ splashing about in the water, and solemnly stating, “They swim… the mark of Satan is upon them”. Extreme comparison? You betchya! But here we are. She drew this parallel, I’m just following it!
The thing about Witchfinder General, I think, that makes it such a fascinating and worthwhile watch is not in its exploration of Britain’s troubled past in this context — although that is certainly an element of the draw — but rather in how it portrays Hopkins and his vicious and even, dare I say, gleeful brutality and willingness to lie and manipulate and capitalize on the horrors of the world around him. And this is especially scary to me because, as Scovell writes, it is “the very real horror of our own history” (Scovell, A. 2017). And history does have a habbit of repeating itself. And repeating itself. And repeating… well, you get the point.
To be clear here, my intention with all of this is not to make the claim that Rowling is on the level of violent, horrific, insidious, and terrifying villainy that Matthew Hopkins, or even Price’s portrayal of him, is. I don’t believe she is. It’s just that — as I’ve said repeatedly — she has drawn this parallel, even if it was inadvertently (honestly, I think she was just angrily responding to being caught out on her nonsense more than anything, but… hey! She said it!), and I think that looking at how figures such as Hopkins can and did use the growing unrest of their times — whether that be religious, sociological, or political — to their own selfish ends can perhaps help us contextualize and understand more clearly what is happening here with an author like Rowling and the ‘trans debate’. In the podcast, Rowling says “time will tell if I’m wrong on this”, and I think that’s very telling. She does have the time to tell, she is ultimately unaffected by her own rhetoric — indeed, she even acknowledges that financially she’s not gonna suffer — but the people who are harmed by her words, by the rhetoric she pushes to her army of followers and to the more dangerous and radical people within that crowd, don’t share that luxury. Rowling comes at this from a place of privalege, and like Hopkins, she is, in a sense, ‘outside’ of the conflict she herself is helping to grow.
In the seventh episode of The Witch Trials of J K Rowling, titled Chapter 7: What If You’re Wrong?, Rowling flips the titular question back to trans-rights activists and her detractors. In doing so she — somewhat bizarrely in my opinion — claims “if I’m wrong, great! People aren’t being harmed” (Rowling, J. K., 2023). It’s a pretty weird thing to assert, I think, considering the current climate. In the UK alone, according to official Home Office data, transphobic hate crimes rose by 56% between the year ending March 2021 and the year ending March 2022 (Home Office, 2022), while in the US there are “twice as many anti-trans bills making their way through state legislatures [in 2023…] as there were in 2022”, which was also reportedly “a record breaking year” (Zoledziowski, A. 2023). To claim that “people aren’t being harmed” shows a, frankly, disturbing level of ignorance, and that’s giving her the benefit of actually being, well… y’know, ignorant! But, to be honest, Rowling argues her points in bad faith throughout the episode; when asked about the pain her comments may have caused, the author responds first by saying yes, she can understand that pain, but then states “women are the only group, to my knowledge, that are being asked to embrace members of their oppressor class”. Now, putting aside the fact that this straight up ignores like… well, racism, it’s a perfect example of what little grasp she has on what it actually is to be transgender, and what that means. In the most simplistic terms, she just misgendered the entire trans community.
Throughout The Witch Trials of J K Rowling, Rowling displays a limited knowledge of the issues she purports to be concerned about, and instead dodges criticisms and twists the truth to her own ends. In the same episode, a direct parallel is drawn between witch trials of the kind depicted in Witchfinder General and the culture of social media. In context, it isn’t hard to trace the line from this to Rowling. In the episode, essayist and author Stacy Schiff speaks about the Salem witch trials, and she notes that during that time there was a “constant sense of being on the watchtowers and, needless to say, when you’re watching for something, and you’re watching vigilantly for something, you often see something”. This is interesting because throughout the series so much is made of the build-up to Rowling’s eventual public comments, the author herself makes countless references to “watching” the situation unfold. Schiff goes on to point out “how thoroughly and, I think, profoundly everyone involved believed that [they] were doing something that was good for the community” (Schiff, S. 2023). Obviously, I don’t think this is the case for the Hopkins as depicted in Reeves’ film, but is it possible it is the case for Rowling? Well… probably. As the author herself puts it, “I believe absolutely that there is something dangerous about this movement” (Rowling, J. K. 2023). Take from that what you will.
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