WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968)
Michael Reeves’ brutal evocation of violent, cynical and corrupt Civil War England
Michael Reeves was a British director whose potential was tragically cut short just as he was gaining a reputation in Europe as horror cinema’s latest wunderkind. Witchfinder General (1968) remains a landmark British movie and his lasting legacy. In horror cinema it was one of a handful of films that marked the sea change from the Gothic, supernatural fairy tales of Hammer to the more realistic horror of Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). With the latter, it is often considered as one of the three key ‘folk horror’ films that established the sub-genre that continues today. Its modernism and brutality is seen in a direct line through to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) and the films of Pete Walker. It appeared just as cinema censorship was on the brink of relaxing, taboos were being broken and offered a new direction for British horror cinema, one that didn’t rely on supernatural and mythological elements to generate a sense of unease. In fact, to include it as a film within the horror genre is actually misleading because it is more a period piece about the nature of patriarchal power and religious hypocrisy.
It was made by Tigon, a production company founded by Tony Tenser in 1967. Tenser emerged from the world of British exploitation films, beginning as a partner with Michael Klinger in Compton Films, a distribution company that began by importing sex and horror films and then expanded to make its own productions. Klinger later persuaded Tenser to back Repulsion (1965), an intense study of psychological breakdown and director Roman Polanski’s English-language debut. By 1967, they had split and Tenser had set up Tigon as a production company. It was Tenser who first saw the unpublished galley of Ronald Bassett’s original novel of Witchfinder General in 1966.
Liking the title, he immediately secured the rights and sent the novel to Michael Reeves, a young director who had cut his teeth as assistant director on Jack Cardiff’s The Long Ships (1964) and first got his break into the business by turning up on director Don Siegel’s doorstep looking for work. Reeves had also stepped in as an uncredited assistant director on Italian horror Castle of the Living Dead (1964), a low-budget European production starring horror icon Christopher Lee and a young Donald Sutherland, when its original co-director Warren Kiefer (or Lorenzo Sabatini to give him his original name) fell ill. Reeves, charged with shooting second unit, contributed some stylish sequences to the film. Producer Paul Maslansky, impressed with his work, offered him Revenge of the Blood Beast (AKA The She-Beast — 1966) a low budget potboiler featuring Barbara Steele (whom Maslansky had persuaded to do a cameo for next to nothing in three days flat) that he managed to elevate beyond its rather mundane origins and non-existent budget.
“near-unfilmable by 1967 standards”
Back in London, Reeves co-scripted with his friend Tom Baker (no, not that one) an adaptation of John Burke’s The Sorcerers (1967). Here, he directed the legendary Boris Karloff in a rather psychedelic thriller about an old couple who get their thrills by living vicariously through a brainwashed young man played by Ian Ogilvy (a long-term friend of Reeves). Again, Reeves turned a low budget thriller into a stylish, contemporary film and Tenser recognised that Reeves, and his writing associate Baker, would be the men to transform a slice of popular history about the actual ‘witchfinder’ Matthew Hopkins, into something more suitable for Tigon. Tenser earmarked a £100,000 budget with the proviso that filming should begin in September of 1967 to ensure they had decent weather for what, in Baker’s words, was a film where they wanted a lot of “movement across the landscape and across the country to be a strong theme.”
Reeves and Baker took a number of elements and characters from Bassett’s book and then fashioned a screenplay which, in its original form, was far more violent than the one that was originally filmed. According to Benjamin Halligan, in his book British Film Directors: Michael Reeves, it was “near-unfilmable by 1967 standards” but contained a terrifyingly cynical view of a “savage, brutal, animalistic world” that Reeves managed to inject into the final film. Both were conscious that the film needed to satisfy the requirements for exploitative horror, to bring in the Hammer audience as per Tenser’s objective, but they also wanted to marry the historical and biographical elements about Hopkins to an English Civil War pastoral that, as Ian Cooper noted in his Devil’s Advocates monograph on the film, borrows its context from the westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann as well as the similar aspects of Bassett’s own book. Halligan observes that all these disparate components created “a tension at the heart of the film.”
Reeves and Baker originally wanted Donald Pleasance for the central role of Hopkins, agreeing he would be perfect casting because of the actor’s penchant for experimentation in performance. However, a co-funding and distribution deal secured with American International Pictures, fresh from its foray into Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and a bevvy of hippy/psychedelia exploitation films like The Trip (1967), foisted upon them AIP’s horror star-on-contract, Vincent Price. Reeves was not altogether happy with this casting and much of the script had to be revised accordingly. It was probably necessary because the BBFC were already getting very hot under the collar about the script, one which they had already rejected as “a study in sadism in which every detail of cruelty and suffering is lovingly dwelt on.” Reeves and Baker’s revisions in the wake of Price’s casting and AIP’s investment would substantially tone down these aspects but the film would still end up cut by about four minutes by the BBFC for its “excesses of sadistic brutality.”
“…one of the most personal and mature statements in the history of British cinema”
Meanwhile, the film went into production on a final budget of £83,000 in September 1967 and some exteriors were shot in Norfolk and Suffolk and the Dunwich coast, in Black Park and Langley Park and the interior sets were filmed mainly in converted aircraft hangers in Bury St. Edmunds. The arrival of Price precipitated frequent clashes between the young “genius” director and ageing actor as Reeves desperately tried to reign in what he saw as Price’s often florid and camp performing style. The film was constantly short of equipment and extras and was briefly hit by a British technicians union strike. To cap it all, AIP producer Louis M ‘Deke’ Heyward insisted on the insertion of some brief nude scenes for an export version of the film, scenes he took great pleasure in ‘supervising’ on his brief visit to the set in Lavenham and which Tenser directed simply because Reeves refused to do so.
Equally praised (David Pirie regarded it as “…one of the most personal and mature statements in the history of British cinema”) and vilified (Alan Bennett called the work “the most persistently sadistic and rotten film I’ve ever seen”), the film fictionalises the exploits of Matthew Hopkins, a prolific ‘witch hunter’, during the English Civil War. The Civil War setting is an interesting one when seen in context with the late 1960s. Upheavals in society and culture were reaching their height in the year the film was released and the period was something of a watershed in which youth culture completely rejected the idea of post-war deference to their elders whilst attitudes relaxed about drugs and sex, abortion and homosexuality. It was a social revolution that was reflected in growing civil rights campaigns around feminism, homosexuality and race and the anti-war movements.
The political vacuum depicted in the film’s Civil War framework could be seen as representative of a time when the fissures between generations and contradictions in political, religious and social attitudes created a sense of displacement within society, a violent alienation emanating from “the monstrously repressive actions of certain male characters”, as Peter Hutchings noted in Hammer and Beyond, that is projected violently onto its weakest citizens, the old and, specifically, female.
The opening of the film also provides one of the major motifs that we’ll see throughout Witchfinder General. A woman is dragged by a crowd through rolling countryside, the image framed by verdant hillsides and trees, and led by a minister to a freshly prepared gallows. Reeves contrasts the serenity of the natural landscape, an untainted English Arcadia, with a brutal act as the camera unflinchingly observes her public hanging. As the hangman kicks away the stool upon which she stands and her body swings out across the frame, in a scene that still packs a punch even today, the tone of Witchfinder General is bluntly established.
“victims of licentious greed, misogyny and sadism”
After the stark opening titles, a narration tells us that it is 1645 and that it is a period of unrest and England is in turmoil, with lawlessness abounding as a result of the Civil War between the Royalist Party of King Charles and the Roundhead Troopers in General Cromwell’s Parliamentary Party. Reeves reinforces his motif again, the tranquility of the woodland is placed in stark contrast to the ambush that awaits Trooper Richard Marshall (a terrific Ian Ogilvy) and his men. During an evocative sequence, where Marshall waits with the horses as the rest of the men and his commanding officer deal with the rebels who ambushed them, Reeves holds Ogilvy in close up. His eyes dart across the woodland as he hears distant sounds of gunfire and fighting and Reeves cuts from him to the eerily empty woods to emphasise how isolated and vulnerable he is. It was likely the production couldn’t afford a fully-fledged battle and this was Reeves’ striking solution.
For saving his commander’s life, Marshall is granted leave and he returns to the village of Brandeston, reunited with his sweetheart Sarah Lowes (Hilary Dwyer) and her priest father, John Lowes (Rupert Davies). Here, Reeves contrasts the lushly romantic love scene, one which Dwyer was incredibly nervous about and reluctant to do even though Reeves handles it very tastefully, and its expression of sexual freedom with the repressive and violent attitude towards women dished out by the psychotic patriarchal figures of Hopkins and his henchman John Stearne (Robert Russell). When Hopkins arrives in Brandeston, he tortures John Lowes and sexually blackmails Sarah into believing that if she gives herself to him he will show mercy to her father. Again, Lowes’ arrest and torture are preempted by an idyllic scene showing Sarah walking by the river, John Coquillon’s hazy cinematography offering a lush, golden, almost heavenly vision in stark contrast to the brutality of Stearne’s torture of Lowes.
Marshall learns of Lowes’ death (he is ducked in water to prove his sorcery and then hung for his troubles) and goes absent without leave to find Sarah, in distress, in her father’s vandalised church. The corrupt authority figure that Hopkins represents, one that would hypocritically seek to curb sexual permissiveness and non-Christian belief systems, is put on report by Marshall, who swears a vow to God that he and Sarah be ‘married’ and that he will seek revenge for her desecration and the murder of her father by Hopkins. Thus a specifically male conflict between the young officer and the older Hopkins is established as the film’s major force, as the vengeful liberation of youth is positioned against the cynical and mechanical patriarchy of Hopkins. The death of Lowes is the male exception to the parade of violence inflicted on women in the film. As Emily Edwards offers in Metaphysical Media: the Occult Experience in Popular Culture, the film does not contextualise these victims with any ability to use occult practices but merely shows them as “victims of licentious greed, misogyny and sadism.”
Marshall’s desire for revenge is then depicted within a ‘race against time’ scenario as he tracks Hopkins and Stearne from village to village. His impulse is shown in a number of lyrical sequences as he rides his horse across the English countryside. At first he is in harmony with it, underlined by Paul Ferris’s score and redolent of the English standard ‘Greensleeves’, and his own sense of youthful liberation is matched by the overpowering sweep of the Norfolk landscape. Gradually, Marshall’s obsession diminishes his relationship to the natural world just as Hopkins too is placed not within but outside of nature, as an aberration. His search takes him to Lavenham and a brief reunion with Sarah before both are incarcerated in Lavenham Castle.
It’s here that the film achieves its bleak and despairing coda. Peter Hutchings, in Hammer and Beyond, sees the relationship between landscape, nature and the articulation of despair in the film reach its apotheosis with the final torture of Sarah followed by Marshall’s axing to death of Hopkins. Marshall has by now become as obsessive as Hopkins, cynically violent and psychotically desperate when the troops rescuing them shoot Hopkins dead before Marshall can finish him off and satisfy his revenge. Sarah’s final scream, as the objectified cause of all this trauma, “is a scream arising from a vividly portrayed male violence, a violence that seeks to preserve a certain masculine stability and power.”
“it made me feel dirty”
It was, and remains, a very powerful film. Reeves manages to get a very stripped down, intense performance from Price, probably one of the best he’s ever given and that even he agreed with the director about after he’d seen the film and, despite their earlier differences, wrote a heartfelt letter praising the director. Price is well supported by Ogilvy, full of grit and determination as Marshall and spiraling into violent madness by the film’s harrowing conclusion. Hilary Dwyer as Sarah, offers a sensitivity to this poor woman’s manipulation and repression at the hands of male power.
Throughout a very male-centred film there are also various cameos, one from Wilfrid Brambell as a feckless peasant, capable only of playing the 17th Century variant of Albert Steptoe it seems, and the sublime Patrick Wymark, as Cromwell. He, holding court at his encampment before the decisive Battle of Naseby, is another male figure that Hutchings sees as England’s “new symbolic father” and a reflection of Hopkins own authoritarianism in England’s not so green and pleasant land, where social order is on the brink of descending into disturbing chaos.
There is some stunning imagery here — beautifully composed landscapes, driving tracking shots of riders and their horses dashing across vast stretches of countryside — evoking a deep seated appreciation of an English Arcadia that’s used as a backdrop to examine the nature of war, revenge, evil as a contagion that plagues the land. Cinematographer John Coquillon’s work is a revelation and, unsurprisingly, he went on to photograph a number of iconoclast director Sam Peckinpah’s films, including Cross of Iron’s own take on male authoritarianism. Equally triumphant is the score by Paul Ferris, offering an appropriate flavour to Reeves’ essay about an England undergoing momentous, and often corrupt, change and the revenge-seeking Marshall’s movement through the landscape. How a score this beautiful could be removed from the version released on VHS in the US and replaced with a synthesiser based score is beyond understanding. After a campaign, it was rightfully restored to later releases.
Way ahead of its time in 1968, the bleakness of its brutal, grim message comments much on the times it was made in, a year of generational clashes, moral argument, social disintegration and a come down from the hedonism of the mid-1960s. The moral ambiguity and the very realistic approach to violence that the film uses show British ‘horror’ films testing new ground. It may be a period film but the issues it was dealing with were, and still are, utterly contemporary. Perhaps the last word should go to Reeves himself. Alan Bennett declared of the film, in The Listener eight days after the film’s release, that “it was a degrading experience by which I mean it made me feel dirty.” In a letter Reeves responded, “Violence is horrible, degrading and sordid. Insofar as one is going to show it on the screen at all, it should be presented as such — and the more people it shocks into sickened recognition of these facts the better. I wish I could have witnessed Mr. Bennett frantically attempting to wash away the ‘dirty’ feeling my film gave him. It would have been proof of the fact that Witchfinder General works as intended.” Tragically, Reeves never got the opportunity to make his audience feel ‘dirty’ about themselves again. At the age of 25, he was dead from an accidental alcohol and barbiturate overdose a mere nine months after the film’s release.
About the transfer
Witchfinder General has had a chequered history on VHS and DVD prior to the 2011 UK Blu-ray release. Numerous versions have done the rounds. In the UK, Redemption released an uncut version on VHS, restoring the cut sequences from a laser disc version, and then Prism, and later Optimum, released a ‘Director’s Cut’ on DVD along with a European version in the same DVD set, which included the shots of topless tavern wenches at the behest of producer Louis Heyward. However, their restoration of the cut sequences were of a poorer quality. This was a shame as the actual print they were inserting these into wasn’t bad at all. Finally, in September 2007, Fox put out a completely restored version in their Midnite Movies range on Region 1 DVD. This was the definitive version as all the gore and violence, originally cut by the BBFC, had been properly returned to the film and the nudity, not intended for the UK and US markets, was left out.
The 2007 restoration is the one used for Odeon Entertainment’s high definition transfer of 2011. It isn’t the cleanest print, with the film often showing scratches and blobs of dirt. The quality suffers a little during dissolves and transitions, producing a softer picture very momentarily as a scene switches. However, the vibrant colour of the print greatly benefits from this transfer as does the detail. In some sequences it really is very robust in both the presentation of hue and the finer details of faces, uniforms and the wooded landscapes and there’s more depth to John Coquillon’s ravishing cinematography.
Special features
- Audio Commentary with Michael Reeves’s biographer Benjamin Halligan and director Michael Armstrong. Halligan’s book on Reeves is an absolute must if you haven’t read it and much as he tries to analyse the film here, Armstrong, director of the controversial, and Witchfinder inspired, Mark of the Devil (1970) and a friend of Reeves, spends the time speculating about his friend’s state of mind and Reeves’s treatment of the subject matter. However, this two hander is an interesting effort. The Fox Midnite Movies edition has, in my opinion, a more balanced commentary from the film’s producer Philip Waddilove, actor Ian Ogilvy and writer Steve Haberman. It’s full of lively and amusing anecdotes and behind the scenes stories and is worth listening to.
- The Blood Beast: The Films of Michael Reeves (24 Mins) An edition of Channel 4’s Eurotika series from 1999. A badly edited version was originally on the Prism/Optimum Region 2 edition. It essentially covers Reeves’s career with plenty of interviews, including Maslansky, Ogilvy, Waddilove and Hilary Dwyer.
- Bloody Crimes: Witchcraft and Matthew Hopkins (24 Mins) One in a series produced by Anglia Television in 2002 but it’s an interesting, if rather salacious, romp through the history of witchcraft and the real Hopkins’s crimes.
- Vincent Price on Aspel & Company (10 Mins) Cropped into 16x9 this selection from Michael Aspel’s 1980s chat show features a brief interview with Price and, although there is no mention of Witchfinder and Aspel’s questions are thoroughly anodyne, Price comes across as an absolute charmer despite looking bored to death.
- Intrusion: Michael Reeves short film with optional commentary from Halligan and Armstrong.
- Alternate Scenes from the Export Version: The notorious Louis Heyward ‘produced’ sequences, featuring the topless versions of the tavern scenes that quite frankly make the film look like Carry On… Witchfinder General.
- Theatrical Trailer and Stills Gallery
- Alternate US Opening and closing Credits: AIP, believing they could only earn their money back by turning Reeves’s film into one of their Poe adaptations, concocted this set of titles with Price narrating Poe’s The Conqueror Worm (the film’s alternate US title) which has absolutely nothing to do with the film itself.
Witchfinder General
Tigon / American International Pictures 1968
Odeon Entertainment / ODNBF001 / Blu-ray / Released 13 June 2011 / Approximate running time: 87 minutes / Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen / 1080p / Rating: 18 / Sound: Dolby Digital Mono English / Region Free
Originally published at https://www.cathoderaytube.co.uk. Revised 2023. All written material by Frank Collins (the author) is © 2007–2023 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Please seek permission from the author if you would like to quote or re-use any of the author’s own written material.
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