← Back to Reviews
in
In 17th-century England, a witchfinder travels across the country persecuting those he suspects to be guilty of witchcraft.
There's always something remarkable about watching a particularly old film that manages to be exceptionally violent not just by the standards of the day but also still leaving a bit of an impact even by contemporary standards. Witchfinder General turns fifty this year and I'm more than a little amazed at how raw and brutal it manages to be, especially in its uncut version. In the case of the DVD I watched, the scenes that had originally been cut had visible deterioration all over the footage due to having been duplicated off a recovered print and re-inserted into the cleaner-looking cut version - if anything, this added an edge to the proceedings as anytime the film got noticeably grainier it ended up serving as a heads-up that something especially twisted was about to happen. Of course, it's about what you'd expect from a film that opted to tell a story in as horrid a setting as an England being so divided and ravaged by civil war that the eponymous witchfinder (Vincent Price) is capable of waging his own war against the threat of witchcraft. This is especially true when his idea of finding witches ultimately amounts to him subjecting various people to cruel and unusual punishments under the guise of figuring out who is or isn't innocent (in ways that end with innocent people dying anyway).
A plot does formulate wherein a soldier (Ian Ogilvy) goes out for revenge after his lover (Hilary Dwyer) and her priest uncle (Rupert Davies) are tormented by Price, though this does ultimately serve as a means to keep things moving from scene to scene of puritanical barbarity. It's a decent enough backbone, especially when Ogilvy is constantly caught between his commitment to the war and his dedication to Dwyer in a way that underlines such a difference (and yet such a similarity) to Price. However, Witchfinder General definitely takes more time to go over its brutality in detail to the point where the soundtrack is often wall-to-wall screaming that feels as if it's mixed in such a way to torture a listening audience as well. In this regard, I have to consider Witchfinder General an effective horror, but there's always the question as to how much it earns its right to wallow in such unpleasantness throughout its brief running time. The thing about the earliest attempts at gore-hound horror is that I wonder how much of it has a point or exists just to test the waters of what a film could get away with as standards began to relax in the middle of the century. I can't shake the feeling that Witchfinder General is a case of the latter, but it certainly does make an admirable effort to give its cruelty some measure of substance.
#29 - Witchfinder General
Michael Reeves, 1968
Michael Reeves, 1968
In 17th-century England, a witchfinder travels across the country persecuting those he suspects to be guilty of witchcraft.
There's always something remarkable about watching a particularly old film that manages to be exceptionally violent not just by the standards of the day but also still leaving a bit of an impact even by contemporary standards. Witchfinder General turns fifty this year and I'm more than a little amazed at how raw and brutal it manages to be, especially in its uncut version. In the case of the DVD I watched, the scenes that had originally been cut had visible deterioration all over the footage due to having been duplicated off a recovered print and re-inserted into the cleaner-looking cut version - if anything, this added an edge to the proceedings as anytime the film got noticeably grainier it ended up serving as a heads-up that something especially twisted was about to happen. Of course, it's about what you'd expect from a film that opted to tell a story in as horrid a setting as an England being so divided and ravaged by civil war that the eponymous witchfinder (Vincent Price) is capable of waging his own war against the threat of witchcraft. This is especially true when his idea of finding witches ultimately amounts to him subjecting various people to cruel and unusual punishments under the guise of figuring out who is or isn't innocent (in ways that end with innocent people dying anyway).
A plot does formulate wherein a soldier (Ian Ogilvy) goes out for revenge after his lover (Hilary Dwyer) and her priest uncle (Rupert Davies) are tormented by Price, though this does ultimately serve as a means to keep things moving from scene to scene of puritanical barbarity. It's a decent enough backbone, especially when Ogilvy is constantly caught between his commitment to the war and his dedication to Dwyer in a way that underlines such a difference (and yet such a similarity) to Price. However, Witchfinder General definitely takes more time to go over its brutality in detail to the point where the soundtrack is often wall-to-wall screaming that feels as if it's mixed in such a way to torture a listening audience as well. In this regard, I have to consider Witchfinder General an effective horror, but there's always the question as to how much it earns its right to wallow in such unpleasantness throughout its brief running time. The thing about the earliest attempts at gore-hound horror is that I wonder how much of it has a point or exists just to test the waters of what a film could get away with as standards began to relax in the middle of the century. I can't shake the feeling that Witchfinder General is a case of the latter, but it certainly does make an admirable effort to give its cruelty some measure of substance.