Witchfinder General (film)

Michael Reeves, who had just completed Tigon's The Sorcerers (1967) starring Boris Karloff, provided a story outline which met with Tenser's enthusiastic approval. Tenser immediately began putting together a preliminary budget, and requested that Reeves quickly complete a full film script, stressing to Reeves that the production would need to commence by September of that year to avoid shooting during cold weather. Reeves called in his childhood friend Tom Baker (who had co-written The Sorcerers with Reeves) to assist him with the script.[10] Reeves and Baker began drafting a screenplay with Donald Pleasence firmly in mind as the film's star. However, once American International Pictures became involved in the production, they insisted that their contract star, Vincent Price, be given the lead, and Pleasence was dropped from the film.[14] With the abrupt change of star, Reeves and Baker had to rethink their original concept of presenting Hopkins as "ineffective and inadequate … a ridiculous authority figure", which they had believed Pleasence could play to perfection. They knew the tall, imposing Price, with his long history of horror roles, would have to be more of a straightforward villain, and they made changes to their script accordingly.[10]

As was required by law for British film productions of that time, the completed first draft of the screenplay was presented by Tenser to the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) on 4 August to determine if any possible censorship issues could be anticipated. On the same day, a preliminary report was issued by a BBFC examiner, who, noting that Tenser was an "ape", referred to the screenplay as "perfectly beastly" and "ghoulish". The script was returned to Tenser a few days later, with a more detailed report from the same examiner, which described the screenplay as "a study in sadism in which every detail of cruelty and suffering is lovingly dwelt on … a film which followed the script at all closely would run into endless censorship trouble." After a second draft was subsequently written and sent to the BBFC only eleven days after the first draft, the reaction was nearly the same. It was returned to Tenser with an "exhaustive list" of requirements to reduce the film's possible offensiveness.[10]

Reeves and Baker completed a third and final draft that was "substantially toned down" in content from the previous attempts. This version of the screenplay, which was filmed with only a few minor revisions during the production, was missing many of the more explicit moments of violence described in the first submitted drafts: the death spasms of the pre-credits hanging victim, Lowes getting stabbed fifteen times with a steel spike, and a sniper's victim somersaulting through the air and slamming into a tree. A sequence depicting the Battle of Naseby was to be filmed, during which a soldier's head was to be cut off on screen. Most significantly, the film's finale was completely altered. In the original ending, Stearne falls in with a group of gypsies and attempts to rape one of their women, who successfully fights off her attacker by plunging her thumbs into his eyes, blinding him. The gypsies then stake him to death. Marshall arrives and convinces the gypsies to assist him in ambushing Hopkins. Hopkins is viciously beaten by Marshall, who forces a "confession" out of the bloodied man. Marshall partially drowns Hopkins (whose thumbs have been tied to his feet), then finally hangs him. Tenser had previously expressed concerns regarding the scope of the Battle of Naseby sequence as well as the gypsy-ending, noting that these would both require the employment of additional groups of extras. He asked Reeves and Baker to remove the battle sequence and simplify the ending for the final draft.[10][15]

Production began on 18 September 1967 with a budget of £83,000. Thirty-two thousand pounds was provided by AIP, with £12,000 for Price's expenditures and fees, and £20,000 for production costs. Philip Waddilove, a former BBC radio and record producer, contributed £5,000 in return for associate producer billing.[16] Although the film would be the biggest-budgeted title in Tigon's history, for AIP their part of the budget represented a relatively small expenditure of money. Not much in terms of real quality was expected by AIP heads Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, and the movie was intended to be nothing more than a tax write-off.[10]

The interiors were filmed in two specially converted aircraft hangars near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, which were leased for £1,500; this cost-measure resulted in much of the dialogue having to be re-recorded later, because the tin roofs of the hangars caused an echo.[15] The exterior shots range from the Dunwich Coast (for the scene with the fisherman) to Langley Park outside London (for the scene where Stearne escapes capture). The tracking shot of the ambush after the opening credits was filmed at Black Park in southeast Buckinghamshire, a location frequently used by Hammer Film Productions.[15] Lavenham Square (in Lavenham, Suffolk), site of the witch-burning scene, was the real Lavenham Market Square; the crew lowered TV antennas and telephone wires and Waddilove hired a cherry picker from a local utility company for £10, because the unit could not afford a camera crane.[15] The countryside vistas seen in the chase scenes on horseback were shot on the Stanford Battle Area near Thetford, Norfolk—the producer, through connections with the government, was able to lease parts of the area.[15] The church used in the film is St John The Evangelist in Rushford in Norfolk.[17] The moat drowning and hanging scenes were filmed at Kentwell Hall, in Long Melford. The climax of the film was shot at Orford Castle, on the coast of East Anglia, which is an English Heritage property. Filming wrapped as scheduled on 13 November 1967.[14][18]

The production went relatively smoothly except for the unrelentingly antagonistic relationship that developed between Reeves and Price. Reeves kept it no secret from everyone associated with the production that the American actor was not his choice for the role, and the director's comments had reached the actor back in the US. Reeves refused the courtesy of meeting Price at Heathrow Airport when he arrived in England, a "deliberate snub calculated to offend both Price and AIP."[10] "Take me to your goddamn young genius," Price reportedly said to co-producer Philip Waddilove, who greeted the actor at the airport instead of Reeves.[19] When Price went on location and met Reeves for the first time, the young director told the actor, "I didn't want you, and I still don't want you, but I'm stuck with you!"[10]

According to Kim Newman in his book, Nightmare Movies, when Reeves made a suggestion on the set, Price objected and told the director: "I've made 87 [sic] films. What have you done?" And Reeves responded: "I've made three good ones."[20] "Reeves hated me," Price later recalled. "He didn't want me at all for the part. I didn't like him, either. It was one of the first times in my life that I've been in a picture where the director and I just clashed."[21] Price felt that all the actors on the set had a difficult time with the director, explaining: "Michael Reeves could not communicate with actors. He would stop me and say, 'Don't move your head like that.' And I would say, 'Like what? What do you mean?' He'd say, 'There—you're doing it again. Don't do that'." Price reportedly became so upset with Reeves that he refused to watch the film's dailies.[19]

In one scene, Reeves needed Price to shoot his flintlock between the ears of the horse he was riding. When Price realised that Reeves had ordered that an actual blank charge was to be used so the weapon's puff of smoke would be visible, he shouted, "What? You want the gun to go bang between the ears of this fucking nag? How do you think he's going to react?" However, Reeves insisted and, when the gun went off, the horse reared and sent Price tumbling onto the ground. Price was not hurt but he was extremely angered by the incident.[10]

On the final day of shooting, Price showed up on the set visibly intoxicated. Reeves seethed to Waddilove, "He's drunk—how dare he be drunk on my set! I'll kill the bastard." Waddilove soon discovered that Reeves planned to inflict painful revenge on the actor. During preparations for Price's violent death scene, the director was overheard instructing Ogilvy to "really lay into Vincent" with the stage axe. Although when the scene was filmed Ogilvy indeed responded with blows that were not faked, Waddilove had earlier found some foam padding and fitted Price's costume with it, protecting the actor from any injury.[10]

Despite the tension between the two men during the production, when Price saw the movie the following year, he admitted that he finally understood what Reeves had been after and wrote the young director a ten-page letter praising the film. Reeves wrote Price back, "I knew you would think so." Years after Reeves's death, Price said, "I realised what he wanted was a low-key, very laid-back, menacing performance. He did get it, but I was fighting him almost every step of the way. Had I known what he wanted, I would have cooperated."[19]

In addition to his difficult relationship with Price, Reeves had to deal with a few production problems during the shooting. On the first day, Price was thrown from his horse and sent back to his hotel to recover. The actor returned to work the following day.[15] Towards the end of filming, a strike was called when the British technicians union learned the production company was not hiring a large enough crew as required by union rules. After an extra man was hired, the crew resumed working.[15] On two occasions, Reeves was short of actors. Waddilove replaced an absent actor as a Roundhead officer during Wymark's one-day scene. Waddilove's wife, Susi, played one of the women in the animal enclosure during the witch-burning sequence.[15]

The film's violent ending deviated from the script due to a continuity problem. In the scene as written, Trooper Swallow was supposed use both his and Harcourt's flintlock pistols to shoot both Hopkins and Richard dead. However, only Harcourt was depicted in previous scenes as carrying a pistol, and therefore only one person could be shot. When this plot hole was discovered, Reeves immediately told actor Nicky Henson, "All right, just shoot Vincent and I'll get Ian to scream and shout and go mad and freeze frame on Hilary Dwyer screaming."[22]

Several additional nude scenes were filmed during the production. Set in a pub and involving local "wenches", the sequences were reportedly solely intended for the movie's German release version.[19] Reeves refused to take part in the filming of these sequences and they were completed by the crew after the "regular" versions of the scenes had been shot, with Tigon's Tenser acting as director.[10] According to Waddilove, Louis M. Heyward appeared at the location only to ensure those additional scenes were filmed.[16] The credits read, "Additional scenes by Louis M Heyward." According to Ogilvy, this was an in-joke because for Reeves, "additional scenes" meant "some prick of a producer putting his oar in and messing up what the director had done."[16]

Witchfinder General's celebrated score was composed by Reeves' friend Paul Ferris, who had previously scored The Sorcerers, and acted in the film under the alias "Morris Jar" (a reference to his favourite composer, Maurice Jarre). He drew inspiration from the folk song "Greensleeves" in writing the romantic theme "Peaceful Interlude" as a means of evoking its time period, as well as to serve as a counterpoint to the film's violence.[24] Film critic Tim Lucas has compared the score to that of Marcello Giombini's music for the swashbuckler film Knives of the Avenger (1966), noting that both films are "historical melodrama[s] that [function as] metaphorical Westerns".[25]

Ferris' ambitions clashed with Tenser; the composer hoped to have the score performed with traditional Elizabethan instruments, a creative choice that Tenser vetoed for budgetary reasons. He instead conducted a 55-piece orchestra with whom he recorded at Olympic Studios in February 1968; he paid most of the performers' wages with his own money when Tenser refused to sanction additional funds, although he was later reimbursed after Tenser was impressed with his efforts. Ferris sold the publishing and master rights for the soundtrack to De Wolfe Music, who incorporated it into their large library of stock music and released the score, alongside Peter Knight's music for the Tigon/AIP film Curse of the Crimson Altar, on their album Strange Location, credited to the "London Studio Orchestra". Many of Ferris' tracks have been utilised in a wide variety of films and TV programmes. De Wolfe eventually released an official soundtrack album in 2013; the CD release includes a 12-page booklet containing stills from the film and liner notes by Tenser biographer John Hamilton.[24]

For its time, Witchfinder General was considered an unusually sadistic film. British film censor John Trevelyan was reportedly a distant cousin of Michael Reeves[9] and accepted the director's good intentions when Reeves explained why he felt it was necessary to include such intense violence in the movie. Trevelyan nonetheless argued, "The film gave the impression that it was exploiting violence, and in particular, sadism for commercial reasons." Consequently, the film was cut extensively by the British Board of Film Censors for its UK release. Nearly two complete minutes of what was described as "excesses of sadistic brutality" were removed. Reeves agreed to make some of the initial minor cuts himself, but when additional and more extensive demands were made he adamantly refused to take part in any further editing.[10]

Trevelyan claimed that Reeves later wrote him a letter admitting that the cuts were not as harmful as he had expected.[22] No copy of the letter has ever surfaced, and based on several other comments the director subsequently made about how the edits "ruined the film", Reeves's biographer Benjamin Halligan believes Trevelyan may have somehow "misremembered" the existence of this letter, confusing it with an earlier missive from the director in which he made a plea for the BBFC's leniency.[10]

Even the truncated version was met with considerable controversy by UK film critics. Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times complained "17th-century hanging, burning, raping, screaming, and Vincent Price as England's prize torture-overseer. Peculiarly nauseating."[14] The Guardian felt the film was filled with "gratuitous sadism."[22] Margaret Hinxman of The Sunday Telegraph dismissed it as a "sadistic extravaganza."[22]

Nonetheless, several critics felt the film was worth accolades. John Russell Taylor in the London Times Saturday Review said the film "… is quite happily and deliberately a horror film: that is to say, it has no particular pretensions to being anything else … There is much in it which would win Michael Reeves an important reputation if he were dealing with some more pretentious, but fundamentally no more serious subject … Mr. Reeves is no longer merely promising. He already has real achievements behind him: not merely good horror films, but good films, period."[14] Films and Filming noted, "Witchfinder General has no explicit 'message', but it does say something about the springs of despair and it says it forcefully. It is a very frightening film … Matthew Hopkins is the best of Price's recent performances. Witchfinder General is emphatically not a horror film; it is, however, a very horrifying one …"[14]

Monthly Film Bulletin observed, "Not since Peeping Tom has a film aroused such an outcry about nastiness and gratuitous violence as this one … the tone of the film is oddly muted, with torture and death in plenty, but viewed matter-of-factly and without stress … Throughout the whole film there is a vivid sense of a time out of joint, which comes as much from the stray groups of soldiers who skirmish against unseen attackers in the woods or hang wearily about by the wayside waiting for battle to commence, as from the bloody crimes committed in the name of religion by Matthew Hopkins."[29]

Playwright Alan Bennett was particularly repulsed by Witchfinder. In his regular column in The Listener, published eight days after the film's release, Bennett explained how he felt horror films should always be "punctuated by belly laughs" and attacked Reeves's completely humourless movie as "the most persistently sadistic and morally rotten film I have seen. It was a degrading experience by which I mean it made me feel dirty."[10]

Although Reeves was infuriated, his response indicated that he believed Bennett's reaction was proof that his decision to include such extreme violence was the correct approach to the material. In his letter published in The Listener, Reeves noted: "Surely the most immoral thing in any form of entertainment is the conditioning of the audience to accept and enjoy violence … 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."[10]

US film poster, which bore the title The Conqueror Worm to associate the film with AIP's earlier Corman-Poe cycle.

AIP heads Arkoff and Nicholson had originally contributed their portion of the budget as a tax write-off, but when they were screened the completed film they were astonished by its quality. Nicholson told Louis Heyward, "It is one of the best we have gotten from England. Everybody thinks this is about the best production in the Poe series for the past few years." Arkoff noted that "Michael Reeves brought out some elements in Vincent that hadn't been seen in a long time. Vincent was more savage in the picture. Michael really brought out the balls in him. I was surprised how terrifying Vincent was in that … I hadn't expected it."[10]

In the US, the film was not subject to any censorship at all, and was released virtually intact to AIP's usual mix of drive-ins and grindhouses on a double bill with The Young, the Evil and the Savage (1968).[30] However, in an attempt to link the film with Roger Corman's earlier Edgar Allan Poe series of films, it was retitled The Conqueror Worm. Brief prologue and epilogue narrations (by Price) taken from Poe's poem were added to justify the new title. As Danny Peary noted in his Cult Movies book, the film went nearly unnoticed by critics during its US release: "The few snoozing trade reviewers who saw it treated it as just another entry in AIP's Edgar Allan Poe series … and gave it such dismal notices that future bookings were scarce."[31]

Of those who did see it, Hollywood Citizen News was appalled by the film: "A disgrace to the producers and scripters, and a sad commentary on the art of filmmaking … a film with such bestial brutality and orgiastic sadism, one wonders how it ever passed customs to be released in this country."[14] The trade journal Box Office noted that: "Fans of the horror film will be glad to know that Vincent Price is back to add another portrait to his gallery of arch-fiends … bathed in the most stomach-churning gore imaginable …"[14] Variety opined that "Dwyer gives evidence of acting talent, but she and all principals are hampered by Michael Reeves's mediocre script and ordinary direction."[32]

In a more favourable notice written for The New York Times, Renata Adler expressed that the film featured "any number of attractive young aspiring stars who seem to have been cast … mainly for their ability to scream. … Price has a good time as a materialistic witch-hunter and woman-disfigurer and dismemberer, and the audience at the dark, ornate New Amsterdam seemed to have a good time as well. There are lines like, "Take three good men and ride into East Anglia," through which a man behind me snored and a middle-aged couple next to him quarreled viciously, but people woke up for the action and particularly cheered when Price was hacked to death".[2] Despite the lack of critical support, the movie was a modest success stateside, earning $1.5 million for AIP according to Cinefantastique magazine.[21] In his biography of Reeves, Benjamin Halligan claims the film made $10 million in the US.[10]

Very soon after its initial release in the spring of 1968, several critics began championing the film in the UK and US. Robin Wood wrote that "Witchfinder General is certainly [Reeves'] most successfully achieved work … what one is immediately struck by is the assurance and intensity of what is on the screen… the English countryside is felt as a real presence: it is difficult to think of other films in which it has been used so sensitively and meaningfully. With it is associated Paul Ferris' theme-music, which suggests a traditional air without being actual quotation. Against the peace and fertility of nature is set the depravity of men."[33]

David Pirie, who wrote extensively and enthusiastically about the film in his 1973 book A Heritage of Horror, reviewed the film in 1971 for Time Out, commenting: "one of the most personal and mature statements in the history of British cinema … The performances are generally excellent, and no film before or since has used the British countryside in quite the same way."[34] Danny Peary noted, "The Conqueror Worm is a stunning film in many ways, but probably Reeves's greatest achievement is that he was able to maintain an extraordinary momentum throughout, until the film ends as it began, with a woman (this time Sara) screaming."

In 2000, Derek Malcolm included Witchfinder General as part of his series The Century of Films, a list of what he considered to be the one hundred most "artistically or culturally important" movies of the 20th Century. Malcolm asserted that the film "is one of the most compulsively watchable ever made in Britain" and "transcends its genre with the sheer panache of its making."[35] In 2005, J. Hoberman of the Village Voice stated that the film "has long been a cult item—in part because its talented 25-year-old director, Michael Reeves, died of a drug overdose before [sic] the film's release, but mainly because it is an extraordinarily bleak story of political evil … Reeves shot on location and the movie has a robust autumnal quality perfectly matched by Price's overripe performance … it remains contemporary, and even frightening, in its evocation of cynical Puritanism and mass deception."[36]

A contrary assessment came from Alex Cox, who in his introduction to the film in a 1992 episode of BBC2's Moviedrome, praised Price's performance as being "untroubled" by his American accent, but otherwise described the film as a "fairly routine Price horror movie with none of the excessive genius of the Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe films", finding its violence to be "relatively tame" compared to the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street films.[37]