Witchfinder General (film) - Response

Response

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." The Guardian felt the film was filled with "gratuitous sadism." Margaret Hinxman of The Sunday Telegraph dismissed it as a "sadistic extravaganza." 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." 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 ..." 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."

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." 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."

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."

In the U.S., 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. 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 U.S. 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." 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." 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 ..." 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." Despite the lack of critical support, the movie was a modest success stateside, earning $1.5 million for AIP according to Cinefantastique magazine. In his biography of Reeves, Benjamin Halligan claims the film made $10 million in the U.S.

The film's retitling by AIP caused a minor fracas in Hong Kong. A group of British sailors had seen the movie at the base theater under its original title and one week later unwittingly saw the movie again in a local theater, playing under the American release title. They immediately demanded their money back and, when the manager refused, they tipped over trashcans, threw popcorn at the screen and "almost tore the theatre apart." The manager changed his mind and paid the sailors back for the price of the tickets, and sent a bill to AIP for the damages.

Very soon after its initial release in the spring of 1968, several critics began championing the film in the UK and U.S. 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." 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." 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 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."

In his 2007 book, Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil's 'Aeneid', Lee Fratantuono described Witchfinder General as a modern retelling of the main themes of Virgil's epic Aeneid, and its central image of the unrelenting nature of fury and madness and its power to corrupt essentially good heroes. Fratantuono has written that in the film Reeves "has captured exactly the point of Virgil's great epic of madness and its horrifying conclusion."