Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968), or The Conqueror Worm in the US, sits slightly at odds with other seminal Folk Horror texts The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Despite similarly engaging with belief systems and Britain’s rural traditions it’s a more overtly political film, less straight horror, in which paganism is an excuse for the human horrors in the film rather than the cause of them. Indeed, almost no one in Witchfinder General believes in anything except advancing their own interests.
A low budget film produced by Tigon, Witchfinder General exists in several different versions (cut for violence in the UK; with additional voice over work in the US in an attempt to link the film to Corman’s Poe cycle; with extra nudity in Germany), it’s a little rough and ready but makes good use of the East Anglian locations and draws out an excellent low key performance from Vincent Price at odds with much of his work in the genre.
Fact versus Fiction
Price plays Matthew Hopkins, an historical figure who may have been responsible for the death of over 300 “witches,” but Witchfinder General is concerned less with historicity than with exploring the structures of power that enabled a man like Hopkins to be so successful. Whereas the real Hopkins may have believed he was doing “God’s work,” the film leaves us in no doubt that Hopkins is a fraud, using his supposed legitimacy to exploit women for sex and communities for money. As he explains, “I hold all life dearly, especially my own.” The communities he targets however, rather than being scared god-fearing types, seem to be as aware of the sham as Hopkins. Witches, after all, could only be identified by accusation, and the film suggests the accusers have their own, ungodly, agendas.
Witchfinder General takes place in 1645 during the English Civil War, fought between the Parliamentarian forces of Oliver Cromwell and Royalists loyal to King Charles I. It was a time of social and religious upheaval, where the Devil was seen by both sides as taking an active role in the conflict. It was a period when structures of law and order broke down, allowing men like Hopkins to flourish. By no means the only witchfinder, Hopkins was an innovator in moving between towns and villages throughout the region rather than waiting for accusers to come to him. He and his partner, John Stearne (played in the film by Robert Russell), would use various methods to extract confession from their victims, including sleep deprivation and the swimming test (where suspects would be tied and thrown into water – having renounced their Christian faith the water would reject them – those who floated were witches and then hanged, those who drowned were not). Witchfinder General includes many of the details of the interrogations, doused in that too-red blood beloved of the Hammer films of the same period, but adds some horrors of its own. Whereas the real-life witchfinders took the search seriously the filmic Hopkins works only for money and is happy to suspend a trial in exchange for sex. This is where the film diverges from other folk horrors; there is never any sense that witchcraft is real, all the horrors are human in origin.
The Exploitation of Fear
Witchfinder General is a startling film given its parallels to contemporary political events. Religion is used entirely as a rhetorical construct to justify violence, mostly against women. The choice of victims, generally young and pretty, allows Hopkins to exploit them sexually. Both Hopkins and Stearne are hypocrites, Stearne is seen in several taverns with prostitutes, and they acknowledge the efficacy of witchcraft accusations in forwarding their own agenda. But then it’s not just Hopkins and Stearne who are complicit in this; the town-people are easily involved in the sham trials, giving witness to supposed confessions. During the first hangings, they are actively involved, and, by the film’s centrepiece witch-burning, they have become inured to the violence, neither wincing nor braying for blood. Children cook potatoes in the victims’ ashes. The fear of the civil war and religion is re-routed into murders that become banal through their commonality. It summons up how we now react to television images of Syria, or how voters can be whipped up into a frenzy stemming from their genuine fears and then turn on others, particularly women or anybody typed as other. Hopkins exploits, but society’s complicity is always required.
Hopkins (Vincent Price) is finally brought to book in the film by Robert (Ian Ogilvy)
Hopkins is finally brought to book in the film by Robert (Ian Ogilvy), a parliamentarian soldier whose betrothed, Sara (Hilary Dwyer), has been sexually exploited by Hopkins and raped by Stearne. Driven mad having watched Sara tortured, he escapes and savagely beats Hopkins with an axe, only to be interrupted by a fellow soldier who shoots Hopkins out of pity. “You took him from me” cries Robert in Witchfinder General’s final moments, a man become as violent as those he sought to avenge himself on.
It’s a pitiless end to a film that exposes the power structures that flourish when legal systems break down, how fears can be exploited, and our complicity in it all. In the end it’s not society that stops Hopkins but a personal vendetta. Witchfinder General shows that when violence is unleashed, it becomes uncontrollable: the same forces that Hopkins used for his gain come back to destroy him.
But of course this is fiction. The real Hopkins died in his bed from consumption.
Biography
Cary Edwards is a Film Studies lecturer in Lincolnshire, UK. His earned his PhD in Film from The University of Lincoln and blogs at www.cary-edwards.com. He has also written on Teeth as a superhero movie for Horror Homeroom.
You can read more about the recent resurgence of folk horror here, about the fantastic Eden Lake (2008) as folk horror here, and about The Other Side of the Door (2016), Wake Wood (2009), and grief in folk horror here.
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