Witchfinder General: Reeves's Bleak Puritan Nightmare

Michael Reeves was twenty-four when he made Witchfinder General and twenty-five when he died, in February 1969, of an accidental overdose of barbiturates. He completed three features. The last of them is the best English horror film of its decade and one of the few in the genre that has an argument about violence rather than an appetite for it.

The film opens with a woman being dragged up a hill to a gallows while a village watches. Reeves shoots the walk in full, in a wide shot, in daylight, with the rope already visible at the top of the frame. There is no score cue telling you to feel something. There is a hill, and a crowd, and the length of time it takes to get someone to the top of it.

1645, and no monsters

It is the English Civil War. Central authority has collapsed to the point where a man can arrive in an East Anglian parish, announce that he is empowered to identify witches, charge a fee per conviction, and be believed. Matthew Hopkins was a real person who did exactly this and died in 1647, and Reeves — working from Ronald Bassett’s novel — keeps the essential mechanism: the horror is a business model operating inside a legal vacuum.

There is nothing supernatural in the picture. Not one accused woman is a witch. There is no ambiguity offered, no scene in which the film flirts with the possibility that Hopkins is onto something. That decision costs the film every conventional horror pleasure and buys the only thing it wants, which is the audience’s inability to look away on the grounds that it is only a story. British horror in 1968 was Hammer’s Transylvania and Amicus’s anthologies. Reeves put the same audience in a real field in a real war and gave them nothing to hide behind.

The comparison people reach for is The Blood on Satan’s Claw, which Tigon made three years later on the same instinct about English landscape, and the two films are usually bracketed with The Wicker Man as folk horror’s founding set. The bracket flatters the other two slightly. Haggard’s film has a demon and Hardy’s has a cult, and both therefore have a horror the audience can locate outside itself. Reeves has a man with a ledger.

The man AIP made him hire

Reeves wanted Donald Pleasence. AIP, who were co-financing with Tony Tenser’s Tigon and needed a name for the American release, insisted on Vincent Price. Reeves was furious and did not conceal it, and the shoot became the most productive bad relationship in horror.

The exchange has been repeated in every account since: Price, exasperated by a director half his age telling him to stop performing, pointed out how many films he had made, and Reeves replied that he had made three good ones. Whatever the exact wording, the effect is on the screen. Price gives a performance stripped of every mannerism he had spent fifteen years building for Corman’s Poe cycle — no relish, no arched delivery, no wink. His Hopkins is quiet, businesslike, faintly tired, and utterly without the theatrical grandeur that would have let an audience enjoy him. Price hated the experience and later acknowledged it as one of his finest pieces of work, which is the correct assessment.

What Reeves understood is that a flamboyant Hopkins would have been a monster, and a monster is a comfort. A Hopkins who conducts a torture the way an auditor conducts an audit implicates the parish that hired him, the soldiers who assist him and the audience watching him. Robert Russell’s John Stearne, Hopkins’s assistant, supplies all the brutish appetite the film needs and is contemptible precisely because he enjoys the work; Price’s Hopkins simply completes it.

Coquillon’s England

John Coquillon shot the film, his first significant credit, and Sam Peckinpah saw it and hired him — Coquillon went on to photograph Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Cross of Iron. The pipeline from this film to Peckinpah’s rural England is direct and it explains a lot about both.

Coquillon photographs Suffolk and Norfolk as a real working landscape in real light, and Reeves stages the atrocities inside it without adjusting the frame to accommodate them. A woman is drowned in a moat that is a moat. Men ride across fields that go on past the edges of the shot. The camera’s refusal to become expressionist when the violence starts is the film’s central technique: the world does not change register to acknowledge what is happening in it, which is exactly the observation the film wants to make about how atrocity actually occurs. The countryside is indifferent. The weather is fine. This continues to be true while a man is being burned.

Paul Ferris wrote a score of genuine pastoral beauty for it, all strings and open English melody, and AIP replaced it wholesale for the American release, where the film was retitled The Conqueror Worm and fitted with Poe verses read by Price so it could be sold as another instalment of a cycle it has nothing to do with. It is one of the great acts of distributor vandalism, and it sits alongside the BBFC’s own trims in a history of the film being edited by people who found it upsetting and thought that was a problem. We chart that pattern across the genre in The censor’s scissors.

The argument

Alan Bennett reviewed it for The Listener on release and was withering about its sadism, and the review is worth reading because it is wrong in an instructive way. The film is relentlessly unpleasant. The question is what the unpleasantness is doing, and Reeves’s answer is unusually rigorous for a 24-year-old working in exploitation.

Almost every revenge film manufactures a moment of release: the villain dies, the score swells, the audience is discharged. Reeves builds the entire picture toward such a moment and then engineers it so that the release cannot arrive. He has spent eighty minutes making you want Hopkins dead. He then shows you what wanting that does to the man who wants it, and he does it at a length that becomes unbearable, and he ends the film in the middle of a scream.

This is why Witchfinder General has outlasted almost everything made around it. It is a horror film about the moral cost of the emotion horror films are usually built to gratify. Compare Robert Eggers’s The Witch, which shares the period, the piety and the pitilessness, and which ultimately offers its heroine a form of liberation. Reeves offers nothing. Everyone who survives has been ruined, including the ones who won.

Where to watch: the British cut with Ferris’s score, uncut, at full length. The Conqueror Worm is a mutilation with a different soundtrack and a Poe frame, and it exists solely to be studied as evidence.

Spoilers below

Richard Marshall is a Roundhead trooper engaged to Sara Lowes, whose uncle John is a village priest. Hopkins arrives, and Lowes is a convenient target — an educated man with property in a parish willing to be rid of him. Sara goes to Hopkins and offers herself to save her uncle, and Hopkins accepts and suspends the interrogation.

Then Stearne rapes her, Hopkins learns of it, and the film’s most chilling beat follows: having discovered that Sara is no longer exclusively his, Hopkins simply loses interest in the arrangement and resumes the torture. Lowes is swum in the moat and hanged. The bargain was worthless from the moment it was struck, and Sara paid for nothing, and Hopkins never breaks his commercial calm about any of it.

Marshall returns to find the parish gutted and his marriage a formality performed over a ruin. He swears in an empty church to kill both men, and the film’s remaining hour follows him doing it, becoming progressively less recognisable as the young man who rode out in the first reel.

The ending is the argument made flesh. Marshall corners Hopkins in a cell in Orford Castle and starts killing him with an axe, and Reeves lets it run — blow after blow, past the point of death, past any dramatic function, well past the point where an audience’s appetite for it has curdled into horror at itself. Another soldier, unable to watch, raises a pistol and shoots Hopkins to end it.

Marshall turns on him and screams: you took him from me. That is the film’s thesis in six words. The soldier has performed an act of mercy and Marshall experiences it as theft, because what he needed was the killing itself rather than the death, and it has been taken away before he could finish.

The last thing in the film is Sara, screaming in the corner, and Reeves refuses to cut away from her. He holds it, and then he simply ends the picture over the sound. There is no resolution because a resolution would be a lie, and the twenty-four-year-old who made this understood that better than most directors ever manage.