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Director: Michael Reeves
Screenwriters: Tom Baker, Michael Reeves, John Burke (uncredited) / Tom Baker, Michael Reeves
By Roderick Heath
Michael Reeves’s death at the age of 25 is one of the rawest cheats and tragedies of film history. The English wunderkind, born in 1943, was connected to a wealthy family through his quite unwealthy mother, and the poor relations finally came in for an inheritance when Reeves was 17. By that time Reeves’s cinephilia was already well advanced. At the age of 11 he had made his first home movie, roping in his friends and future collaborators Tom Baker and Ian Ogilvy to help him film and act in it: the result, Carrion, featured Ogilvy as a psycho who attacks a girl in a wheelchair, and sported tracking shots accomplished with a Super 8 camera set up on a tea trolley. An auspicious and forebodingly violence-themed ground zero for the budding director, who, upon coming into his aforementioned windfall, used it to catch a plane to Hollywood and seek out his favourite director, Don Siegel. Lavishing effusive praise on the bewildered but flattered old veteran proved a good way to help Reeves break into the movie industry.
A couple of years later, now barely in his twenties, Reeves’s prodigious ability was first hinted when he was employed as an assistant director on the Italian horror film Castle of the Living Dead (1964), a film made under the typically stringent conditions of low-budget continental genre films of the day, when anything that could help speed up shooting was welcome. Reeves so quickly impressed the film’s producer Paul Maslansky that he and the film’s writer, Warren Keifer, were both invited to shoot portions of the move themselves. Both of them went without credit, the movie credited instead to genre journeyman Luciano Ricci under his regular pseudonym Herbert Wise, but the interesting visual texture, alive to location filming in a manner rare for movies of the type usually weren’t at the time, suggests the depth of Reeves’s impact. That film also proved a starting point for another major talent, Donald Sutherland, employed in a dual acting role. Maslansky gave Reeves the chance to make his credited debut the following year, with La Sorella di Satana, usually known as The She Beast in English, the story of an executed witch returning from the dead, starring Barbara Steele, the English fetish object of Italian Gothic horror, and Ogilvy, now grown up into a starkly handsome potential star. An awkwardly produced and padded film, La Sorella di Satana nonetheless showed further flashes of Reeves’s great talent in conjuring atmospheric visuals and articulating a radical sensibility interlaced with classical genre concerns and clichés.
Reeves’s cult stature nonetheless rests firmly on the two subsequent films he made back in England, The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General, works that saw Reeves moving into high gear, still working within the limits of the genre film world he had found his foothold in but also displaying uncommon ambition and intelligence. On each film Reeves was required to employ a legendary but ageing star deeply associated with the genre – Boris Karloff in The Sorcerers, and Vincent Price on Witchfinder General, and he helped them give performances amongst their very best. This involved some conflict with Price, who kept hitting the same grandiose and showy notes he was reputed for, only to be constantly coaxed to deliver a more reserved performance, which Price didn’t entirely get the point of until he saw the completed film. On Karloff’s part his work with Reeves helped prime him for the following year’s salutary Targets. The success of Witchfinder General, which became one of the many cause celebre films dealing in bloody violence in the late 1960s, made Reeves a hot property, and he was bombarded with potential projects, and the one that really seemed to get him fired up was an offer to make Easy Rider (1969). But a tendency to depression Reeves had managed to keep fairly well-hidden up until that point now came upon him and proved paralysing, and he died in 1969 after taking antidepressants following a heavy night of drinking.
What Reeves might have become if he hadn’t died has always been one of those what-if questions of movie lore. He might very well have melted down prematurely, as did so many promising young talents of the 1960s movie scene, particularly given the British film industry began to implode through the next decade. He might also have become a rival to Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott, or, even if he wasn’t bound for such exalted ranks, a figure equal to David Cronenberg and George Romero in the 1970s horror panoply, and one who could have found another path in a decade that ended with the doldrums of the slasher movie coming on, particularly considering most of the better British horror films of the period, like Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), owe much to Reeves’s template. The special genius of The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General lies in the way they fulfil their basic genre film requirements but also bring a level of conceptual depth and critical awareness altogether rare at the time. The Sorcerers began life as a screenplay written by John Burke, but Reeves and Baker rewrote it so heavily Burke insisted on only taking a story credit.
Reeves appeared and worked in horror cinema at a time when the genre was moving towards a great shift in its basic stylistics, thematic preoccupations, and stock plotlines, from the revival of Gothic horror kicked off by Hammer Films towards the more substantial influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Mario Bava’s proto-giallo films, reorienting the genre’s imagination to less metaphorical takes on personal and social anxieties, with vampires, werewolves, and various supernatural wraiths about to be generally supplanted by more human and substantial threats. Reeves’s own career reflected that shift, moving from the variations on familiar Gothic horror imagery and malevolent spirits in Castle of the Living Dead and La Sorella di Satana, to find possibilities for dread in more immediate and realistic concerns, or, in the case of The Sorcerers, finding a new, pseudoscientific vehicle for exploring the old idea of possession. The Sorcerers, in dealing with an entirely contemporary landscape, and, despite its historical setting, Witchfinder General with its blankly beheld, unstylised violence and harsh, tangible filming approach where the landscapes feel palpable enough to smell, marked important moments in that genre shift. The two films are also notably similar not just in their common conceptual preoccupations, but by their rigorous sense of form. Each takes up a basic, driving concept as sufficient, proceeding with a near-relentless internal logic and scarcely wasting a frame in telling their stories.
The Sorcerers for instance proceeds from a simple but brilliant conceit, one that presents front and centre an essential metaphor for the cinematic experience itself. Indeed, the film’s similarity to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) goes beyond their closeness as horror movies set amidst modern London’s more mundane districts: both movies are preoccupied with the very nature of cinema. Burke, Reeves, and Baker nonetheless went a step further than Powell, in their idea of a psychiatrist’s mind-bending invention. The psychiatrist in question is Professor Marcus Monserrat (Karloff), a once-renowned therapist and academic who’s been reduced to treating nervous ailments like facial twitches in a trickle of patients. His clients are attracted by advertisements pinned in shops close to the shabby apartment he keeps with his wife Estelle (Catherine Lacey), where they’ve been subsisting for thirty years, ever since Marcus’s career was destroyed by a succession of journalistic exposes on his outlandish ideas. Nonetheless, Marcus has, in a spare room of the apartment, painstakingly constructed an electronic apparatus that will allow him not only to induce a hypnotic state of unconscious control over a human subject, but that will allow the subject’s controllers to share in his physical and emotional sensations remotely.
Connecting The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General is a reflexive but considered fascination for violence delivered as a virtual spectator sport, provoking chaotic and primal emotions for both the objects of and wielders of that violence, but also manipulated as a vehicle for other, more insidious needs. In both, figures of authority impose their will on and gratify their needs through luckless innocents, a motif laced with bitter meditation on the “generation gap” often perceived at the heart of the 1960s social schisms, as well as political dimensions given the general concern stemming from the Vietnam War of young people being forced to go and fight old men’s wars. In The Sorcerers this angle of approach is given more ironic and sympathetic tilt at first, as Reeves presents the state of pathos the Monserrats live in, their old, creaking bodies and barren existence, find they have a tool in their grasp that allows them to escape the cage of their own flesh and experience. They gain their ideal subject in Mike Roscoe (Ogilvy), a superficially phlegmatic but exasperated hipster who seems to have evolved a resistance to the easy thrills of Swinging London’s nightspots: he only drinks Coca-Cola when out, seems to have tried every drug around and found it wanting, and is even antsy and distractible when out on a date with the beautiful continental woman Nicole (Elizabeth Ercy), who he ditches briefly to be entertained by his patronised pal Alan (Victor Henry) whilst seeking something indefinable.
What he finds is Marcus, who, his eye caught by the young man, follows him into a café and promises him a unique experience. “What are you selling?” Mike enquires testily: “Blue movies?” “Nothing as dull as that,” Marcus smiles with roguish assurance, and later promises, “Dazzling, indescribable experiences – complete abandonment with no thought of remorse.” Mike takes Marcus up on his veritable but obscure dare, and comes up to his apartment. Reeves has suggested the mysterious trove in Monserrat’s spare room earlier as the professor opens the door and surveys his creation without it actually being shown, menacing music instead hinting at the scene beyond. Mike then sees the room with the audience, beholding a space that looks like it beamed in directly from a Star Trek episode, with smooth white walls and weird devices festooning the space. Estelle helps her husband in coaxing the young subject to take his seat at the heart of the machine with headset in place. Marcus starts up the machine, his subject assailed with a torturous cacophony of electronic sounds and visual stimuli, which just happen to look a lot like the sorts of pulsating psychedelic imagery becoming a popular fixture projected at rock music shows in the late ‘60s. When the process concludes, Mike is in a mesmerised state, under the influence of both Marcus and Estelle, who experiment tentatively at making him obey their will, including sending him to the kitchen to crush an egg in his hand.
The Sorcerers suggests the immediate influence of two earlier, major, recent horror films – Peeping Tom and also Roman Polanski’s breakthrough hit Repulsion (1965), with its emphasis on an insidious breakdown of a personality in the seemingly placid and gritty surrounds of London; the casting of Ercy, a French-German actress, echoes both of those films’ use of European actors in leading roles, but with the twist here that the foreigner isn’t the one going nuts. Instead it’s Ogilvy, perfectly incarnating a brand of astringently phlegmatic but picture-perfect and coldly charismatic young male hipster, one whose brusque and insensate attitude to the people around him finally gains its exponentially worse comeuppance as the Monserrats make him their vehicle for exploring a world they’re entirely cut off from. “A boy who’s bored,” Marcus notes as he and Estelle discuss who their ideal subject should be, “Out looking for something.” Mike’s frustrated scorn for the tired pleasures of Swinging London nightlife and the women in his life contrasts the Monserrats’ desire to indulge those pleasures, and they push Mike to, amongst other things, pick up singer Laura Ladd (Sally Sheridan), a singer who belts out bluesy numbers in the club Mike, Alan, and Nicole frequent most, despite Mike not liking her. Mike explains to the increasingly exasperated Nicole that he keeps having blackouts and patches of amnesia.
For Monserrat, his invention means not just vindication for his ridiculed theories and years of obscurity, but also a device with enormous therapeutic and lifestyle potential, something that can help deliver other elderly people from their cages of their wearing bodies and limited experience, amongst other things. Once he proves his process works, Marcus wants to immediately present it to the world. Estelle however talks him into indulging their newfound power just a little, as a small recompense for all the privation they’ve suffered, a request that Marcus uneasily accedes to, allowing Estelle to use Mike as remote control agent to steal her a lush fur coat from a boutique: Mike smashes his way into the store and eludes an investigating Bobby. But the darker potential of this starts to assert itself as Estelle finds she has a deeper influence over Mike than her husband, proving her will superior to his and beginning to indulge more potent and illicit thrills, first pushing Mike to indulge the petty buzz of borrowing Alan’s motorbike without asking, but then taking it to dangerous levels as she pushes him to speed, endangering both himself and Nicole as she clings on for dear life. When confronted by an irate Alan when returning the bike to the car mechanic shop where Alan works, Estelle urges Mike to hit Alan, sparking a rough fight, with Estelle then pushing Mike to bring ruthless violence to bear, swatting Alan’s boss Ron (Alf Joint) with a wrench and leaving both men dazed and bloodied on the ground. Nicole is horrified and Mike bewildered by it all, flees.
The Sorcerers can be viewed as a particularly skewed and modern take on a string of movies Karloff had made in the early 1940s, which saw him cast as sympathetic but ill-fated scientists whose experiments go terribly wrong, of which The Invisible Ray (1936) and The Devil Commands (1941) are the best. Marcus plays the Mephistophelian lurer to Mike’s callow Faust, but tries to back out of the logic of a situation he’s contrived when he’s appalled to realise he’s unleashed the evil as well as healing potential of his invention. The unique cunning of The Sorcerers stems from the way Reeves utilises a not-uncommon idea in sci-fi and horror fiction, the device that allows some sort of puppet master influence, in a manner that nonetheless becomes an entirely coherent commentary on his movie itself, indeed of cinema itself, this machine that allows a viewer to share, for a spell, all the vicarious thrills of another life, and all that flows from that immersion, good and bad. Marcus’s promise to Mike of “complete abandonment with no thought of remorse” is the promise every film makes to its audience. The narrative form may insist on purveying some brand of officially moral, artistic, and intellectual structure to what it portrays, but the fragments within it often provide nonetheless some reflection of and indulgence of the provocative and amoral acts, beyond the pale of everyday life, from rape to murder to drug use, or even far more mundane things, minor treacheries of faith and loyalty and right thinking. The spiralling path the Monserrats find themselves on becomes a partial metaphor on a game Reeves was already well aware he was playing, as cinema in the late 1960s was being pushed inexorably to provide more and more extreme thrills, as the last veils of censorship fell away and the need of filmmakers to attract audiences away from television found this the easiest way.
Whilst the specific social milieu of the late-1960s hip scene Reeves encompasses is inevitably dated, the tension between youth and age is an eternal one, and moreover Reeves makes ingenious use of the sociological inferences common in 1967 and now in that generational face-off, evoking the way the media gets off on reports of youthful bad behaviour and transmits it through to people simultaneously afraid and envious. In many ways The Sorcerers not only anticipates but outclasses Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) in the way it explores that tabloid obsession with the figure of the rampant young psycho on a spree by looking not just towards ineffectual ways of contending with such social problems but considering what purpose they serve, however incidentally, in that society, and also in filmed representations. The logical extreme Reeves takes it all too is also bound up with another phenomenon reemerging when he made the film – feminism, albeit given a characteristically acidic twist. Estelle, playing the dutiful and long-suffering wife to the wounded male genius, finds herself empowered to an incredible, superhuman degree, and upon realising that her willpower exceeds her husband’s, begins not only to enjoy fighting and defeating him on a psychic level, but also indulging increasingly nefarious thrills without giving much of a damn for what Marcus or anyone thinks, particularly considering there’s no way of connecting her to Mike’s crimes, freed indeed from all need for remorse or moderation, only the pure pleasure of an unleashed will to power.
Witchfinder General approaches a similar preoccupation without the overt genre-enabled metaphor of Marcus’s machine, instead using its historical setting to forge a world where such exploitation and monstrous enthralment can be indulged. The narrative of the later film, adapted from a novel with the same title by Ronald Bassett, draws very broadly on a real historical figure, Matthew Hopkins, who stalked the byways of Civil War-era England seeking out and condemning those accused of witchcraft, in a campaign heavily coloured by religious and regional sectarianism: the film’s title was also a popular nickname he was granted in those heady days of different brands of authority bestriding the normally becalmed fields of England, raining down death in all its guises. The real Hopkins died of consumption at the age of 27, after about three years of activity. Reeves however was not that interested in the usual angle on such figures, like that espoused in Benjamin Christensen’s Haxan (1921) or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which analyse the heady stew of social prejudice, misunderstood psychological phenomena, and hysterical religious doctrines. Witchfinder General is more interested in analysing personal relations of power, and wielding a cogent metaphor for the zeitgeist of its making, being the increasingly fervent and angry tone of late 1960s where the youth culture revolved inescapably around the Vietnam War.
Reeves, originally wanted Donald Pleasance to play the heavily fictionalised take in the script he and Baker wrote, a reasonable choice that would have fit well with the portrait of the man, but when American International Pictures contributed financing they insisted on Price, then in haughty, hangdog middle age. Reeves opens the film with a sequence that coldly and starkly portrays the iniquitous brutality and social investment Reeves perceives in the tale of Hopkins and others like him, as an elderly woman, convicted of witchcraft, is dragged screaming and struggling out of a small town and hung from a gibbet on a windswept hillside, whilst Hopkins watches impassively from his horse at a distance from the actual machinery of the so-called justice. Hopkins travels from town to town on the invite of cliques in each locality, to accuse, process, and execute anyone who both provokes the fear and anger of their fellows but doesn’t have the strength to ward off Hopkins and the mobs that meet and collaborate with him. Hopkins employs John Stearne (Robert Russell) as his extremely eager torturer: where Hopkins regards Stearne as a useful ruffian and minion and little else, Stearne refers to his and Hopkins’ enterprise as a partnership. Hopkins also finds young women in each locale to force into sexual servitude for a time, using whatever leverage he has.
Even if Price wasn’t quite sure what Reeves wanted of him, Reeves certainly got it: Price’s Hopkins radiates a disdain for people that goes far beyond simple hypocrisy and into a realm of pure misanthropic attitude, considering everyone around to be some kind of useful stooge or temporary ally, a victim to be used and flung aside, or foe to be ruthlessly exterminated, and all of them sinners to one degree or another and so with no practical difference between the best and the worse. To a certain extent, indeed, landing Price rather than Pleasance in the part likely incidentally helped Reeves; Price’s formidable appearance amplifies this quality of characterisation rather than making Hopkins merely a sleazy opportunist. Next on Hopkins’ project of cleansing is the small Suffolk town of Brandeston, where he’s been called to investigate the local priest, John Lowes (Rupert Davies), who is mostly suspected – with some justification – of still harbouring Roman Catholic loyalties and so is regarded as satanic agent by his neighbours. His niece Sara (Hilary Dwyer) is his ward and housekeeper, and she has a lover, Richard Marshall (Ogilvy), currently serving with the rank of Cornet in the Parliamentary Army. Given some leave after saving his commander Captain Gordon Michael Beint during a skirmish with some Royalists, he heads to Brandeston and stays with the Lowes, as the priest, worried about their safety, suggests Richard marry Sara and get her away from the locale. The match is set but Richard has to go back to his company for a spell.
In the meantime Hopkins and Stearne breeze into town, and with the aid of their contacts in Brandeston apprehend the priest. Stearne tortures him by pricking his back with a spike, seeking the invisible, insensitive “devil’s mark” supposedly left on the body to seal a satanic pact. Sara makes her own, more palpable deal with the devil as she makes plain to Hopkins she’ll give him sexual favours if he lets her uncle be. Hopkins agrees and tells Stearne to get busy with other suspects. Stearne, himself taken by Sara, rapes her in a field, and when Hopkins is told of this by a witness, the Witchfinder, readily resumes the torture of Lowes, and finally has him and another woman hung after a session of witch-ducking, a session that leaves one woman drowned, and, thus, declared innocent. Richard, sent out on a mission to buy horses for the army with a big battle expected soon, overhears from a trader about the trial and immediately goes AWOL, galloping to Brandeston. There he finds Sara alive but distraught and wracked with guilt and pain, whilst her father’s church has been desecrated. In the mess of the church Richard gets Sara to kneel with him and pledge themselves in marriage over his cavalry sabre, but also vows revenge on Hopkins, and cannot countenance anything else until he gains that revenge. He runs into Stearne in a tavern during his hunt whilst Hopkins is visiting another town, and gets into a brawl with him: the tavern keeper intervenes to let Stearne flee by knocking Richard out, and Stearne alerts Hopkins when they meet on the road.
Hopkins’ charged and umbilical relationship with Stearne offers a new arrangement of the one evinced by the Monserrats, and also their connection to Mike in The Sorcerers. A chain of use and abuse, proxies and doppelgangers, amanuenses and dupes, victims and perpetrators, one constantly shading into the other. Stearne, a more plebeian, less strategically shrewd, if hardly more innocent figure than Hopkins, provides the relish for actually inflicting pain and suffering. Hopkins is happy to employ that pleasure taken in skill, but evidently considers himself superior to it. Hopkins knows well that part of his prestige comes from having layers of insulation, social, religious, and legal as well as in terms of dirty work, between him and the bloody actuality of his labours. They give not just a veneer of respectability, but also an even more pleasurable manifestation of it: even better than to torture someone without consequence is to prove one’s power by motivating that torture. Hopkins nonetheless literally cannot leave Stearne behind, although the two men are separated at one point when they’re stopped by a roundhead patrol: Hopkins, fleeing without a second thought for Stearne’s fate, guns down a soldier to secure his getaway, whilst Stearne is briefly captured and only escapes after a more personal and vicious struggle that sees him stab a soldier to death with his spike for finding the devil’s mark. Stearne vows a reckoning with Hopkins, but when he comes upon him again, Hopkins quickly and easily suborns him again without any concern by calling for him to resume his work.
As with The Sorcerers, Reeves’s political subtexts in Witchfinder General skid in many directions. Hopkins resembles a pseudo-historical take on totalitarian state inquisitors and Stearne the kind of man who helps keep such people in their jobs, one unleashing the other. Given that relatively few films have dealt seriously with the milieu of the English Civil War, particularly with the jarring mixture of high moral purpose espoused by the people fighting it and the disruption and disorientation unleashed by it on the ground level, Witchfinder General is particularly keen to reflect a sort of folk history portrait of perhaps the most subtly ugly front of a war, one where neighbours turn on each-other and petty tyrants grow like weeds, an approach that also connects to the Vietnam War epoch. An early scene of Richard saving his captain from a Royalist soldier, who sneaks through the underbrush close to where the roundheads have converged in the sun-speckled woods, suggests a distant analogue for the constant game of hunt and ambush played in the Vietnamese forests. A little more facetiously, if arguably honouring the ancient traditions of English bawdiness, Reeves rhymes the increasingly liberated culture of the ‘60s era with that with the upturned apple carts of the Civil War as Richard and Sara abscond for a night of passion, with Richard ironically wielding her uncle’s words as well as his tacit approval of their union: “Didn’t you uncle just say you must early to bed? And isn’t he a wise man?”
Reeves avoids the expected in presenting a clash between such premarital carnality and other such outbreaks of pagan practice amidst the chaos of war and the moral order Hopkins nominally maintains, in part because Hopkins himself is freely indulging his own sexual wont, with Reeves delivering his bitterest punchline when the Witchfinder, learning Stearne has soiled his private pleasure, moves on from Sara with icy lack of care. This sense of careless detachment from consequence and misanthropic divorcement is equally apparent as the by-product of Marcus Monserrat’s invention in The Sorcerers, and the way it hands Estelle in particular a tool to indulge the darkest desires. Estelle makes Mike seek out a female acquaintance, Audrey Woods (Susan George), who’s happy to see him, only for him to stab her to death with a pair of scissors in the most sublime/awful consummation of machine’s potential: Estelle shivers with orgasmic pleasure in finally getting to indulge a long-suppressed desire to assault and destroy things that invite jealousy and longing, and she soon compels Mike to repeat the act with Laura. In both films, the membrane that keeps people civilised is tested and found easily broken, a point most famously made in the final scene of Witchfinder General, depicting as it does understandable thirst for revenge becoming lunatic bloodlust and frustration and the complete collapse of moral meaning. Are we good people because we are intrinsically peaceable and empathetic and wrongdoing is aberrant, or is that a state that can only exist so long as a rarefied balance of tensions defining the relationship of individual to group? This interest would also fuel much horror cinema in the future, particularly Wes Craven’s films. In this way Reeves offers a loaded commentary on the logic not merely of the puritanical code of the witchfinder but, again, the nature of war as a corroder of all social values, reducing the best people to maniacal beasts.
Witchfinder General was retitled The Conqueror Worm for its initial US release, to make it seem like one of the Edgar Allan Poe films Price had made with Roger Corman and AIP, whilst different edits drifted around for decades afterwards, helping ironically to increase the film’s mystique. The film nonetheless found significant success, grossing $1.5 million in the US alone against its relatively miniscule £75,000 budget. As well as inflecting the Folk horror trend of the 1970s, Reeves’s film begat a string of horror films about cruel inquisitors, most of them made in Germany. The look of Witchfinder General, accomplished in Reeves’ collaboration with the great cinematographer John Coquillon, proved particularly influential. Coquillon would go on to collaborate regularly in that period with Sam Peckinpah. The feeling of connection between Reeves and Peckinpah goes beyond this, that said. Witchfinder General anticipates the same choleric, Sadean logic Peckinpah would bring to bear on The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971), with their determined depiction of the most violent and barbaric aspects of humanity, coexisting with a desperate effort to crawl out of the muck. At the end of an excruciating sequence of a woman being burned alive, Reeves delivers his most vicious joke in the sight of some village children roasting potatoes in the charcoal of the auto-da-fe, a vignette strongly reminiscent of the one Peckinpah offers at the opening of The Wild Bunch.
Witchfinder General also manages the rare feat of straddling genres easily. The bloody violence and air of slowly cranking, finally incipient lunacy certainly makes it count as horror, but it also shifts at points throughout into a war movie, historical drama, revenge thriller, and a sort of English Western, with Richard cast as the mounted avenger dashing on his noble steed across the fields, to the strains of Paul Ferris’s score, which toggles between a sweeping romanticism and flourishes of folk music and more standard thriller scoring for the era. Reeves films his landscapes with a similarly ironic sensibility, a stylistic approach that would essentially birth the so-called “Folk horror” style that would similarly hinge on a deceptive blend of the bucolic and the menacing. It’s worth comparing the heavily stylised approach Bava and John Llewellyn Moxey took a few years earlier, with La Maschera del Demonio (1960) and The City of the Dead (1960) respectively, in dealing with similar depictions of witch trials and executions and thematic territory. Instead, Reeves and Coquillon’s camera sweep a very real world, capturing the rural pastures, the pools of mud and dancing horses, the grass-framed lanes and thorn-fringed woods, the grey-stone churches and pebble paths, with all the evocation of yeoman virtue and pastoral crudeness befitting the artistic exaltation of John Constable or William Blake. But these come edged with hints of menace and gathering darkness in surveys of gaunt trees, looming clouds over silhouetted gibbets and hanging trees, and low, flare-casting sunsets charged with romantic tristesse, all of which would become fixtures in the cinematography over the next decade. Moments of the grotesque are approached with the same deadpan sense of strange beauty – pocks of red blood spurting from the backs jabbed with Stearne’s blade, fire wrapping around a screaming victim.
After failing to run the witchfinding duo down, Richard returns to his company and is lucky to avoid a court-martial through his captain’s good graces. After distinguishing himself at the Battle of Naseby, Oliver Cromwell (Patrick Wymark) assigns Richard to chase down the king, who’s rumoured to be fleeing to the East Anglia coast, and he sets off in the company of Troopers Swallow (Nicky Henson) and Harcourt (John Trenaman). Wymark’s brief appearance as Cromwell – he also narrates the film at the outset – sees the film’s fictional drama intersect cleverly with the history, with Wymark expertly capturing some essence of the future Lord Protector, professing his desire to have his success at Naseby remembered as a success for godliness and expressing delight in good food after a well-earned victory, all with the self-certified attitude of a man who knows what real power is and how to use it. Cromwell casually promotes Richard to Captain whilst assigning him to chase down the king, giving him a perfect window to also pursue Hopkins. After learning the king has managed to sail away, Richard heads for a rendezvous with Sara, who’s staying in the town of Lavenham. Richard however is unaware that Hopkins has set up in that town as well, and, knowing Sara is there, lies in wait for him.
On closer inspection it’s possible to view both The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General as Reeves exploring and trying to come to grips with his own depressive streak. This feels particularly cogent with The Sorcerers, in its portrait of a young man who seems to have everything going for him yet finds himself at the mercy of a force that steals his time, fragments his thoughts, saps his sense of self, and drives him to irrational places. In Witchfinder General it registers more in the film’s unflinching appraisal of infernal possibilities underlying the placid world, a world with its comforting trappings surgically cut away, where just about all that’s good and noble is systematically ruined. Reeves also meditates wryly on the illusive nature of the hipster universe Mike drifts amidst in The Sorcerers, the gyrating youngsters all trying to look chic whilst holding down jobs like Mike in a shop and Alan as a car mechanic. The antique store Mike works in is called, with amusing double meaning, “The Glory Hole,” where he is at one point faced with a testy customer (Gerald Campion) who comes in, pokes around the wares, and asks for a telephone, but doesn’t want the antique kind Mike offers him: “In that case you’re not much use to me are you?” This offhand but meaningful feel for social station is echoed again in Witchfinder General, where war has to a great extent benefited Richard in bringing him rank and connection, and also gives him the chance to marry Sara, a match that was unlikely before the war as Richard whilst a landowner only has a small farm. Indeed, the way the social disruption has benefitted him also applies to Hopkins and Stearne.
The innermost core of both The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General is nonetheless the preoccupation with violence, not as a mere anomaly in human life but an entire paradigm, questioning what keeps it at bay as well as what unleashes it, and its eruption means for the world in small and at large. The most violent and horrific moment in The Sorcerers isn’t Mike’s murders, but the crucial scene in which Estelle, realising she can overpower her husband, responds to his decision to deprogram Mike by smashing his apparatus, the pleasure of release and violent action etched into her aged face. Marcus tries desperately to stop her, but she easily topples him by kicking his cane out from under him, using the cane as her implement of destruction on the machine before then walloping Marcus on the brow with it. Knocking Marcus out gives Estelle a chance to tie him with arms spread to a cabinet. Once she has him at bay, Estelle tries to feed nasty-looking forward purely to keep his strength up to engage in more “competitions.” Here is a truly dark and evil vision of an old and exhausted marriage, the utter antithesis of the kind celebrated in a song from the same year, The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four,” finding its terminus in elder abuse and pure domestic violence and tragedy. Similarly, Hopkins utilising his sway to force women like Sara into his bed isn’t the most spectacularly ugly of his acts, but it is in a way the most familiar and excruciating (and as good as Karloff and Ogilvy are, Lacey steals the film off them). Both The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General also climax with Reeves taking on a basic, goading problem for anyone writing an action thriller – that moment when a protagonist is tied up and entirely at bay, with Marcus tethered to a cupboard and Richard finally bound and captive at the mercy of Hopkins and Stearne, forced to watch as Sara is brutalised with malignant design and purpose.
Reeves, despite his diptych’s forward-lunging approach to story, still inserts great little asides that let in jots of comic relief that aren’t allowed to get distracting, like the scene in The Sorcerers with the antique storie customer and another vignette with an over-eager Jewish deli manager (Meier Tzelniker) that feel harested from everyday life around London, and a cameo in Witchfinder General from Steptoe himself, Wilfrid Brambell, as Master Loach (“Witchfinding? Oh, that’s nice, that’s very nice!”), a rambling horse dealer who sells a nag to Stearne and accidentally helps him find Hopkins after their separation. Hopkins meanwhile, having set up in Lavenham, supervises the bleak spectacle of a young woman (Maggie Kimberly) being executed through Hopkins’ new innovation of being lowered slowly and face-first into the blaze, whilst her husband is held at bay by some village men. This couple, whilst not even named on screen, are vital counterparts and mirrors to Richard and Sara, illustrating the worst end they could come to, and the husband is similarly driven to revenge against Hopkins, trying to attack him with a knife only to be shot in the gut by the quick-draw witchfinder. This however proves to be key to Hopkins and Stearnes’ ultimate undoing, as the husband, not yet dead, manages to tell Swallow and Harcourt, on the search for their leader, that Richard and Sara, having been captured by Hopkins’ connivance, have been taken to a nearby castle.
Swallow and Harcourt ultimately play the same role in Witchfinder General as Alan and Nicole in The Sorcerers: both duos try to intervene in a dismal situation but do so just a hair too late, and the story must end with the degradation and downfall of the nominally innocent as well as the self-consuming comeuppance of the villains. Alan and Nicole, realising after Laura’s body is discovered that Mike was the last one with her and seeing the connection with Audrey’s slaying too, decide to track Mike down and try to dispel their fears, even two detectives (Ivor Dean and Peter Fraser) are on the trail too, rummaging through Mike’s flat. When Alan and Nicole confront Mike in the antique store, Estelle urges Mike to lash out violently and then flee in a stolen car. The police chase down Mike as he speeds recklessly through the London streets. But Marcus finally regains control not by trying to temper Estelle’s destructive impulse but to take it to its greatest extreme, and knowing well that physical damage Mike takes will manifest on their bodies: Marcus compels Mike to drive pell-mell into a building sight, crashing the car and burning to death within it. Marcus manages to breathe a last apology to his wife as he performs the ultimate act of self-sacrifice and punishment, and Reeves caps the film, by dissolving from the licking flames of the burning car to the sight of Marcus and Estelle now charred corpses.
Witchfinder General’s more famous, and notorious, climax is even darker, delivering the coldest possible parody of a situation most action films would present in heroic terms in depicting the turning of the worm and justified payback. Hopkins and Stearne relish having Richard and Sara at bay, Stearne now riddling Sara’s back with the same bloody stigmata as he did her father, whilst Richard levels on Hopkins a dead-eyed glare and promise to kill him, a promise Hopkins has heard a hundred times already and takes smirking delight in. Meanwhile Swallow and Harcourt try to bluff their way past Hopkins’ local ally (Peter Haigh) and finally bet fight him to gain access to the dungeon. Whilst Hopkins delights in threatening to burn Sara’s flesh with a cruciform branding iron, he orders Stearne to untie Richard and bring him close to watch. The ruckus upstairs gives Richard a split-second chance to knock Stearne down and throw off his bonds, delivering the spur of his boot to Stearne’s eye and leaving him writhing agony whilst advancing on Hopkins with an axe. Swallow and Harcourt arrive to behold another awful spectacle, that of Richard repeatedly swatting the agonised Hopkins with the axe, and Swallow shoots the witchfinder dead to put him out his misery. Richard, mad-eyed and distraught, begins to repeatedly bellow, “You took him from me! You took him from me!”, whilst Sara begins to shriek in crazed shock. Whilst The Sorcerers in some ways develops its driving ideas in close concert with its narrative form more completely than Witchfinder General, it’s not as full-blooded and delirium-producing as a work of directorial realisation, and in its climax Witchfinder General hits a truly raw nerve, capping the film with its haunting note of unresolved pain and spiralling madness. Sara’s wail becomes an entire philosophical statement, the scream ever-echoing from all that’s unresolved and unjust in the world’s deep, dank history.
film freedonia 