Witchfinder General

An undeniably brilliant swan song for the ill-fated directorial prodigy Reeves, with remarkable vision, and a ghastly sadistic performance by Vincent Price. Hard to like the film because it gets under your skin with its brutality and just stays there, eating you from within. A very fine work that stays with you, hauntingly.

_**Cinema's account of the infamous Matthew Hopkins**_ The infamous witch-finding exploits of Matthew Hopkins in Eastern England circa 1646 are chronicled based on Ronald Bassett’s 1966 novel. Hopkins (Vincent Price) and his colleague John Stearne travel from village to village brutally torturing "confessions" out of suspected witches and charging the local magistrates for the "work" they carry out. "Witchfinder General" (1968) is a Tigon production, a minor rival of Hammer Films, retitled "Conqueror Worm" in America with the addition of opening/closing quotes from the Poe poem by Price…

Vincent Price is superb in this depiction of the tyrannical, evil "Matthew Hopkins", tasked amidst the English Civil War to bring fear and terror to the population. Playing to just about every phobia and superstition, he travels the land seeking out and punishing those who worship or serve the devil... There is a magnificent scene in which he divines that a man dropped into the river with stones tied about him will be a witch if he floats, innocent if he sinks (and drowns!)... Sums up the science, really - and the really quite perturbing attitudes that prevailed, even amongst those deemed…

*Witchfinder General* has somehow spent decades sitting at folk horror’s top table while behaving rather like someone who wandered into the wrong wedding reception and nobody had the nerve to ask for their invitation. It certainly looks the part. Michael Reeves gives us Civil War England, open East Anglian countryside, witchcraft accusations, Puritan hats and Vincent Price stalking from village to village as Matthew Hopkins. Yet the longer the film goes on, the stranger its place in the folk horror canon becomes. There is virtually no supernatural unease here because nobody needs it. Hopkins…