Witchfinder General

With his towering frame, regal bearing, and cruel blue eyes, Vincent Price stands tall in the pantheon of horror icons. But the prevalence of ham in his acting might suggest that he’s better suited to other holidays besides Halloween. That’s why now is the perfect time to discover Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General, featuring what Price himself called “one of the best performances I’ve ever given”—one divested of all the flamboyance and winks to the audience of his Corman outings, proffering in their place a chilling account of avarice, lust, and devouring ambition.

Price plays the infamous historical rogue Matthew Hopkins, who tore through pastoral England in the 1640s like the plague, exploiting political instability and local superstition to root out witches and heretics through criteria all his own, and execute them for a fee or spare their lives for sexual favors. Empowered by the same Puritan mania that would occasion the Salem witch trials half a century later, the unflappable Hopkins bellows about doing the lord’s work while laying false claim to privileges and titles (“Witchfinder General”) conferred by Parliament and allowing his sadistic aide, John Stearne (a diabolical Robert Russell), to extract confessions through unlawful acts of torture. We see accused persons stabbed repeatedly in pursuit of “the devil’s mark” believed to adorn the bodies of satanists, and submitted to water tests wherein the only way to prove one’s innocence is to drown—gruesome methods borne out one and all by historical records.

Though it’s hard to imagine anyone but Price filling the white gloves and black cloak of Hopkins, the film was initially conceived as a showcase for Donald Pleasence, who was to play the role, per a biography of Reeves, as “ineffective and inadequate . . . a ridiculous authority figure.” The casting of Price, a requirement of backer and distributor American International Pictures, necessitated a wholesale revision of the character, which angered Reeves, an immensely gifted 24-year-old who died of an accidental overdose nine months after the movie’s release. The animosity between the embattled young director and his unwanted star made for a tense shoot, but in the end, Reeves succeeded in curtailing the actor’s baroque tendencies and eliciting a terrifying turn (further enhanced by low-angle shots that accentuate his fearsome stature), while Price brought the film a gravitas belying its low budget.

No thriller this side of 1973’s The Wicker Man better contrasts the beauty of unspoiled bucolic landscapes with the human savagery taking place there; shots of villagers reacting to hangings and immolations debunk the myth of wholesome country life and suggest full complicity, rather than forced conformity, with Hopkins and his witch hunts. Several versions of Witchfinder General exist, including the American cut retitled The Conqueror Worm that’s bookended by Price’s recitations of the titular Poe verse (having less to do with the story of Hopkins than with the series of Poe vehicles for which the star was lucratively known in the States). Whichever edition you watch, you will see the leading man at the peak of his powers; as this scalding study of innate corruptibility argues, everyone has their Price.