Film #175: Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm)

Among the horror genre’s most criminally overlooked classics, 1968’s The Conqueror Worm, which was US distributor American International's Corman-esque way of linking the film to the classic, long dead horror writer Edgar Allen Poe, in a bid for US box office success. Poe was then a big movie ticket seller and the inspiration of many Hammer horror and Corman-led vehicles like The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, The Raven, and The Tomb of Ligeia, among many more (though the author's connection to this film is tenuous at best; his words are present only as some snatches of opening and closing poetry). Better known in the U.K. as Witchfinder General (the title under which it was eventually released on an MGM Blu-Ray box set including the Poe-connected anthology film Tales of Terror, the raucous two-film Dr. Phibes series, and the superb, Shakespeare-tinged horror black comedy Theater of Blood).

Reeves' version of this extraordinarily downbeat tale is a jaw-dropper. Despite its inobviously low budget, it succeeds in placing viewer right in this ornate but life-cheapening era. In it, Vincent Price leads as Matthew Hopkins, the real-life henchman for Cromwell's war-torn 17th century Britain who's assigned to locate and prosecute witches hidden within the country’s tiny townships. He’s an intriguing character because, with his obvious intelligence, he should be equipped to mitigate his dark side with common decency. Yet Hopkins is so consumed with lust and power that he can’t help but take advantage of the vulnerable, especially in a time where almost everyone was mad with fear and ignorance.

Rest assured, Price plays all this to the hilt in one of his very finest non-tongue-in-cheek horror performances. Without even the briefest moment of relief from the terror gripping the UK in this period of its history, the film is smartly helmed by long-depressed director/co-writer Reeves who, before accidentally overdosing in 1969, spearheaded two more dire, similarly-flavored pictures (The She-Beast with Barbara Steele, and The Sorcerers horror legend Boris Karloff). In keeping with those unsparing works, Witchfinder General is disturbingly set in a Hell where all moral boundaries have been violently erased, and all its subjugated inhabitants are capable of atrocities against even their closest confidants. No walk in the park, it is seriously distressing--the utter definition of horror.