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Beyond the Cycle: 5. Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) (1968)
🕑 Added 2023-10-20 12:00:03 +0000 UTCOkay, I'm just gonna rip the band-aid right off and say it at the very start. This is the single most well-regarded film out of all these blogs... and I don't much care for it. If you're one of the many who hold this one up on a pedestal, and you also get angry when other people don't like that one thing you like, you'd probably be better off just skipping this blog. Life really is too short to waste getting annoyed by a random dude on The Internet over a movie that's most likely older than the both of us. That's your fair warning. Do with it what you will.
Anyway, back at the start of these blogs, I mentioned that The Oblong Box was not the first attempt by American International Pictures to stretch out the Poe Cycle after Roger Corman had moved on. It WAS the more legitimate attempt, though, since the intention from the start of production was for the film to at least bear the name of a real Poe work (even if that’s ALL it wound up bearing). AIP’s ACTUAL first attempt to sell the public a post-Corman Poe, on the other hand, was a far sneakier affair; only gaining its Poe-centric title when they realized they had a period Horror flick staring Vincent Price and hastily dubbed him reciting the now-titular poem over the opening and closing shots. Outside of that, the movie they'd re-dubbed as The Conqueror Worm was never even remotely intended to connect with Corman’s Poe Cycle in style or substance. The movie was ORIGINALLY produced, and indeed is far better remembered today, as Witchfinder General.
The operative word throughout many of these blogs has been “fun,” something a bit odd when you think about the subject matter. While these movies all brand themselves as “Horror,” and devote themselves to frequently macabre and grotesque subject matter, they generally do so with an ultimate goal of catharsis. Any attempt at being creepy or scary is only done to facilitate some nervous laughter from the audience at having overcome the jolt, and that’s assuming they don’t just hoot and holler from the outset. Vincent Price himself was known to say that playing a good villain was as much about being a figure of comedy as one of terror, and his multifaceted performances frequently relied on such a dichotomy. But by the tail end of the ‘60s, Horror cinema was drastically shifting its attitude in this regard. 1968’s Night of the Living Dead infamously eschewed any sense of humor or wackiness in favor of a revolutionary commitment to unrelenting grimness, while Rosemary's Baby went far harder into psychological distress, and the coming Giallo wave out of Europe was already building up momentum to unleash new heights (or depths, if you prefer) of graphically disturbing content. And there’s the key word: disturbing. The new wave of Horror movies weren't looking to pull fun out of a twisted subject matter, but rather to genuinely shock and unsettle the audience, or at the very least upping the ante for just how harsh that twisted subject matter could get. It’s ironic, then, that as much as Horror cinema was looking move beyond the formulas that Vincent Price had so excelled within, his influence was still heavily felt. All those Giallo Thrillers drew significantly from Corman’s Poe movies, most notably The Pit and The Pendulum, while Night of the Living Dead takes very obvious cues from The Last Man on Earth four years earlier. And just a few months before Living Dead, Price had already stared in Witchfinder General, which took him just as far out of his comfort zone as any of those other films would have.
Based very VERY loosely on historical events, Witchfinder General tells the tale of Matthew Hopkins, a charlatan who exploits the chaos of the English Civil War to accumulate power and influence under the guise of hunting witches. It goes without saying that Price is in that lead role, but his performance here is shockingly devoid of camp or theatricality, with absolutely no sympathetic trait for the audience to latch onto. His character in Comedy of Terrors might have been fully unlikable, but Price's own personal charm was still allowed to shine through regardless. Even the literally satanic Prince Prospero in Masque of the Red Death at least seemed to be having fun being the bad guy, but Hopkins is a stonefaced and hateful force of pure malice and misery. And I don't mean that in the sense that Price is UNDER-acting here, either, though that's almost certainly where a lesser performer would have wound up in these circumstances. Rather, Price is operating on whole new levels of subtlety, managing to show a man in the act of NOT showing his emotions, while nevertheless hinting that they are indeed there. Indeed, one can't help but wonder if the experience of playing Hopkins might have aided in Price's LITERALLY stone-faced portrayal of Doctor Phibes just a few years later. It’s interesting, then, that this role which so many modern critics hold up as one of Price’s best performances should be one of the movies Price most hated doing. Famously, director Michael Reeves had wanted Donald Pleasence in the lead role, and made no attempt to hide his displeasure with Price being forced down his throat instead. Reeves also didn’t seem to be that good at communicating what he actually wanted from Price on set, to the point that it wasn’t until he saw the finished product that Price finally understood what Reeves had been trying to get out of him. (Gee, it’s almost as if acting like a professional around your cast makes the shoot go easier or something) Even setting aside the unpleasant shooting experience, it doesn’t surprise me that Price wouldn’t look back on his time being Matthew Hopkins too fondly. I’m reminded of Andy Griffith’s role as Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd: the against-type turn as a manipulative egomaniac is also commonly considered Griffith’s best performance, but that required so much time in such an ugly headspace that Griffith would refuse to play a bad guy again for decades. I can definitely see Vincent Price having similar reservations about a role as irredeemably vile as Hopkins, regardless of how much the modern day critics might laud it.
And yes, it is very much MODERN critics who fawn over Witchfinder General. Upon its release, the movie wasn’t exactly a flop (it’d been made so cheaply that it couldn’t help but turn a profit) but the few critics who remarked on it at all regarded it as crass, sadistic exercise in violent torture. But you know how much people love to be the ones to rediscover and champion works that previous generations weren’t clever enough to appreciate the way THEY do, so now Witchfinder General is heralded as a neglected classic. It also doesn’t hurt that Michael Reeves died before he had a chance to do another movie, and championing a tragic artist lost too soon is an even bigger endorphin rush. Now, don’t get me wrong, Witchfinder General is not a bad movie, and definitely deserved more attention that it got at the time. But at the same time… I don’t think it’s THAT great.
First off, there’s the much-ballyhooed violence in the movie, coming mostly in the form Hopkins’ torture sessions. There’s just no way around the fact that decades of advances in make-up and special effects have rendered Witchfinder General’s “splash some red paint on the body” more quaint than disturbing to modern eyes. Now in fairness, the movie doesn’t try to be a gorefest in the first place, banking more on the horror of human cruelty than the graphicness of the violence itself. And admittedly, Witchfinder General is different from a lot of movies of its ilk that would see torture sequences as little more than an excuse to get actresses in a state of undress and film them accordingly. But in the absence of that kind of full-on exploitation, I don’t think Witchfinder General really knows what to do with itself. Or, to put it another way, the movie thinks it’s doing a lot more than it actually is. Quite frankly, I find this movie kind of boring, with attempts at drawn-out tension and suspense only striking me as tedious. The cinematography doesn’t really help me much in that regard, despite what the popular critical consensus holds. For a move about the worst of human ugliness, Witchfinder General leans heavily on scenic shots of beautiful British countrysides, which can’t help but make me think of The Tomb of Ligeia, and that’s not a good thing. Granted, this movie is TRYING to deliberately clash the pastoral beauty against the brutal human activity, which is more ambitious than Ligeia’s “Well, it’s here, might as well film it” attitude towards the scenery. I still don’t think it works, though. Rather, I think the two contrasting moods cancel each other out: the wannabe historical epic and the wannabe horror merging into this slush of sweeping shots of fields and people getting slapped in the face a lot, interrupted by some trill abysmal day for night shots. Too me, it's a perfect example of why Corman's Gothic Horrors worked best when he shot entirely on sound stages and had absolute control over the lighting and atmosphere to create the exact mood he wanted.
I don’t think the writing is all that strong either. The script is littered with characters doing dumb things (or even just pointlessly running around in circles) because that’s what the plot needs, and the more seriously a movie takes itself, the more of a problem that kind of lazy writing is. Worse, the story has a sort of utopian counter-cultural undertone to it -with sweet innocent youth being brought down by The Man- despite that being wildly incompatible with the downbeat tone of the flick as a whole. I think all the pastoral scenery was supposed to feed into that dichotomy as well, but again I think it’s way too half baked to come across as intended. Also, there's something kind of clueless about trying to cram a pseudo-hippy counterculture message into a film where the good guys are aligned with Cromwell. ALSO also, there are several stretches where the film feels like it's trying to be a swashbuckling adventure flick, with is ENTIRELY the wrong tone given what happens elsewhere. Honestly, I get the feeling Michael Reeves couldn’t decide what what kind of movie to settle down and make, and lacked the discipline to realize that making them all at once just wouldn’t work. Oh, and there’s also a pathetic wet fart of an ending, over FAR too quickly to justify how drawn out the rest of the film leaning up to it was.
See, there’s a fundamental risk in Horror movies ditching that ghoulish sense of fun in favor of taking themselves more seriously: that means that I have to take the movie more seriously. Trashy little exploitation movies that know they’re just about giving the audience some excitement have a much better chance of getting me on their side and willing to cut them some slack. I can overlook some dumb plot holes or ill-judged cinematography or embarrassing day-for-night if the movie’s won me over enough. But when a movie makes it clear that it’s not looking to make friends and demands some respect, well, it’d dang well better DESERVE it. Objectively speaking, Witchfinder General is a better made film than most of the other films in these blogs, but I hold it’s flaws against it WAY harder than any of those others. Well, except for The Oblong Box, but that one has even worse pretensions of seriousness that it can’t hope to live up to. Witchfinder General has it’s act together better than THAT, for sure. But otherwise, I just can’t see the lost classic that so many others do. Heck, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the very fact that I read such good things about it before seeing it raised my expectations too high, but I don’t think that’s the whole problem. Expectations or no expectations, Witchfinder General carries itself in a way that I just don’t think holds up as well under scrutiny as other people do. I don’t enjoy this one under just about any circumstances, and DEFINITELY not as a grafted on addition to the Poe Cycle.
Of course, it could very well be that THAT was my problem. I keep mentioning the more colorful and fun Corman Poe movies, which is entirely fair of me since AIP went out of their way to establish such a connection when they renamed the film to The Conqueror Worm. But at the same time, this movie was clearly never meant to look or feel anything like those movies, so one COULD say I'm dumping on a film for failing to deliver something it never actually promised to in the first place. I suppose there's a bit of truth to that, but on the other hand, it's not as if those Corman movies are the ONLY Horror movies I've ever seen. To double back to those other paradigm-shifting films of the time, Night Of The Living Dead is even less colorful and fun and Witchfinder General, and I don't have the slightest problem seeing what everybody else sees in THAT movie. Thus, I'm forced to conclude that I simply don't like Witchfinder General all that much under its own merits, and my problems with it being counted in the Poe Cycle are entirely secondary.
I think some folks over at American International eventually agreed with me, because they didn’t keep up these attempts to prolong the Cycle much longer. The aforementioned Oblong Box was SUPPOSED to be Michael Reeves’ follow-up project, which he obviously didn’t live to complete. I don’t know if his version would have been any better than the one we got, but what we got seems to have mostly killed off AIP’s interest in dragging out the Poe franchise much further. They did one more movie in 1971 -an adaptation of Murders in the Rue Morgue- which I’ve never seen and nobody else seems to remember either. It also doesn’t have Vincent Price in it at all. I fully believe these two facts to be closely connected. However, AIP still had some other tricks up its sleeve, one of which meant finally get around to making a serious attempt at something they’d danced around several times already…
