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 merely to link the movie to Corman’s Poe-inspired flicks and, theoretically, sell more tickets. Some call this "the original torture porn" and I suppose the torture scenes were pretty radical in 1968, but the film always struck as a British Western with a simple rape/murder/vengeance plot: A soldier's beautiful fiancé is raped and her uncle tortured & murdered for supposedly being a witch. When the soldier (Ian Ogilvy) finds out, he vows revenge. In short, it’s like a Western transplanted to 17th century England more so than a torture/horror film, although there is that element. The one death that I found particularly unsettling was where a woman is burned to death by being lowered into a bonfire. It definitely has a lasting impact. The writer/director was Michael Reeves, a promising young…

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 educated or sophisticated. Ian Ogilvy is "Richard Marshall", a man determined to stop these atrocities and at risk to himself and his family - and we have now watch a battle royal between the two men as worthy as any fought in the war. It's, at times, quite gruesome to watch - and the whole look of the film adds oodles to the sense of menace evoked by this truly malevolent man. Again, based on the vivid imagination of Edgar Allan Poe, this film is a cracker for late on a winter's night with a glass of red wine and a rogue branch tapping on the window.

*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 does not uncover an ancient evil. He is the evil, and witchcraft is simply the paperwork. That is where the film becomes more interesting than its genre reputation. Accusations grow from grudges, fear and opportunity. Hopkins and his brutal assistant turn them into money, sex and power. The horror is not that these communities genuinely believe something dreadful is loose among them, but that belief can be manufactured whenever somebody sufficiently unpleasant discovers it is useful. Price is crucial to making that work. His Hopkins is cold, controlled and almost bureaucratic, which proves far nastier than a cackling occult villain would have been. Against the remarkably attractive countryside, the cruelty becomes even more bluntly human. The land is not threatening anybody. The people a…