Ian Cooper - Witchfinder General

Witchfinder General (1968), known as The Conqueror Worm in America, was directed by Michael Reeves and occupies a unique place in British cinema. Equally praised and vilified, the film fictionalizes the exploits of Matthew Hopkins, a prolific, real-life witch hunter, during the English Civil War. For critic Mark Kermode, the release proved to be the single most significant horror film produced in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, while playwright Alan Bennett called the work the most persistently sadistic and rotten film Ive ever seen. Steadily gaining a cult reputation, unimpeded by the directors death just months after the films release, the film is now treated as a landmark, though problematic, accomplishment, as it exists in a number of recut, retitled, and rescored versions. This in-depth study positions the film within the history of horror and discusses its importance as a British and heritage film. It also considers the inheritance of Hopkins, the scripts relationship to the novel by Ronald Bassett, and the iconic persona of the films star, Vincent Price. Ian Cooper conducts close textual readings of specific scenes and explores the films various contexts, from the creation of the X certificate and the tradition of Hammer gothic, to the influence on Ken Russells The Devils (1971) and the torture porn of twenty-first-century horror.