Witchfinder General [The Conqueror Worm] **** (1968, Vincent Price, Ian Ogilvy, Rupert Davies, Patrick Wymark, Hilary Dwyer, Nicky Henson) – Classic Movie Review 2580

Vincent Price stars in one of his best horror roles as the true-life 17th-century witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who travels the length and breadth of Britain torturing and killing the people he suspects of being witches and other supposed deviants.

Co-writer/director Michael Reeves’s memorably chilling 1968 British film Witchfinder General [The Conqueror Worm] is a grisly but fascinating and compelling portrait of a society where sadism is supported in the name of the state and the church.

Ian Ogilvy also stars as Richard Marshall, a young soldier who fights the system when he discovers his fiancée Sara (Hilary Dwyer) has been abused by Price’s vicious assistant John Stearne (Robert Russell).

Keeping his performance commendably stern, severe and serious, Price has a scary, lip-smacking field day, and is extremely effective in a tour de force, while Patrick Wymark is excellent as Oliver Cromwell.

Rupert Davies (as John Lowes), Wilfrid Brambell (as Master Loach), Nicky Henson (as Swallow), Tony Selby (Salter), Bernard Kay (fisherman) also star.

This is the third and final film from director Reeves, who tragically killed himself with a drugs overdose at the age of 25 a year later. it is a uniquely unsettling piece of work that turns the usually welcoming East Anglian fenlands into a place of great unease and terror.

Also in the cast are Godfrey James, Bill Maxwell, Maggie Kimberly, Peter Haigh, Michael Beint, Paul Ferris, John Trenaman [John Treneman], Hira Talfrey, Anne Tirard, Peter Thomas, Edward Palmer, David Webb, Lee Peters, David Lyell, Alf Joint, Martin Terry, Jack Lynn, Beaufoy Milton and Maggie Nolan.

Reeves, Tom Baker and producer Louis M Heyward base their screenplay on the novel by Ronald Bassett, which derives from the poem The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe.

[Spoiler alert] The story shows Hopkins being killed in 1645 while witch-hunting, but he died of natural causes in 1647, a retired witch-hunter.

Reeves wanted Donald Pleasence to play Hopkins, but American distributor/co-financier AIP insisted on Price.

The American version, retitled The Conqueror Worm, features opening and closing narration from Poe’s poem and replaces Paul Ferris’s score with a similar one by Kendall Schmidt.

UK DVD versions feature both the uncut UK cinema print (the Director’s Cut), which restores the violence, and the European print (the Export Version) which includes both the BBFC censor cuts for violence and topless nudity during the tavern scenes.

In 2015 the 71-year-old Ogilvy is filming We Still Steal the Old Way, his 100th acting credit. He also appeared in Reeves’s The Sorcerers (1967).

On 21 May 2019, it was announced that John Hillcoat is to direct the remake of the historical horror film Witchfinder General. Nicolas Winding Refn and Rupert Preston are producing the update, which is written by Jon Croker (The Woman in Black 2).

Nicky Henson and John Trenaman in Witchfinder General (1968).

RIP Nicky Henson, who died of cancer on 15 December 2019, aged 74.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2580

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