Vincent Price was a working Hollywood actor long before he became a horror icon, yet it was his genre work that gave his career a decidedly strong second wind while also ensuring that his name would not vanish into the mists of cinema history. Coming along just after Universal legends like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr., but just before Hammer stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, Price worked alongside nearly all of them and found his own personal niche between the former’s traditional terrors and the latter’s exploration of bloodier yet more sophisticated and even psychosexual themes within often staid Victorian trappings.
An often memorable villain in dozens of films beforehand, Price came into his own when he teamed in the early 1960s with producer/director Roger Corman – who had been toiling on increasingly ambitious B-films for years – on a series of films mostly based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Corman and his writers – primarily Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont – stretched several of Poe’s short stories into feature length scripts and put Price in the lead role for seven of the eight films (Ray Milland took the Price role in The Premature Burial).
Scream Factory, the horror and sci-fi offshoot of the Shout! Factory Blu-ray and DVD company, has just released The Vincent Price Collection, a handsomely packaged set of six films all making their Blu-ray debuts, and it’s no coincidence that four of the pictures are from Corman’s Poe cycle. The Poe films represent a turning point for horror cinema: while still wedded to the Gothic trappings of the previous 40-plus years of the genre on screen, they delved into surreal, hallucinatory and even psychedelic imagery, while becoming more explicit (relatively speaking) in their sadism, sexual overtones and psychological extremes.
But for our purposes we’re going to look at one of the two non-Poe features included in the set: Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General. The film is an anomaly in both the new set and Price’s own filmography for several reasons. Number one, it’s less a horror film than an historical drama, although its subject matter, tone and plot points bring it firmly into the horror genre. Second, underneath its period and genre trappings it’s a nasty piece of political commentary. Third, it features perhaps the most restrained performance by its star in all of his horror outings, and certainly one of the finest of his entire career in general.
The film is set in 17th century England during that country’s bloody Civil War and stars Price as Matthew Hopkins, who is appointed by the puritanical government to track down all suspected witches and gain confessions from them – by any means he deems necessary – with the enthusiastic help of his sadistic aide Stearne (Robert Russell). Their path of torture, execution and depravity in the name of God brings them on a collision course with a soldier (Ian Ogilvy), whose bride-to-be (Hilary Dwyer) has been raped by Hopkins and her uncle – a priest! – killed by him for alleged demonic activity.
Hopkins was an actual person who reportedly sent more people to their deaths in his relatively brief three years of witch-hunting than had been executed in the previous 160 years of British history for the same crime. Fanaticism, paranoia and lust for power run rampant in Witchfinder General, and the story is more than relevant to America’s own witch hunts – both the Salem variety and the McCarthy flavor – while the background political turmoil also bore uneasy similarities to the cultural turbulence roiling the world in 1968 (the film, not surprisingly, still reverberates in today’s political climate as well).
In a performance that is 180 degrees from his often over-the-top work in the Poe films, Price is restrained here, taking the material with deadly seriousness and bringing gravity and menace to Hopkins. He also brings complexity to this decidedly evil figure, leaving the viewer off balance as to whether the witchfinder truly believes he is morally righteous and doing God’s work, or simply making a good business venture for himself out of the persecution of helpless individuals. It’s part of the film’s legend that Price reportedly clashed with Reeves, who was not happy to be working with the actor (Price’s involvement was part of the co-financing deal with American International Pictures, which had produced the Poe movies), but the latter clearly got something out of the actor that few directors had achieved before.
The movie itself, which opens with a hanging on a country hilltop, is cold and bleak to the point of being genuinely difficult to watch. The original script, which Reeves co-wrote, allegedly featured even more brutality and torture than the final product until British censors forced the filmmakers to tone it down. Yet it is difficult to imagine the movie being even more sadistic on the viewer without it being all but unwatchable. It’s not that the violence is so graphic and explicit; for the time it certainly was – and it’s still quite vicious — but it pales in comparison to what we see these days in things like the Saw franchise.
No, it’s the mood of Witchfinder General, coupled with the unpleasant violence, that makes the film still harrowing 45 years later. There is a sense that forces have been unleashed that cannot be contained and that the very fabric of civilized society is coming unraveled, with no chance of escape from the widening vortex. Even the climax, in which some sort of justice for Hopkins’ diabolical crimes is meted out, is the hollowest of victories, and the film ends on a final shot that is among the most hopeless in horror cinema.
The finished film was edited extensively by the British censor, and U.K. critics were generally repulsed by it. Strangely, the uncut version was shown in the U.S. (under the title The Conqueror Worm, in a nonsensical attempt to link it to the Poe movies by using the name of one of the author’s poems), where it was ignored by the press but proved to be a minor box office success. Its reputation, and that of its troubled director (who died of a drug overdose at the age of 25 within months of completing the film), has grown over the decades to the point where it’s now considered a genuine classic of British horror.
If you do pick up The Vincent Price Collection, watch the Poes first – they’re well-made and sophisticated, but still relatively light genre fare – before delving into Witchfinder General. And then if you’re left as shaken as we expect, you can finish off with the later and quite excellent black comedy The Abominable Dr. Phibes, another Price stand-out also making its Blu-ray debut as the sixth film in the set.
Just make sure you have something ready to ease your mind after spending 90 minutes with Matthew Hopkins in what is arguably the darkest film Vincent Price ever made.
The Vincent Price Collection is out now on Blu-ray.