My take: This movie is a product of it’s time and is not very frightening today.
Rating: 1 out of 4 stars
Witchfinder General was released at the same time as Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby. But it lacks the timeless qualities of those films.
It is a period piece set in the 1600s. One thing I have come to learn about historical fiction: they often say more about the time they were created than the time they are set. This film is no different.
Vincent Price as the Witchfinder General
Witchfinder General tells the story of the victims of witch hunting in England at the time of Cromwell. But the film focuses heavily on the senseless violence, terrifying raping of women, and the sadism of the witch hunter, played in this film by Vincent Price. These themes are prevalent in horror throughout the early 1960s and70s.
Straw Dogs is one example from 1971, where a couple is brutally terrorized by a group of locals. Last House on the Left from 1972 is another exploitation horror film that covers similar ground.
As a result, I imagine that this story of witch hunting and torture would have terrified me in 1968. But today, it simply falls flat and fails to scare me any more than an episode of Law & Order SVU.
If you like period horror films, you might like this one. Otherwise, you can probably just skip it.
I got the movie from Netflix. Here is the trailer:
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