seen in WITCHFINDER, of throw- ing an accused witch into a pond and deeming her innocent if she drowns), only for honest Ralph to fish her out and try to help. A doctor (BERSERK!’s Howard Goorney) tests Margaret by slic- ing off a hairy patch of “Satan’s Skin” on her leg (many char- acters have sprouted such dis- tinguishing features). Finally, the Judge—who admits that his plan includes deliberately letting things get out of hand before doing anything—calls in vicious dogs (handled by bald goon Milton Reid, Britain’s Tor Johnson) and uses more Matthew Hopkins methods to combat the evil. One reason the film is so
unsettling is that the script, by Haggard and Robert Wynne- Simmons, is not entirely success- ful in unpicking the elements of the original, separate stories and braiding them together. This tends to keep an audience off- balance with arbitrary comings- and-goings: characters we initially think important are writ- ten out (Landon’s Aunt Isobel, positioned with all manner of complicated relationships and opinions—then dropped) or shown up as ineffectual by- standers (Williams’ aristocratic horseman, ostensibly the hero of the first act—but actually a clod), while others (Dotrice’s Mar- garet, who comes from nowhere to be central to the finale) arrive late and have to be fitted in. It takes several viewings to puzzle out exactly what the Evil One is doing: assembling its own body from hairy-skinned bits grown on other characters, with Ralph’s leg at risk in the interrupted sacri- fice of the finale. It winds up with something of the elliptical, allu- sive narrative method of a Chris- topher Wicking script (elements prefigure DEMONS OF THE MIND): there’s a despairing tone
as a succession of characters we get involved with suffer a variety of appalling fates (dragged away to Bedlam, chopping off their own hands, unjustly accused of child abuse) while the Judge is off somewhere about his own business and the local Squire (HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN’s James Hayter, name misspelled “Hoyter” in the opening credits) windily does everything wrong. If Reeves was working in a
1968 political-social climate formed by Vietnam and the pro- test movements, Haggard’s touchstones are the Manson Family and the official crush- ing of those same protests. The film’s originally-planned ending would have been more in line with the finishes of WITCH- FINDER or NIGHT OF THE LIV- ING DEAD with the Judge unloosing a militia who “destroy the village in order to save it,” ending the threat of the cult by killing everyone in the region and burning their homes to the ground. Even in the more am- biguous finish, Wymark’s cal- lous approach to the Lord’s work shows this isn’t simply an attempt to demonize flower-garlanded hippie kids as sadistic pranksters who deserve death by torture. Sympathies are batted back and forth, with only the evil but allur- ing Angel (who seems to be growing the Devil’s eyebrows for him) and the stalwart but frankly useless Ralph steadfastly in the camps of Evil and Good. The Sadean torment of the innocent Cathy begins with the throttling of her brother and extends through capture in a sinister game (the childishness of the Satanists is especially creepy), betrayal, rape and, only after she has joined the cult by showing her own patch of Satan’s skin and responded passionately to her rapist, sacrificial murder as Angel sticks her in the back with
sheep shears. Margaret is intro- duced during this sequence, hail- ing “Behemoth” as she reads the lesson at the ritual, but her sub- sequent treatment (which even- tually makes her the Linda Kasabian of her day) is as elabo- rately cruel as that meted out to Cathy; it is also structured as a parallel—like the innocent girl, the witch is roped and dragged, then tied down for torture (the surgical removal of her patch of hairy skin) and betrayed by An- gel (who lures her to step into a man-trap) when she tries to re- join the coven. Anchor Bay UK’s DVD of this
important title offers a letter- boxed 1.85:1 transfer which (un- usually) isn’t 16:9-enhanced, and has a rough-hewn, though by no means ugly, look. It’s a little darker than TV prints we’ve seen, which seems deliberate in that it makes the monster more indistinct and adds gloomy shadows to the sylvan but con- vincingly muddy farmyard and ruined chapel locales (this is a lot less lyrical about rural En- gland than WITCHFINDER). The audio options include 5.1 and DTS mixes, but the origi- nal 2.0 is perfectly satisfactory and highlights Marc Wilkinson’s outstanding music, easily on par with Paul Ferris’ score for WITCHFINDER. Special fea- tures are: AN ANGEL FOR SATAN, a 12m chat with the lively Hayden, covering her whole ca- reer; a detailed, amusing and informative commentary track with Haggard (very well rep- resented on UK DVD, with re- cent issues of his major TV works, QUATERMASS and PENNIES FROM HEAVEN), Wynne-Simmons and Hayden; a British theat- rical trailer, notes and bios, a reversible sleeve with con- trasting designs and, as a .pdf file, one of Wynne-Simmons’ original stories.
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