Flawed, uneven, and compelling, this campy early folk horror is a mixed bag: spooky slow-burn pastoral unease, deeply uncomfortable racial politics, bad acting, and the unmapped delight of genre freshness.
Gwen Mayfield is a fragile former missionary who goes to work as headmistress in a lovely little town. All is not as it seems – but is she having a breakdown, or is there a coven of witches at work…?
Joan Fontaine can’t act – one of the film’s two big problems – and heroine Gwen Mayfield is repellent. White, middle class, feminine, neatly presented and in white collar jobs – in other words, a particular kind of patronising. She’s a busy body, she starts rumours without understanding the consequences in small villages; her teaching manner is pleasant, but not wholly appropriate; she intrudes into the villagers lives as if she has absolute right to be there. Looking like the face of a homophobic mothers campaign, or a young Margaret Thatcher. Is it intentional? It’s hard to be sure. The film works well – better, even – understanding Mayfield as an everyday-sort-of-awful person; but at the same time, the narrative seems blind to its own class and racial implications which make me react to her with such unease. It’s all a bit Turn of the Screw, and I wonder if that’s a touchstone: a fragile woman goes to teach in the countryside at the behest of a handsome man, a discomforting closeness* to a male pupil, and the possibility of mental health/sexual inactivity causing imagined incursions of the supernatural.
*not necessarily a sexual one; but I’ve worked as a teacher, and there’s an over-familiarity, an ownership, a dissolution of boundaries that discomforts me. There are many ways to be unprofessional with a child which fall short of violence; Mayfield has a certain energy – needy, smug and possessive
The film takes its time, building a setting and establishing the village’s mood. For most of the runtime, nothing happens, except the British social terror of being an outsider. Its brilliant. The residents of the village are claustrophobically rumourmongering about one teenage girl who stands out, gossiping and obsessing over her potential sexual behaviour. The butcher is chummy – too chummy – as he gleefully skins a rabbit. Your cat turns out to be somebody else’s cat just visiting. The horror of stampeding sheep; and then, the horror of a man who’s never imagined further than the village gate trying to comprehend that his wife has left him. It’s nicely done, and is a perfect evocation of an everyday rural that unsettles. The disquiet of an abandoned church, and a man who pretends to be a priest but cannot be one.
Nigel Kneale is the Rosetta Stone of British sci fi/horror, and its no surprise to see him helping to establish folk horror – having already laid groundwork in Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit, and going on to make Murrain, Beasts: Baby, and probably others I’ve yet to encounter.
There’s some familiar Kneale themes here. He flirts with a scientific explanation for what is happening, loving the Fortean borderlands where the incredible becomes possible. The power of the devil might be some internal human ability; the witchcraft might be some kind of hysteric response; the Devil is a kind of H-bomb, and our understanding of its components does nothing to diminish its power. I recognise too the theme of man’s primal instincts re-emerging from the subconscious or deep parts of our bone and brain – from Quatermass and the Pit. There’s something theoretically subversive about the image of lovely little village people, in their patterned day dresses and politely coiffed, going wild – of something British becoming undone; and this final sequence is strikingly directed and effective, in a film that’s otherwise plain.
But that isn’t the whole picture. The film is bookended with two matching pagan rites, opening in darkest Africa where Mayfield works as a missionary. Drumming, mobs, terrified locals and an attack by witch doctors follow. It’s a rare moment of overt horror in a film that’s otherwise slow and creepy, and a pulp genre staple. Perhaps, the audience in 1966 would not be familiar with British traditions of witchcraft, and so the exotica is present as a point of comparison; but I think that’s generous. It’s straightforwardly racist, and casts a serious shadow over the final ritual, in which white people dance orgiastically, beat leopard print drums and bones, smear one another with mud and copulate in the dust. The implication is not merely Kneale’s stock trope – of civilised people returning to primal instincts – but the more sinister archetypally white setting of rural England “becoming black”. It’s extremely uncomfortable. If other meanings are intended, they don’t land. If the opening ritual isn’t supposed to clarify our understanding of the closing one, I have no idea why it’s there.
For me, the film never recovers from this opening sequence – ethically indefensible, and artistically lazy. Without it, I think the film would be better regarded – a perfect mix of slowburn pastoral oddness and high-camp satanic villainy; it would be more open, too, to other meanings and readings. It’s just bad, almost a textbook example.
(The Witches is one year later than Dr Terror’s House of Horror, a pleasing horror anthology film from Amicus Pictures that has a very good voodoo story; the protagonist is a jazz player who steals a voodoo drumbeat. Played by a comedy actor, the story emphasises that his outlandish beliefs about voodoo are silly, and he only falls foul of a curse due to his rudeness in intruding and stealing something clearly forbidden. This anthology segment demonstrates clear meta-awareness of the exotic horror subgenre, suggesting it was already familiar to audiences and dated by the time The Witches came out. Perhaps the innovation was in bringing this kind of scenario to Britain and setting it in our traditional witchcraft? Still, it’s certainly not a case of old films not “knowing better”; this is absolutely a stock theme, and by 1966 it’s getting tired)
The Witches also has a prominent queer subtext. Lady of the manor Stephanie Bax is coded somewhat like Rosa Klebb from From Russia With Love, a confident mannishness that’s contrasted to Mayfield’s fragile pastel-yellow blousy femininity. Stephanie drinks gin, has two big Alsatians, and writes controversial news columns; she’s chosen Mayfield to be her immortal life companion, going so far as to (unwisely) explain her villainous masterplan in the hope she will join her. Why Stephanie is so fond of Mayfield as to make this offer is not otherwise clear. Stephanie takes on the “man’s role”role of the leader of the devil’s rites, offering up a maiden in a sequence of virgin sacrifice which is unambiguously erotic, brandishing a dagger.
She is unmarried, living with her brother who – in his own way – also pings my queer radar. Alan is mild-mannered, has a tell-tale longing for Catholicism, but was banned from the priesthood (for reasons never clearly stated). He and shares in the perversity of living with a sibling instead of a spouse. The queer implications are underlined by how the film defines a “happy ending” – we don’t find out anything about Ronald or Linda – but the cinematography and sweaters imply that Alan and Mayfield are now romantically linked, creating an appropriately heterosexual resolution, surrounded by lovely children.
The bad politics trifecta wouldn’t be complete without talking about class. Alan Moore states that “rural horror is often fear of rural people”; but as with the Wicker Man, Heddaby’s horrors are controlled by the local aristocracy, who hold unexamined power over the local area (and local people). The film is entirely uninterested in the politics of the Bax siblings – aristocracy is normalised in British culture, that we are left to fill-in what their legal or political status is. Between their manor house, and the deference of local working class, they have what is due to them, as normal, natural and unremarkable.
Kneale explicitly classes magic. Older, working class, rural Granny Rigg makes herbal remedies and has power to make illness and speak to animals; but Stephanie Bax dismisses this as trivial and petty. Bax, by contrast, has made an intellectual study of magic, collects rare texts and speaks Latin. She leads rites in ceremonial magic style – tools, robes, incantations, inscribed magical circles*. And there’s a third clear contrast, because Bax’s coven of ordinary working&rural people do not respond in “ceremonial” style, but with unstructured, intuitive, animalistic writhing. As with Wicker Man, the film wants it both ways – evoking the fear of rural people, without threatening the social order that places them under Bax’s leadership. In The Triumph of the Moon, Roland Hutton discusses how Victorian anthropologists and folklorists would assume the rural people they studied had no insight into their own rites and traditions, inventing more pleasing meanings and adding fanciful heritages to practices which were known to be recent and non-magical in origin. There’s something of this in both films, where the local aristocrat is (cynically) creating and interpreting the old faith for the commoners who, it is implied, would never have discovered it on their own and whose simplicity allows them to believe in it fully.
*bits of the magic circle are authentic-ish – I recognise some of the Hebrew words – but most of it is unknown to me, a very odd mix.
Hey, what’s Michele Dotrice doing there? Is she like the John Wayne of folk horror satanic sex rituals?
The Witches won me over. A racist title sequence and mediocre leading lady cast a significant shadow. But I love the collection of quiet moments in the first half; the genre uncertainty bringing unexpected twists; I like the village setting and Mayfield’s ambiguous goodness. I love queer-coded villains, and the final rite is one of the best I’ve seen in the genre. After 30 minutes, I was gearing up to write a negative review; by the end, I was on the edge of my seat.
Still, this is one for completionists only; a poor central performance and stagey directing will irritate those who do not bliss out at the sight of a tiny pebbled cottage and the promise of a gentle weird of place. And the racism, somehow both extraneous and essential. Either so out of place as to ruin the film’s harmony and focus, or intentionally sinister racist coding – it’s a textbook example of pulp exotic horror tropes, and too prominent to be ignored.
In all, both maddening and memorable.
Astercote Herald 