The Witches (1966)
is one of Hammer’s lesser-known productions.
Lacking the Gothic trappings most commonly associated with the studio’s
horror output, it was designed as a star vehicle for Joan Fontaine (an Oscar-winner for her performance in Hitchcock's Rebecca over a quarter of a century earlier), who had acquired the
rights to film a novel called The Devil’s
Own by Peter Curtis, a pseudonym employed by bestselling historical
novelist Norah Lofts.
The movie, scripted by Nigel Kneale and based around the
survival of a Satanic witch-cult in a contemporary English village, is chiefly
of interest as a precursor of (and apparent influence on) The Wicker Man. In its best
moments it conveys an air of creepy menace and growing paranoia although it fails to maintain
the terrifying tone of classics such as the The
Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw. Joan Fontaine, as its middle-aged head-mistress heroine Miss Mayfield, bears an unfortunate resemblance to one Margaret Hilda Thatcher and is
arguably upstaged by an outrageously camp performance from supporting actress Kay
Walsh as high priestess of the coven.
The final, stylised Black Mass / orgy scene rapidly descends into
unintentional hilarity, like some piece of experimental art-theatre improvised
by over-zealous GCSE drama students.
The Devil’s Own has
been reissued in paperback as The Witches by the renascent Hammer, as part of
a series of movie tie-ins and novelisations (it has also previously appeared as
The Little Wax Doll under Norah Lofts’
own name). Unfortunately, Hammer has chosen
to saddle the book with an embarrassing generic cover which bears no relationship to its contents and is evidently designed to mislead fans of Twilight and similar 'young adult' sagas. Anyone seeking ‘supernatural romance’ in The Witches is in for a cruel disappointment;
a more sexless tale could not be imagined; the novel, first published in 1960 and set in 1959, is a relic of an era in
which an unmarried woman in her forties had to accept that she was
a hopeless ‘spinster’ and destined for a solitary life. The compensation was that she was allowed to pursue
a career; hence Miss Mayfield’s willingness to take on the role of headmistress
at the remote East Anglian village of Walwyck.
Miss Mayfield is a quietly idealistic character who has not
long returned from a twenty year stint teaching at a mission school in Africa. She wishes to escape from the drudgery and
squalor of working at her most recent appointment in an inner-city school and living
in ‘digs’ with another woman teacher. As
the story progresses, we learn that she has survived an unspecified mental breakdown
in Africa which led to her return to England.
Apart from a chilling reference to ‘the Mau Mau oath’ (colonial
ethnopsychiatry held Kenya’s Mau Mau rebels to be ‘an irrational force of
evil, dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism’, which aided the killing of more than 20,000 of them and the torturing of suspects by the British) much less is made in the novel of African
voodoo than in the film. In his newly commissioned
introduction, Cyril Franke, the film’s director, proudly refers to his ‘production
of Man of Africa and first-hand
experience of witchcraft among the natives’.
It therefore seems likely that Franke was responsible for emphasising this
element, which is crudely-presented and adds nothing to the film apart from an unpleasant and
unnecessary injection of racism.
Another difference to is that Canon Thorby (Bax in the film), who
runs the private school to which Miss Mayfield is appointed, is a genuine
cleric, rather than an eccentric imposter. Unlike the ruin depicted in the film - so
reminiscent of The Wicker Man - the
village church is intact and still functioning as a site of Christian worship
(alongside the occasional Black Mass).
Thorby’s sister Isabel is eventually revealed to be the coven leader; could
it be that Hammer shied away from depicting a churchman so closely implicated
in Satanism, for fear of censorship from the BBFC? The Canon and his sister are much more boring
characters in the novel, with the latter hardly seen until the climax.
Much of the novel runs the same as the film, with the addition of extra characters and a number of pointless plot digressions. After Miss Mayfield becomes suspicious that a
death in the village has been caused by witchcraft and vows to reveal all at
the inquest, she bangs her head on a desk in a mysterious ‘accident’ and conveniently
(and unconvincingly) loses her memory.
This leads to her being parcelled off for a rest cure at a Fawltyesque boarding
house in Hove, inhabited by bridge-playing old ladies and a retired General
with their attendant nurses (there's not much fun to be had for the Twilight crowd here!)
Eventually she escapes back to Walwyck and regains her memory just in time to
rescue Ethel, a teenage girl who, Rowan Morrison-style, has been secreted away
prior to being the focus of Walwyck’s ‘All Hallowse’en’ sabbat which is to take
place in the church itself.
The fate that has been planned for Ethel – defilement at the
hands of a pantomime-clad ravisher - is much less horrific than the Ed Gein /
Elizabeth Bathory gruesomenesss threatened in the movie, during the nastiest moment of
which we observe the village butcher, who has already been graphically shown skinning
a rabbit, whetting his knives in readiness.
This was possibly not expected to be the case in the minds of Ms Lofts’
genteel lady readers; any suggestion of nakedness or sexuality is couched in
terms of the utmost horror and repulsion.
As she hides in the church, the mere sight of the villagers’ uncovered
bodies at the start of their ritual causes Miss Mayfield so much distress that
she is forced to pretend to herself she ‘is back home, in bed’, rather than face up to ‘the fat round haunches… the pendulous breasts
like empty paper bags…’ paraded in front of her. This scene is prefaced by a jaw-dropping reflection
about her time in Africa; ‘she had time to think that black skin was, in
itself, in some strange way, a kind of raiment; no black-skinned people could
look as naked as these Walwykians did.’
The film suffers from a preposterous conclusion in which
Miss Mayfield is finally invited along to the human sacrifice by Thorby's sister for no apparent
reason and then manages to sabotage the proceedings via supernatural means. By
way of contrast, the novel’s ending is plausible enough but dull. Besieged in the church tower with the
hypnotised girl, Miss Mayfield finally realises that ’she was, in a fashion,
the victim of her own faith’ and that the witches are without any supernatural capabilities;
‘if they had any power other than their own, they wouldn’t throw themselves
against the door.’ Miss Mayfield saves Ethel
by human means, Isabel Thorby bangs her head against the font
and dies and, in a final ‘twist’, the girl destroys out of modesty the cine
film that her rescuer has made of the ritual so that no record remains of
Walwyck’s lurid Satanic revels.
The Witches, with its unquestioning depiction
of post-war attitudes and morals, is a snapshot out of time. Although its
premise is a promising one, the story is poorly paced and offers little of
interest by way of characterisation. It might
have been rendered more interesting had the heroine been less strait-laced and
old maid-like (the word 'dowdy' is used to describe her appearance throughout). A frisson of attraction between
her and the Canon would have offered an additional pole of interest; instead all
we have is her fending off the attentions of a mildly louche, elderly wine-dealer
in a purposeless distraction to the main story.
As we have seen, The
Witches doesn’t really count as supernatural fiction, although Ms Lofts was not averse to including spooky passages in her 'modern gothic' novels such as Gad's Hall (1977) and even published an entire collection of ghost stories; Hauntings (1974). Written
prior to the mainstreaming of Wicca and modern paganism, the story’s depiction
of witchcraft comes straight from the pages of Malleus Maleficarum, although in Miss Mayfield’s sensibly modern, rationalistic
brand of Christianity, witchcraft is seen as an atavistic survival rather than
an active force of evil and most of its adherents are to be pitied rather than condemned:
So what can have inspired such a tale? In the mid-1950s, witchcraft and murder had
been linked in the public mind with the publication of Detective-Superintendent
Robert Fabian’s sensational memoirs Fabian
of the Yard (1955). In these, he
offered a grippingly embellished account of an unsolved murder that had taken
place in 1945. In a case which became
known as ‘the Lower Quinton Witchcraft Murder’ an elderly Warwickshire farmworker named
Charles Walton was found savagely slain in a manner described by Fabian as ‘like
the kind of killing the Druids might have done in ghastly ceremony at full moon’.
Alternatively, the manner of Walton’s
death, pinned to the ground by a pitchfork through the chest and slashed across
the throat with a billhook, closely resembled the 19th Century
execution of a suspected witch by a mentally deranged young man in the same
area. Fabian found his investigations
blocked by obstructive villagers and reported an eerie encounter with a ‘Big
Black Dog’ that related to local legendry involving Walton. He secretly concluded that the murder was
committed by a farmer with a financial motive (he could not record this while
the suspect still lived due to libel laws) but the idea of a present-day
hideous crime linked to the survival of ancient beliefs in a backward rural community
is a powerful one that may well have provided an impetus for The Witches.
It is on record that Nigel Kneale’s original screenplay
included elements of humour that the producers rejected. It is easy to see why he would wish to
satirise this material and the completed film retains camp elements that are absent
from the novel. It is impossible not to
snigger, for example, at the prurience with which Ms Lofts alludes to a bodily act which she is
primly unwilling to describe yet nonetheless invites us to guess at and imagine:
‘Then she lifted the cup, and
saying, “Here is his blood,” offered it to Granny Rigby, who did with it
something so degrading that Miss Mayfield shut her eyes and released her finger’s
pressure on the camera, hoping that she had been in time. Not even for purposes of evidence did she
want a picture of that!’
So - who is going to enjoy this book? Well, no one who is attracted by the
cover, that seems certain. Its appeal will mainly be limited
to diehard Norah Lofts fans (who will probably have read it already) and Hammer
completists. Wicker Man scholars and may also wish to check out both the book and the film. For myself, I am always intrigued to read the book that inspired a
film I have enjoyed and The Witches was a thought-provoking, if somewhat dull, read
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