In a career-highlight performance, Vincent Price plays corrupt real-life inquisitor Matthew Hopkins who journeys across 17th-century East Anglia extracting confessions of witchcraft using cruel torture and public burnings. This censor-shocking period piece is regarded as director Michael Reeves' masterpiece and one of the most stylish of witch-trial horrors spawned in the late-1960s.
Screening as part of the BFI Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film season at the BFI Southbank in London, the 1968 film, which also stars Ian Ogilvy, Hilary Dwyer and Nicky Henson, will be introduced (9 December only) by Peter Hutchings, author of The A to Z of Horror Cinema, who explores what motivates film-makers to turn Britain's usually idyllic countryside into haunting landscapes as seen in the likes of The Wicker Man and Reeves' Witchfinder General.
SCREENS AT THE BFI SOUTHBANK
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