Witchcraft

A 300 year long feud between a a coven of witches and a family of wealthy land developers comes to a head when an old cemetery plot is disturbed, unearthing the grave of a witch once buried alive. Morgan Whitlock, head of the coven , now has his means to take revenge on the usurpers of his land and sets the resurrected witch upon them.

A rarely seen and almost forgotten horror, Witchcraft is now available on the MGM / Fox "Midnight Movies" label, paired as a double feature with Devils of Darkness. The big draw for me is that it's one of the last legitimate horror films in the career of Lon Chaney Jr., so seeing it nearly pristine on DVD is a treat I never thought I might indulge in. To my surprise, Chaney's part wasn't quite as big as I hoped, but this is okay as the rest of the cast is made up of mostly British actors, and the Brits rarely disappoint in the realm of horror. Better still is that Hammer Film veteran Don Sharp is at the helm, who has given us Kiss of the Vampire, and Rasputin the Mad Monk, among other genre pictures. Handsomely shot in black and white, Witchcraft has all the atmosphere that both Gothic and 60's contemporary horror fans crave. The mute witch makes for an eerie apparition as she silently stalks her prey, I might liken the scenes of her on the prowl to scenes in A Drop of Water from Bava's masterful anthology.

While it's true that the plot is nothing new I do feel the film has style to burn. Modern viewers will likely doze off as it is bloodless and the pacing is a bit lethargic, however in many scenes this deliberate pacing works very well. 7/10

The movie WITCHCRAFT certainly was never meant to be Shakespeare nor an episode of "Masterpiece Theater", so you can't expect it to be great intellectual entertainment. However, as a relatively low-budget horror film, it manages to deliver quite well.

While the film stars Lon Chaney, Jr., he doesn't seem to be the star and he's not a welcome addition to the film. All he seems to do is yell a lot and you wonder why everyone in the film has a nice British accent while Lon doesn't!! Still, it's a dandy tale about a couple greedy land brokers who accidentally unleash the spirit of a dead witch when they thoughtlessly bulldoze a graveyard. Considering that the witch was buried alive and had the powers of Hell at her disposal, it isn't surprised that she returns to seek vengeance on the family who buried her. Heck, maybe she's so angry because she was alive all that time (about 300 years) waiting to be released--gee that would be boring!!

The film has an intelligently written plot, good acting (apart from Chaney) and solid pacing--making you believe, somehow, that all this COULD be real! The only problem, and it's a small one, is that in one scene where a lady discovers a Satanic coven, she yells out to one of them as she recognizes her! If any SANE person saw these human sacrificing nuts, I doubt if their first impulse would be to yell out but instead would just leave....and very, very quietly!! Good low-budget entertainment that manages to be better than usual even with this one silly mistake.

... who does very little through the entire film but threaten people and wave his cane around. And yet he is top billed.

Morgan Whitlock (Lon Chaney Jr.) is angry with the Lanier family for bulldozing the Whitlock family cemetery so that they can put in new construction. But he's also mad because 300 years ago the Lanier family had condemned a member of his family, Vanessa Whitlock, as a witch and used the opportunity to seize the Whitlock family estate. So the bad blood goes way back.

Unfortunately, the Laniers didn't have her burned at the stake but buried her alive. Also unfortunately, her coffin was disinterred by the bulldozing. And very unfortunately, she is still alive 300 years later, and not in the best of moods.

I'm surprised Vampira didn't sue the makers of this movie because the freed Vanessa never speaks, never makes any telling expression, just stalks about like, well, Vampira! And the Laniers are much too likeable and fair minded individuals to make good objects of revenge for Vanessa Whitlock.

There are some subplots of interest - in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet a young couple, one in the Lanier family the other in the Whitlock family, are in love. The matriarch of the Lanier family hasn't left her room since the death of her husband years ago, and she also has come to believe she cannot walk. And who builds a family crypt that connects to the main house anyway? Finally, as in so many British films, "an inspector calls" as people start dying in weird ways, but atypically turns out to be pretty useless as the Laniers seem to be on their own in figuring this out for themselves.

In an American film you'd probably be able to tell who survives and who is killed by the witch, but since this is a British film the survivors and victims are unexpected. It certainly was better than I expected considering the no-name cast, thus raising my rating of it just a bit.

In all honesty "Witchcraft" is just an average British horror accomplishment from the sixties, but I'm slightly biased and overenthusiastic because I'm a big admirer of the subject matter (witchery and family curses), the director (Don Sharp also made "Psychomania", "Dark Places" and many other overlooked genre movies) and the notorious cool guy who receives top billing even though he only sporadically appears in the film (Lon Chaney in finally another role that suits his grim appearance). Somewhere deep in the remote en rural British countryside, the centuries old feud between the Whitlock clan and the Lanier family sparks up again. For the big upcoming real estate project of the Laniers, a bulldozer ravages straight through the Whitlock family cemetery and destroys the grave of 17th Century ancestress Vanessa Whitlock, whom was accused of witchery and buried alive by the Lanier family. Well, the accusation wasn't false for sure, as Vanessa promptly rises from the tomb and teams up with the grumpy Morgan Whitlock in order to bring the entire Lanier family down. Several members of the Lanier family die in mysterious circumstances, but complications arise when it turns out that Morgan's little niece Amy is in love with a Lanier enemy. "Witchcraft" is a competent enough and well-paced occult thriller with gloomy black & white cinematography, a couple of original ideas in its screenplay and an extremely tense finale. Lon Chaney Jr. is naturally menacing, but the biggest creeps are provided by Yvette Rees as silent the hypnotically staring witch Vanessa Whitlock. If she would appear behind me on a flight of stairs, I would surely throw myself down from them as well! There are also two very nifty and imaginative fright scenes involving a car and its passenger(s) driving through a bumpy landfill and towards certain death, although in their minds it looks as if they're driving on a safe and cozy lane.

I first saw Witchcraft on TV when i was around seven years old and it scared the pants off me! I used to have this feeling for years afterwards that the witch stood in my garden looking up at my window waiting for me to peek from behind my curtain late at night! Since then of course I've grown up and out of that fear (ive also moved house umpteenth times) and if anything i now find the witch (Yvette Rees) quite sexy and she could haunt me anytime! Even though I'm lucky enough to own a copy of the film i think its a shame that it isn't available on DVD. Its now perhaps thought of as dated and is to all intents forgotten but for me it will always remain the horror movie that showed me for the first time what the cinema was capable of. Itll always have a special place in my heart. Ill watch it every now and again and it takes me straight back to my childhood and daring myself to peek around that bedroom curtain. A forgotten horror classic.