Ten Days of Terror!: The Sorcerers

Film: The Sorcerers
Format: Internet video on Fire!

There is something that I very much appreciate about older horror movies. I don’t mind gore when it’s warranted, but the older horror movies, say pre-1972 or so. Because at least the mainstream movies (missing out things like Blood Feast and other Herschel Gordon Lewis films) didn’t use a great deal of gore, they had to be more inventive with what they showed and where the plots went. The Sorcerers, one of the last films of Boris Karloff, is exactly such a film. This is a film that wants to go for real psychological terror rather than splatter, and for the most part, it gets there.

This is a film that should be better known than it is. There are echoes of this film in Strange Days and a whisper of it in Being John Malkovich. It’s going to go to some ridiculous places in terms of the science, but it uses that ridiculous science to give us a story that, in the context of that goofy science, works pretty well.

Wednesday Horror: Witchfinder General (The Conqueror Worm)

Film: Witchfinder General (The Conqueror Worm)
Format: DVD from River Valley District Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

Witchfinder General is one of those movies that comes with a great deal of additional baggage in the vast number of names it goes by. The copy I got was titled Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General, and I’ve seen it listed as Edgar Allen Poe’s Witchfinder General. It was also released in the States as The Conqueror Worm another weak attempt to connect this story to the canon of Poe despite it having no connection at all.

Sherman set the Way-Back Machine for the time of Oliver Cromwell and civil war raging across England. While Cromwell’s troops attempt to purge Catholicism from Great Britain, Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) moves from town to town conducting trials to find witches. This goes about how you would expect based on what history you know from these days. Someone accused of witchcraft is put on trial and endures a variety of torture, in this case at the hands of Hopkins’s assistant John Stearne (Robert Russell). Eventually, they are put to a final test which is either fatal, proving their innocence or valid confession, or not so fatal, which means a horrible death.