Once she’s hanged, her dead body dangles in the air in a distant wide shot for several seconds. Her fellow villagers stand by and look on as devout anglican men drag her to the gallows as she pleads for her life with blood-curdling screams of terror, moments after a bogus tribunal supposedly proved that she practices witchcraft. The film begins with an anguish-inducing sequence of a woman being brutally and unjustly executed. Witchfinder General is excruciating to watch at times (King calls it “revolting”), and it’s bold enough to warn you up front of just how hard it will be to enjoy it, unless of course you’re the Marquis de Sade. However, I’ll be referring to the film by its original and more wicked title for the remainder of this review. AIP released the film stateside as The Conqueror Worm in an effort to link it with Roger Corman and Vincent Price’s previous Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, even though neither this narrative nor the characters have any basis in Poe… Nonetheless, gentle reader, I am begrudgingly choosing to headline this post with the inferior US title simply because that’s what King calls it in Danse Macabre-and this is, after all, a Danse Macabre column. ![]() These days, most folks know The Conqueror Worm by its (better) British title, Witchfinder General, but Stephen King lists it in Appendix I as its American import name because that’s what he knew it as in ’81, thanks to American International Pictures. Much like when I reviewed The Creeping Unknown (aka, The Quatermass Xperiment), I find myself in a headline quandary. With this Fearsome Queer column, I’ll be making my way through those titles in no particular order. King closes out the volume by recommending 96 films and 113 books released during the 1950-1980 period that he feels have significantly contributed to modern genre fiction. He addresses the social issues and political conflicts that have influenced creators over the years, and the ways creators have influenced each other. In 1981, Stephen King published Danse Macabre, a work of non-fiction wherein the author acts as a tour guide through the history of horror.
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