‘Witchfinder General’ Remake Coming From ‘Drive’ Director: What To Do About All The Women Whipping?

Vincent Price looking askance at the idea of finding someone worthy to fill his buckled boots in the remake of 'Witchfinder General.'
Vincent Price looking askance at the idea of finding someone worthy to fill his buckled boots in the remake of 'Witchfinder General.' Tigon British Film Productions

Nicolas Winding Refn, director of Drive, Only God Forgives and the upcoming Neon Demon, will team up with UK producer Rupert Preston for a remake of Witchfinder General. According to Deadline , Refn will be producing but not directing the Witchfinder General remake, with a proposed budget of between $5-10 million (typical for a low-budget horror movie). With the ink barely dry on the acquisition of the remake rights, Witchfinder General is still a ways off from theaters, which gives Preston and Refn time to work out exactly how they’ll adapt the brutality of the original film for modern audiences.

Released in the United States as The Conqueror Worm, Witchfinder General is the rare horror movie that manages to be both lurid and layered, suited to the trashy, drive-in / grindhouse crowd, but without the derivative tropes of the era.

Vincent Price plays Matthew Hopkins, a 17th century witch hunter. Accompanied by his lecherous assistant John Stearne, Hopkins bounds around the countryside, extorting villages and burning the daughters of those that don’t comply, in the Baroque period’s version of a mob extortion racket. Much of the movie is consumed with Vincent Price laughing wickedly as he watches Stearne enact grotesque tortures, like stabbing a man repeatedly in the back with a needle, ostensibly to find his insensitive “ Devil’s Mark .”

By the end, a horrible bloodbath has been enacted as the English Civil War rages in the background. Women and men are tortured in recreations that are mild by today’s standards, but remain visceral and shocking for the misogynist dimension to the whole affair. Ramsay Bolton has clearly taken a cue or two from the Matthew Hopkins school of villainy.

Other than The Blood on Satan’s Claw and a handful of other rural “folk horror” films (a small subgenre with The Wicker Man often named as its pinnacle), there’s nothing quite like Witchfinder General. But while it remains a remarkable and unnerving experience, it’s hard to imagine translating it into the modern day unscathed. And perhaps it shouldn’t, especially since main character Sara’s arc in the original film mostly involves sexual torment and whipping while she waits for her husband to ride to her rescue. Audiences are unlikely to go for a movie taken up with the torture of a damsel in distress type.

That said, the Witchfinder General remake will find itself in good thematic company, with movies like The Witch and A Field in England proving the continued vitality of the folk horror mode. Still, it will be interesting to see what will change when the monstrous Witchfinder General rides again.

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