How witchploitation cinema cast its spell on the… | Little White Lies

How witch­ploita­tion cin­e­ma cast its spell on the counter-culture

06 Dec 2021

Words by Adam Scovell

A woman with dark hair sits before a red curtain, illuminated by a warm light, wearing a pale blue top.
A woman with dark hair sits before a red curtain, illuminated by a warm light, wearing a pale blue top.
In the 1960s and 70s, a spate of low-rent exploita­tion films tapped sor­cery and the occult for cheap, sleazy thrills.

In the 1960s, dab­bling in the occult became an unusu­al­ly pop­u­lar pas­time. Though ini­tial­ly the pre­serve of aris­to­crats and the like, inter­est in eso­teric beliefs and prac­tices – par­tic­u­lar­ly var­i­ous forms and wic­ca and witch­craft – became part of the fab­ric of pop­u­lar cul­ture. By the end of the decade, what had once been niche was now as much a part of counter-cul­ture life as music, drugs and fash­ion. Film had its part to play in this grow­ing trend.

Whether in fea­ture films, doc­u­men­taries, exploita­tion films or soft­core skin flicks, witch­craft in par­tic­u­lar became a use­ful excuse for nudi­ty, vio­lence and var­i­ous oth­er tit­il­la­tions. Some­times used as an intrigu­ing expres­sion of sub­ur­ban social angst while oth­er times just a rea­son for dis­robed rit­u­als, witch­craft became a pop­u­lar theme for film­mak­ers of all sorts. Like all boons, it was ripe for exploit­ing and pro­duced a body of sleazy witch­ploita­tion cinema.

It must be sug­gest­ed that, in many of these films, belief sys­tems and prac­tices are huge­ly con­flat­ed. Witch­craft, wic­ca, occultism, satanism, pagan­ism, voodoo and all sorts of oth­er prac­tices and the­olo­gies went into the melt­ing pot. For the sake of sim­plic­i­ty, they’re referred to as occultism and witch­craft from here on, but it should be not­ed that film­mak­ers played fast and loose with such imagery and ideas.

Such themes were arguably already rel­a­tive­ly pop­u­lar in hor­ror cin­e­ma. One of the most accom­plished exam­ples was Ben­jamin Christensen’s Häx­an: Witch­craft through the Ages, an incred­i­bly influ­en­tial film that would fore­shad­ow the future blend of doc­u­men­tary and hor­ror imagery. Telling­ly, the film was re-released in 1968, re-edit­ed with a voiceover by William Bur­roughs, just as schlocky vari­a­tions on Christensen’s film were in vogue.

Films such as Mark Robson’s The Sev­enth Vic­tim, Claude Alexander’s The Naked Witch, William J Hole Jr’s The Devil’s Hand and Don Sharp’s Witch­craft are also good fore­shad­ows of fic­tion­al witch­ploita­tion films, albeit ambigu­ous and lack­ing the deter­mined kitsch style of lat­er screen renditions.

Witch­craft itself gen­er­al­ly had a dif­fer­ent flavour before the counter-cul­ture, more a draw­ing room nov­el­ty than an erot­ic hap­pen­ing for hip young things. Even if the Chelsea mob did even­tu­al­ly retire to their par­ents’ manors to indulge, its vibe was still some­thing clos­er to pop­u­lar rather than under­ground cul­ture. Think of Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon or Sid­ney Hayer’s Night of the Eagle, films where there is some­thing dis­tinct­ly upper class in occult mis­chief, the lat­ter film espe­cial­ly show­ing witch­craft used for earnest social climbing.

A woman in a purple cloak stands over a woman lying on the ground, with a dark background.

Not all films lat­er in the 60s tapped into the counter-cul­ture aspects either, even with the cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion in full swing. Films such as Cyril Frankel’s The Witch­es and Ter­ence Fisher’s The Dev­il Rides Out still retained that rur­al indul­gence as opposed to grimy urban exploita­tion. Even folk hor­ror clas­sics such as Michael Reeves’ Witchfind­er Gen­er­al and Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw played loose­ly to some extent with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of witch­craft; the for­mer look­ing at what behav­iour its pos­si­ble pres­ence could excuse, the lat­ter look­ing at its use in influ­enc­ing groups of youths to help the Dev­il arise.

It’s easy to see the influ­ence of Christensen’s Häx­an on the most impor­tant run of witch­ploita­tion films. Whether in grimy Soho cin­e­mas or on tele­vi­sion, film­mak­ers used the doc­u­men­tary for­mat to explore the grow­ing prac­tices of counter-cul­ture youth, in a not dis­sim­i­lar way to mon­do and exploita­tion direc­tors’ use of swingers groups and strip joints.

The first of these was Witch­craft 70 by mon­do mae­stro Lui­gi Scat­ti­ni. Some­times known as The Satanists, the film globe-trots in order to explore a num­ber of dif­fer­ent eso­teric prac­tices (sim­i­lar­ly to Scattini’s appro­pri­ate­ly named debut Sexy Magi­co), per­haps most impor­tant­ly zon­ing in on Diane LeV­ey, founder of the Church of Satan in 1966. LeV­ey her­self would play a fic­tion­al Satanist some years lat­er in Robert Fuest’s under­rat­ed The Devil’s Rain. Explor­ing the often erot­ic world of the witch,” the film typ­i­fies the witch­ploita­tion style; a doc­u­men­tary filled with increas­ing­ly Ken­neth Anger-esque imagery, all psy­che­del­ic night­mares and hip­py communes.

The British iter­a­tion of witch­ploita­tion cin­e­ma is per­haps the most cel­e­brat­ed, often because it fea­tures the king and queen of the counter-cul­ture witch­es Alex and Max­ine Sanders. It’s dif­fi­cult to con­vey the influ­ence these Not­ting Hill häx­ans had on b‑movie cul­ture at this point, as well as on the gen­er­al per­cep­tion of the counter-cul­ture as dis­tinct­ly witchy, specif­i­cal­ly in its grow­ing taste for wicca.

Though Alex Sanders had appeared on an episode of Late Show Lon­don in 1966 (telling­ly along­side Roman Polan­s­ki a year before he start­ed pro­duc­tion on Rosemary’s Baby), his real screen debut came in the mes­meris­ing Leg­end of the Witch­es. Direct­ed by Mal­colm Leigh, the film’s stark black and white imagery is star­tling and evoca­tive, cen­tring around one par­tic­u­lar ini­ti­a­tion rite where a naked man walks blind­fold­ed through a series of tests. The eerie calls of Michael” uttered by the naked witch lead­ing him into the night make for excep­tion­al­ly com­pelling scenes.

Leigh’s back­ground and future was in less­er sex­ploita­tion come­dies, his pre­vi­ous short being about the typ­i­cal­ly strange British obses­sion with randy win­dow clean­ers, while his lat­ter work such as Games That Lovers Play and Erot­ic Fan­tasies show where the director’s true inter­ests were. Oth­er direc­tors took note.

Sanders appeared again in the even more pulpy and psy­che­del­ic Secret Rites by Derek Ford. More so than Leigh, Ford real­ly was a skin-flick direc­tor. Secret Rites could have been just a witch­craft tinged addi­tion to Ford’s oth­er saucy work such as Groupie Girl, The Wife Swap­pers and Sub­ur­ban Wives. But the film is sur­pris­ing­ly effec­tive. Focussing on the Sanders coven allows for a huge range of visu­al pos­si­bil­i­ties. The film is a heady, colour­ful day­dream, filled to the brim with effec­tive hor­ror imagery. The gen­uine cos­tumes are espe­cial­ly mag­nif­i­cent, retain­ing the sort of grainy authen­tic­i­ty that most occult films today would mur­der for.

No turn towards pop­u­lar witch­craft would be com­plete with­out the oblig­a­tory Satan­ic Pan­ic style reac­tion film and this came thanks to the BBC in 1971. In The Pow­er of the Witch: Real or Imag­i­nary, Sanders again makes an appear­ance, along­side var­i­ous author­i­ty fig­ures express­ing con­cern about all this preter­nat­ur­al per­mis­sive­ness, pre­sent­ed by Michael Bakewell. Being the BBC, it obvi­ous­ly doesn’t go to the lengths of the B‑movies but it cer­tain­ly feels a nat­ur­al cousin to those oth­er films, replac­ing the sex mag­ick rit­u­als with enjoy­ably con­cerned vic­ars and pious church military.

Though oth­er films looked at witch­craft with more cre­ative aims, in par­tic­u­lar Rod­dy McDowell’s The Bal­lad of Tam-Lin and George A Romero’s Sea­son of the Witch, it was the b‑movie mod­el that dom­i­nat­ed. In an atmos­phere of sex come­dies, mon­do doc­u­men­taries and increas­ing­ly camp hor­ror, it was nat­ur­al that witch­ploita­tion reflect­ed the cul­tur­al milieu around it.

Striking image of a woman in a green dress standing next to a large, golden mask on a dark background.

Ray Austin’s Vir­gin Witch is the epit­o­me of fic­tion­al witch­ploita­tion films. Every­thing that made those films enter­tain­ing pulp is present; the typ­i­cal exploita­tion tropes of sex and vio­lence, but also the end­less­ly watch­able, kitsch visu­al style of the ear­ly 70s. The film is enjoy­able pre­cise­ly because it under­stands the nat­ur­al cou­pling of the post-’60s youth rev­o­lu­tions and the occult. It fol­lows a mod­el Chris­tine (Ann Michelle) and her sis­ter Bet­ty (Vic­ki Michelle) head­ing to a cas­tle in order to be con­tract­ed to a mod­el­ling agency run by Sybil (Patri­cia Haines). There’s only one prob­lem: Sybil is a witch in charge of a coven and requires a young vir­gin to join their ranks.

Austin him­self was real­ly a tele­vi­sion direc­tor and Vir­gin Witch was only one of his two non-TV fea­ture films. The oth­er was Fun and Games, anoth­er sex­ploita­tion film fol­low­ing the unbal­anced daugh­ter of a prison gov­er­nor who decides to work her way through staff and pris­on­ers alike. Vir­gin Witch is slight­ly sub­tler, but only just. It is at least more earnest­ly fun, aware of its own absur­di­ty and rel­ish­ing its stag­ing of var­i­ous rituals.

As with many films of the genre, it’s best to enjoy the pulpy viva­cious­ness of Vir­gin Witch rather than think about the sce­nario too deeply. The film’s aes­thet­ic alone is replete with dat­ed plea­sures, all miniskirts, dodgy hip dia­logue and a won­der­ful, heady score by Catweazel com­pos­er Ted Dicks. Its role as just anoth­er cheap Soho quick­ie may have been its chief pro­duc­tion draw, pulling the pun­ters with promis­es of copi­ous nudi­ty, les­bian witch­craft and a spat­ter­ing of rit­u­al sac­ri­fice, but films like Vir­gin Witch cap­ture the era of their pro­duc­tion far bet­ter than big­ger bud­get films do, quite sim­ply because they’re more hon­est about the tastes and dri­ves of a late night audience.

The genre itself didn’t just can­ni­balise gen­er­al hor­ror tropes but open­ly nicked things from oth­er films. It was only a few years lat­er that B‑movie don Nor­man J War­ren used the exact same loca­tion of Austin’s film for Satan’s Slave. The witchy ele­ment is more eso­teric than hob­by­ist in that the main char­ac­ter, played by Can­dace Glen­den­ning, is sug­gest­ed to be the re-incar­na­tion of a witch. Michael Gough has macabre, campy plans for her, and the film is filled with win­try land­scapes and flow­ery fashion.

Ulti­mate­ly, it’s Austin’s film that col­lects togeth­er all that went before it and pack­ages it neat­ly and enter­tain­ing­ly. Even the semi-doc­u­men­tary form of pre­vi­ous works feels in some way par­al­lel to the youth cul­ture ele­ments of Vir­gin Witch. It’s British schlock at its best, but then, as hap­pens with many cheap flicks, oth­er direc­tors saw the poten­tial for their own sala­cious necromancy.

Witch­craft itself had real­ly become ubiq­ui­tous by the way time it entered the grind­hous­es. The BBC Ghost Sto­ry for Christ­mas in 1975, Lawrence Gor­don Clark’s The Ash Tree, focussed around the haunt­ing of a peri­od witch and her dead­ly chil­dren”, while tele­vi­sion pro­grammes like Doc­tor Who, The Tomor­row Peo­ple and Play for Today all show­cased occult ten­den­cies through­out the 1970s (specif­i­cal­ly in The Dæmons, The Heart of Sogguth and Robin Red­breast respectively).

Once pop­u­larised by the counter-cul­ture, schlock and B‑movie cin­e­ma found new ways to exploit the most abstract and fic­tion­alised accounts of witch­craft. Sup­plant­i­ng occultism into the mod­ern day was real­ly a bless­ing for no-bud­get film­mak­ers, as well as tele­vi­sion direc­tors, as it removed the expen­sive require­ments of peri­od films like Witchfind­er Gen­er­al and Adri­an Hoven’s Mark of the Devil.

Instead, the link­ing between eso­teric prac­tices and the mod­ern day was tak­en for grant­ed, tying into youth cul­ture and fash­ion. It made the job incred­i­bly easy for B‑movie direc­tors. In Cor­ra­do Farina’s Baba Yaga, for exam­ple, the nar­ra­tive of a jeal­ous les­bian witch (Car­rol Bak­er) is told around a vari­ety of fash­ion shoots, most of which descend into soft­core S&M.

Woman with long, dark hair and a bright smile, wearing makeup and sitting against a green backdrop.

Pro­vid­ed the mod­ern day is present in some form, no occu­pa­tion is too bizarre or ill-fit­ting for a spate of witchy action. In Hollingsworth Morse’s Daugh­ters of Satan, an antique deal­er (Tom Sel­l­eck) buys a paint­ing of witch­es being burned at the stake, only to notice a strange resem­blance between one of the witch­es and his wife (Bar­ra Gant). Fred­die Fran­cis’ Craze also fea­tured a dement­ed antique deal­er (Jack Palance) who sac­ri­fices women to an idol. Adding to that Peter Cushing’s non-witchy role as a mur­der­ous antique deal­er in Kevin Conner’s From Beyond the Grave and it’s easy to believe that antique hunt­ing in the 70s was a gen­uine­ly haz­ardous pastime.

While most of these films have absur­di­ty embed­ded with­in them, as the years went on and the counter-cul­ture con­tin­ued its slow demise, there’s lit­tle doubt that witch­ploita­tion films became camper, lum­bered with ever more bizarre colo­nial hang-ups and, over­all, enter­tain­ing­ly bad. Films such as Ted V Mikels’ Blood Orgy of the She-Dev­ils, David Low­ell Rich’s Satan’s School for Girls, Mario Gariazzo’s Enter the Dev­il, Aman­do de Ossorio’s Demon Witch Child and Jor­di Gigó’s The Devil’s Kiss are just a few exam­ples that show­case just how schlocky film­mak­ers were will­ing to go with their So Mote it Be’s. Film­mak­ers were lit­er­al­ly sell­ing the name on the tin by this point, epit­o­mised most by films like Lui­gi Batzella’s Nude for Satan which had hard­core scenes cut and uncut, depend­ing on the screen­ing scenario.

What at first seemed a mere ploy to get pun­ters in to hor­ror films had turned almost unique­ly into seedy Satanism. Ham­mer films had tried to mine the post-counter cul­ture trend of hip­py witch­craft too, in John Hough’s Twins of Evil, but its peri­od set­ting made it feel clos­er to the studio’s reg­u­lar stock and trade. Ele­ments could also be seen in Alan Gibson’s Drac­u­la: AD 1972 but it toed the line with vam­pirism rather than witch­craft. Instead, Ham­mer used their remain­ing throw of the hor­ror dice to indulge in vague­ly erot­ic witch­craft in To the Dev­il, a Daughter.

Their sec­ond adap­ta­tion of Den­nis Wheatley’s work, the first being the supe­ri­or The Dev­il Rides Out, Peter Sykes’ film again con­flates mod­ern day Lon­don life with ancient prac­tices; fol­low­ing Richard Wid­mark as he tries to save the soul of Natass­ja Kin­s­ki from Christo­pher Lee’s ruth­less band of occult dis­ci­ples. The occult had gone through many vari­a­tions at this point and the days of grainy films show­cas­ing naked witch­craft seemed long gone. Though the film may have con­tained copi­ous vio­lence and nudi­ty, much to the dis­may of Wheat­ley who wrote to Ham­mer to express his annoy­ance, the occult had moved onto big­ger things than swing­ing cir­cles and Not­ting Hill orgies.

The suc­cess of William Friedkin’s The Exor­cist showed the future direc­tion of the occult in all its guis­es; name­ly that The Dev­il him­self now pro­vid­ed the best box office odds. It was less about frol­ick­ing hip­py witch­es and more overt­ly about polit­i­cal pow­er. Fol­lowed fur­ther by the suc­cess of Richard Donner’s The Omen, as well as Dario Argento’s still witchy Sus­piria, the grainy, grimy end of witch­ploita­tion was left to decay in the Chelsea base­ments from where it had bloomed. It was far from those heady days of new free­doms a decade ear­li­er when it real­ly had been the sea­son of the witch.

Vir­gin Witch is released on Blu-Ray via Black House Films on 6 December.

You might like