Witchcraft *** (1964, Lon Chaney Jr, Jack Hedley, Jill Dixon, David Weston, Viola Keats, Marie Ney) – Classic Movie Review 5866

Director Don Sharp’s 1964 British horror B-movie is a lurid and vigorously handled affair.

Harry Spaulding’s screenplay is all about a modern-day housing contractor developing a graveyard where a witch was buried 300 years ago, and accidentally resurrecting a 300-year-old witch and setting off the activities of a coven. This is a grave situation indeed. Hex marks the spot where they shouldn’t be digging.

The visiting American star Lon Chaney Jr plays Morgan Whitlock, who tries to stop local builder Bill Lanier (Jack Hedley), who ignores him till his auntie and partner are killed and his wife Tracy (Jill Dixon) is abducted.

Director Sharp keeps a tight lid on the devilish goings-on, paying equally careful attention to both the action and the atmosphere. And the under-played, unemphasised performances, unusual in a satanic horror movie, are effective.

Also in the cast are David Weston, Viola Keats, Marie Ney, Yvette Rees, Diane Clare, Barry Lineham, Victor Brooks, Marianne Stone, John Dunbar and Hilda Fennemore.

In America, cinema-goers were offered a gimmick green badge ‘witch deflector’ to save them ‘from the eerie web of the unknown’.

It shares a lot of themes with Sharp’s later 1973 British horror movie Psychomania [The Death Wheelers].

Don Sharp died on 14 December 2011, aged 90. He is also remembered for The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), Psychomania [The Death Wheelers] (1973), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978) and Bear Island (1979).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5866

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