Give Me a Skin for Dancing In!
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“Camp” is a word tossed around a lot by people criticizing Seven Arts/Hammer’s The Witches (1966), specifically the bizarre, choreographed sabbath near the end. That sequence is certainly unlike anything you’re likely to see in other Sixties-era supernatural thrillers. Personally, I find the stylized eroticism—the barefoot writhing, the suggestion of same-sex lust, Priestess Stephanie’s glob swallowing and orgasmic eye flutter—riveting, and wholly in keeping with the picture’s weird sexual undercurrents.
To wit, I think it’s pretty clear what “horrible things” went down in Africa to cause the breakdown of schoolteacher Gwen Mayfield (Joan Fontaine)—things from which she has only marginally recovered when she takes the headmistress post in rural Heddaby. And make no mistake, village patroness Stephanie Bax (Kay Walsh) is wise—surely weighed those “things” favorably when deciding to hire poor, confused Gwen. “You’re as fastidious as I am,” she purrs. That huge bed warmer we see when Gwen enters her cottage for the first time suggests Stephanie is dead right. Meanwhile, whom do we have but brother Alan Bax (Alec McCowen) wandering around woefully in a white collar despite being no priest, the embodiment of enforced celibacy. Stephanie’s doing?
Celibacy, of course, is at the center of the picture; it’s crucial to Stephanie’s unholy plans. The villagers in her thrall are determined to keep one special girl from getting “in trouble,” for reasons, we discover, to do with an intended sacrifice. The filmmakers naturally aren’t about to show us anything like that, but they deftly convey the horror of what’s to happen, quite graphically, care of a rabbit in the hands of the village’s lascivious butcher.
Sex and Death, Wagner’s eternal bedfellows, startlingly foreshadowed near the beginning of The Witches in a single, fleeting image.
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