In last month's issue, we considered the case of a director who shot only four horror films before his death, two of them somewhat marginal efforts, and yet has become a major cult figure.  Now we're going to look at the two films that firmly established Michael Reeves's star in the cinema firmament.  Perhaps a close look at these two cinematic "clues" will help us to finally unravel... 

By HARVEY F. CHARTRAND

(Note:  This is the second and concluding installment in a series concerning the short but significant directing career of Michael Reeves.  The first installment, dealing with his films Castle Of The Living Dead and The She-Beast, can be found here.)

Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers (1967) has been called a minor classic of bleak horror. Judging by the film’s unusually dark tone, it is no surprise that Reeves committed suicide less than two years after shooting wrapped. The young director’s unhappiness seemed to be an essential part of his very considerable talent.

A disgraced medical hypnotist (Boris Karloff) invents a machine that enables him and his wife (Catherine Lacey) to live vicariously through the experiences of Michael (Ian Ogilvy), a bored, thrill-seeking young man who has agreed to become a guinea pig in a mind control experiment. Michael is soon driven to ever more extreme behavior by the psychotically frustrated and resentful wife--culminating in acts of brutality and homicide.

The feeble, elderly Karloff is unable to stop the evil excesses of his stronger and more domineering spouse. (The Sorcerers is one of the few films in which husband-battering is treated seriously.) This is a film that shows people at their absolute worst; it’s unusually pessimistic for the "flower power" era in which it was made.

Reeves and Tom Baker wrote the screenplay for this weird, downbeat British shocker, based on an idea by horror novelist John Burke. Karloff stars in one of his traditional misguided (not mad!) scientist roles, creating a scientific miracle that is fatally misused. But in this story, the harsh reality of daily life intrudes on Karloff's fantasy world.

Professor Marcus Monserrat lives in grinding poverty in a cramped, cold-water flat in a drab south London neighborhood. And unlike the exotic paraphernalia in the old Frankenstein movies, this scientist’s laboratory is just bare bones--a reclining chair, strobe lights, slide projector, reel-to-reel tape recorder and elaborate headphones.

Karloff was 79 and visibly ailing when he made The Sorcerers. It is one of the better roles he was offered in his later years (along with his next project, Targets) and Karloff makes the most of it. A lifetime of pain and humiliation is etched into Prof. Monserrat’s gaunt yet distinguished features. Ogilvy convinces as the jaded Mike Roscoe, who gets more than he bargained for in his quest for kicks. Lacey is unfortunately over the top in the pivotal role of Karloff’s wife. Her transformation from sweet old lady to paragon of evil is unconvincing.

It’s a nihilistic and nasty world the characters inhabit, making The Sorcerers a glimpse into the near future, as if Reeves had a vision of the dawn of punk in Britain. Much of the story takes place at a Swinging London-type nightclub where everyone drinks Coke instead of snorting it.

After an amazing car chase, The Sorcerers offers one of the bleakest endings in postwar British horror cinema. Karloff drives Ogilvy to immolate himself in a car crash, torching himself and his demented wife in the process.

I can’t say I really enjoyed The Sorcerers. It’s well made but leaves the mental equivalent of a bitter aftertaste.

A bizarre footnote: Shortly after production wrapped on The Sorcerers, actor Victor Henry, who plays Ogilvy’s best friend, was struck by a bus while walking to an audition in London’s West End. Henry remained in a vegetative coma for 17 years until doctors finally pulled the plug on him in 1985.

One would almost suspect a "Sorcerers curse" at work, except that the picture introduced lovely Susan George, who went on to enjoy a thriving career in Hollywood until she turned 40. George plays Ogilvy’s first victim in her film debut.

Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General (1968) is Reeves’ masterpiece and, despite its low budget, the only true indication of the splendid career that awaited him. Lawyer Hopkins (Vincent Price) and his henchman John Stearne (the magnificently thuggish Robert Russell) wander through the English countryside in 1654, investigating accusations of witchcraft.

The sinister duo delights in the persecution of hapless victims, usually of the female variety. For their services of summary trial and protracted execution, they are paid handsomely by the superstitious villagers, some of whom have personal scores to settle with the "witches." Innocent victims die slow, horrible deaths at the hands of the demonic duo, who revel in doing "God’s work."

But Hopkins and Stearne have made a deadly enemy: Richard Marshall (Ogilvy), the anti-Royalist soldier who is on their trail to avenge the honor of his girlfriend (Hilary Dwyer), after she was raped by Stearne and slept with Hopkins in a futile attempt to prevent her uncle’s execution. The finale (a true transference of evil scene) still shocks 35 years after the film’s release.

Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General is strange fare indeed--part American International Pictures exploitation feature, what with all the screaming, gore, rape, madness and torture--and part European arthouse cinema, imbued with brilliant realistic "touches" and austere atmosphere (not unlike the work of Danish pantheon director Carl Dreyer). The result is as depressing as it is horrifying.

Witchfinder General influenced many filmmakers, sparking off a whole spate of witch persecution films, notably Mark Of The Devil (1970) with Herbert Lom, Curse Of The Devil (1972) with Anton Diffring, The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1970) with Patrick Wymark, and Cry Of The Banshee (1970), which re-teamed Price and Dwyer.

In the United States, AIP retitled Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem "The Conqueror Worm," to sell it as another of the Poe films that came into vogue, following the success of Roger Corman’s House of Usher in 1960.

An opening and closing narration by Price were added, and several scenes of tavern wenches in various states of undress were cut. Paul Ferris' haunting orchestral score was scrapped on the MGM Midnight Movies VHS of The Conqueror Worm, released in 2001. To avoid paying royalties, MGM (which purchased the AIP catalogue) substituted uninvolving moog synthesizer stylings by Kendall Schmidt. The Metrodome Special Edition DVD of Witchfinder General (released in February 2003) features Ferris' original score.

In July 2002, a biography of the doomed director at long last appeared: The Remarkable Michael Reeves: His Short and Tragic Life by John B. Murray (published by Cinematics in the United Kingdom). The book holds the reader’s interest, but is overlong and could have used the services of a good editor. If Murray tells us once that Reeves was crazy for Don Siegel, he tells us a hundred times. If he observes that Witchfinder General is not so much a horror film as an "English revenge western," he repeats this information a dozen times.

The book clears up some "urban legends" about Reeves, but also commits factual errors of its own. Murray writes that Reeves was approached by AIP in late 1968 to direct a Richard Matheson script titled Implosion, which the biographer says was about the life of the Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade and "absolutely brilliant" (according to Ferris).

Despite having directed excruciating torture scenes in Witchfinder General, Reeves found Implosion too disturbing to focus on. (By now, Reeves was in the low cycle of a manic-depressive episode that would eventually kill him.)So he turned down the project.

However, Implosion was not the original script for Cy Enfield’s De Sade (1969), but a completely different story about a global pandemic of infertility, with the authorities putting the remaining fertile women into breeding camps. Matheson considers Implosion one of his best scripts (pity it was never produced or even published).

The most revealing section of the book describes Price’s intense dislike of Reeves during the filming of Witchfinder General. Price was so upset by Reeves’ impersonal nature that he almost quit the picture in a drunken funk. But when Price saw the finished work months later in California, he realized that Reeves, despite his alienating personality, knew what he was doing, drawing a masterful performance from the 56-year-old thespian.

In a "crow-eating" gesture that Murray says is unparalleled in the history of world cinema, Price wrote Reeves a letter of apology and congratulations, expressing the hope that they would work together again. (They almost did on The Oblong Box, a tale of voodoo, disfigurement and grave-robbing that was eventually directed by Gordon Hessler.) Murray reports that Reeves responded to Price’s grand gesture by getting inebriated, calling the actor at all hours and repeatedly yelling: "I told you so!"

I salute Murray for his doggedness. He’s obviously been working on this biography for many years, having corresponded with Price in the late Eighties and with Ferris before his untimely death in 1996. But Murray does let his interview subjects ramble on. And even though Ian Ogilvy’s ex-wife Diane is interviewed at great length, there’s nary a quote from Christopher Lee and Donald Sutherland (who worked with Reeves on Castle of the Living Dead) or Barbara Steele (star of Reeves’ The She Beast). A second biography of Reeves by film scholar Ben Halligan will be published in August.

Lastly, a word on Reeves' death, which is often described as a suicide. That would be sad enough, and may well be true. But there could be another explanation. Reeves was going through a bad spell, taking anti-depressants and drinking heavily through early 1969. According to the coroner's report, it appears he came home one night, quite drunk, couldn't sleep, took a handful of pills and never woke up.

Perhaps it wasn’t suicide, but simply a mistake made in a state of inebriation. The autopsy revealed that Reeves hadn’t gone too far over the limit of what was necessary to kill him, which indicates that the suicide may have been unintentional. But there was no question that Reeves’ life was shutting down in his final six months, as he became increasingly isolated and untalkable-to.

When Reeves withdrew from The Oblong Box project, he effectively blew his career at the very moment he was making it big. One feels particularly sorry for Reeves’ mother, whose husband also committed suicide. She outlived her son by 17 years.

At any rate, the snuffing out of such a talent at far too early an age will always remain a great loss to horror cinema.

Thanks, Harv!  Yes, the loss of Michael Reeves was a major one for horror film fans, even if they did not realize it at the time.  Such a gifted director could well have improved the horror film output of the likes of American International Pictures and Tigon.  On the other hand, considering his abrasive personality, perhaps he would have alienated one star too many eventually and ended his career anyway.  We'll never know now.

Article copyright Harvey F. Chartrand

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