52 Weeks: The Craft that Came Before
Witchcraft (1964)
★★★★★★★☆☆☆ (7 out of 10 stars)
Directors: Don Sharp
Producer: Derek Ford
Starring: Lon Chaney Jr., Jack Hedley, Jill Dixon
“You cannot destroy what has been buried with purpose.” – Morgan Whitlock
The Review:
I must confess, dear reader, that I had little expectation going into this film. I reflexively responded to the word witchcraft and snapped it up like a hungry toad. Like a gluttonous master of muck and pond-water, I did not much care how this particular meal might taste. I only knew that I desired it—primal, unreasoning, and perhaps a touch unwise.
Imagine, then, my delight when this unassuming platter revealed itself to be a banquet.
What Witchcraft offers is not merely occult window dressing, but a layered, brooding meditation on the slow rot of modernity encroaching upon ancient soil. It is folk horror before the term had been suitably codified—its bones laid bare with surprising confidence. There it is, paraded before us with ritualistic precision: the careless trespass, the desecration of the old ways, and the grim, inexorable reaction that follows. A cacophony of demoniac delights unfurls with methodical grace.
Lon Chaney Jr. looms over the film like a weathered monument—an idol half-forgotten yet stubbornly enduring. His presence alone lends the proceedings a mournful gravitas, as though the film itself remembers something we have long since dismissed. Jack Hedley’s skepticism is sharp but brittle, a modern man trespassing upon ancestral wrath, while Jill Dixon offers a vital tether between the clashing worlds.
And clash they do.
Here lies the film’s greatest strength: the collision between two incompatible epochs. On one hand, the clinical arrogance of post-war progress; on the other, the stubborn, festering persistence of belief and ritual. The past does not merely whisper—it seethes. Coffins unearthed, curses sharpened, and the earth itself seems to bristle at intrusion. This is not spectacle for its own sake, but something closer to inevitability.
There is a rhythm to it, almost liturgical. Each misstep compounds the last, each defiance drawing the noose ever tighter. One can practically feel the soil closing in.
And yet—ah, there is always that tantalizing yet—my admiration is not without reservation. The ending, though satisfying in structure, retreats ever so slightly from the abyss it so carefully approaches. I felt it pull back from where it might have gone, and perhaps from where it would have gone had it been born a few years later, in a slightly darker, more permissive cinematic age. One senses the shadow of a more audacious conclusion lingering just beyond reach.
Still, what remains is potent.
Witchcraft stands as a deliciously murky precursor to the folk horror currents that would later swell into full, dreadful bloom. It is a film steeped in loam and legacy, a grim little dirge for the folly of forgetting that some things—once buried—are buried for very good reason.
And like any proper curse, it waits patiently… for the next fool to dig.
Yes child, there is more…so much more. See what you have missed: T. Glenn Bane’s 52 Weeks of Halloween Index.