Through December the Gene Siskel Film Center celebrates peace on earth and goodwill toward men with a series of occult horror films. Religious people may find this perverse, but look at it this way: they’re the only nonsecular holiday movies you’re likely to see all month.
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The series kicks off with a pair of little-known but seriously creepy British features from Tigon Films, a pretender to the Hammer Films throne in the late 60s and early 70s. The Witchfinder General (1968, 86 min.) stars a commanding and unusually restrained Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a 17th-century magistrate who took advantage of the English civil war to conduct a massive witch hunt across East Anglia. His sinister story comes from a historical tome by Ronald Bassett, though director Michael Reeves (whose life was cut short by a drug overdose the next year) seems equally inspired by the stark visuals in Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath. American drive-in impresario Roger Corman, hoping to capitalize on his earlier Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, acquired the movie, retitled it The Conqueror Worm, and slapped on some voice-over of Price reading from Poe’s poem; the Film Center will screen this version. (Fri 12/3, 8:15 PM, and Mon 12/6, 6 PM)
