Analysis
Analysis
This chapter offers a detailed analysis of Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968). Landscape and history are two of the key elements of Witchfinder General and they are used in such a way as to consciously evoke the Western genre. With the possible exception of film noir, there is no other genre that presents the landscape as a character, rather than simply a setting. Ronald Bassett's source novel also evokes the Western: both in terms of action and thematically. One of the reasons for the striking use of landscape is the way Reeves and Tom Baker wrote the script around the locations. Rather than hand the completed script to a location manager, they sought out suitable scenery as they wrote. If Witchfinder General looks back to the B-movie Westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, it also anticipates the violent revenge Westerns of the 1970s and the sexual violence in a number of them.
Keywords: Michael Reeves, Witchfinder General, landscape, Western genre, Ronald Bassett, Tom Baker, B-movie Westerns, revenge Westerns
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
