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WITCHFINDER GENERAL is a wonderful little conundrum of a movie that raises questions about the morality of the tradeoff between re-arranging art or not having it be seen in the first place: which is worse? A lot of films exist in forms that the original or credited director may not have been completely in favor of or participated in all of, best example I can think up off the top of my head is ALIEN 3 which is regarded as a David Fincher film, though only the 2004 Director's Cut DVD features only scenes that he filmed or approved of. The commonly seen theatrical version is somewhat different in tone and mood but he still gets credit for it even if he more or less disowned the project.

CONQUEROR WORM is certainly a different movie than WITCHFINDER GENERAL while still sharing the same core storyline and majority of scenes. Yet it is still Michael Reeves' film and the version that most of us got to know here in North America was the WORM re-cut -- mostly due to so many local TV creature feature screenings during the 1970s as to almost make the film ubiquetous. And of course the Orion home video and Laserdisc releases, both of which featured the altered AIP cut. That's what we are used to even if it wasn't "right" or "legit" or even entirely what Reeves had in mind, a situation compounded by the fact that he died before the film was even in general release, meaning he never got to see his movie become a sensation. But even if he had been alive to protest the alterations AIP "owned" the rights to the film in North America and added the content they did, mostly because the form that the movie appears to take -- gothic period horror -- almost "required" that kind of content to resonate with the more jaded North American audiences and their taste for ghoulish excess.

Put in a different way, if the CONQUEROR WORM prints did NOT have the AIP inserts & alterations it may not have developed the ferverent following and controversy that the film engendered. Like it or not, that's the way we were introduced to the movie and got to know it and for many viewers the more "pure" British and European versions don't quite have the same suckerpunch of flesh, sadism, blood and mind numbing gloom. I am sure that the WITCHFINDER GENERAL prints are probably a better version of the same story but it's not any or more less legitimate than the CONQUEROR WORM prints, even if Reeves himself was not the one to make the additions and in fact reacted vocally in opposition to the alterations. Movies get re-cut or altered by their distributors all the time.

For better or worse the AIP prints of CONQUEROR WORM seem to be a more calculated blunt force trauma assault on the nerves and sensibilities of the viewer when considering the time in which the movie was made. Yes it is a blasphemy that Reeves' art was @#%$ with in the way that it was but the result was a movie that really did catch viewers by surprise. It has the appearence of a Hammer-esque production with shapely babes in push up gowns, people riding horses and living in castles or quaint villages, but underneath it's surface there is a barely contained rage that really boils over in a way that exceeds anything that similarly looking & sounding movies had ever done. By contrast the WITCHFINDER GENERAL prints come across as a costume drama that just happens to center on Matthew Hopkins but is just as much about the Cromwell era and the changes it brought to the traditional rural feudal order.

The contradiction here is that Reeves' film as he envisioned it may not have engendered the reaction that the AIP altered form did, for better or worse, and my thinking has always been that the AIP staff who got the job of promoting the film for North American audiences came to the conclusion that it needed to be spiced up. As for the Vincent Price narration of the Edgar Allan Poe verse from which the AIP print takes it's name that was also a marketing ploy to try and snooker viewers into making an overt Poe association with the film, which is what most viewers circa 1968/1969 thought of when the name Vincent Price came up, the reason for which should be self explanatory when looking at Price's resume from the 1960s. It also bears noting that Price wasn't Michael Reeves' first choice for the role: He wanted Donald Pleasance to play Hopkins but the decision to use Price was forced on him, and if the accounts I have read are correct he and Reeves did not get on well during the filming.

To a certain degree then it is correct to surmise that the entire project was taken from Reeves' control and became a "filmed deal", and when AIP saw the finished product they decided it was too ambiguous and heightened the exploitation angles to appeal to the horror movie sect since their ultimate involvement in making the film wasn't to create "art" as it were but to sell tickets to a movie. They wanted a film that would guarantee box office and this was a very low budget potboiler, Reeves still a very young director just getting started and his creative control over the project thus extremely limited. AIP went ahead and changed WITCHFINDER into WORM and the result was a sensation that more or less created the witchhunt & inquisition idiom -- and I for one don't think that would necessarily have been the case if they had left the movie as he had assembled it himself. Whether or not such meddling was right or wrong is almost a separate issue, though it is very sad to consider that having his work hijacked and bastardized by AIP probably contributed to the anxiety & depression that ultimately resulted in his death by drug overdose (barbituates).

Just to be clear I am not saying that one version or the other is better or more desireable, and like finally getting to see something like Sergio Martino's original version of ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN as opposed to Roger Corman's distillation called SCREAMERS it is important that Reeves' original vision for the film gets seen as it was intended to. But at the same time you can't fault people who are used to the sleaze and filth that made WORM so potent to be somewhat hung up on that version as well. The obvious solution is a 2 DVD set that shows both of them with equal care given to presentation ... and if I recall a discussion thread back at the Latarnia forums it was pretty much accepted that Tigon would have staged WITCHFINDER GENERAL as a 4:3 open matte shoot that would then have been cropped to 1:66:1 for theatrical screening so both the fullframe and LBX presentations are "correct" depending upon which context you intend to view the film. My own preference is for Reeves' WITCHFINDER cut to be seen letterboxed and the AIP print shown fullframe, which sort of enhances the scuzzy exploitational nature of their edit by removing it from any artifice of appearance in terms of "film as art".

As such I can understand why MGM might have been less than eager to release WORM based on the somewhat more worn and home video-ish transfer by Orion, which even on Laserdisc has a kind of cruddy, grindhouse look to it that is at odds with the whole idea of DVD restorations. And we have also seen how film companies now routinely go ahead and crop or otherwise reformat picture ratios to cater to the 16x9 widescreen TV crowd even if doing such is not in the best interests of the film in question. I would be interested in having one of these French releases in my library but would ALWAYS be drawn to the AIP version of WORM if only that it delivers the motion picture that I came to admire & be downright afraid of. The last time I watched CONQUEROR WORM I was zonked out of my skull on a certain hallucinogen and the scene where Elizabeth Clark is immolated while tied to the ladder stopped the show cold, this is not a "party movie" to be taken lightly or watched on whimsey and like it or not the more staid WITCHFINDER edit will always feel like it's missing something, even if it didn't belong there in the first place.