The first in the so-called “Unholy Trinity” of folk horror, and Michael Reeves’s final feature in a promising but brief career, Witchfinder General adapts Ronald Bassett’s salacious novel of the same name, based on the true story (or at least the true legend) of self-proclaimed seventeenth-century witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, played with unprecedented ferocity by horror icon Vincent Price. A heavily fictionalized account of Hopkins’s torture and murder spree across the countryside during the English Civil War in order to expose and obliterate sorcery and witchcraft in the home counties, Witchfinder General is a dramatically violent and nihilistic film whose notorious censure by the BBFC was countered with success on American soil in uncut form as The Conqueror Worm.