Witchcraft (1964)

Accidentally removing a tombstone during a cemetery renovation, a buried-alive witch returns from the grave to continue enacting a curse held on two rival families in modern-day England and forces them to stop its ties with one to end the rampage.Frankly, this was quite enjoyable and certainly a worthwhile British Gothic horror effort. One of its many enjoyable aspects is the rather enjoyable atmosphere created here from what was simply a low-budget effort that certainly has a lot going for it with its use of the graveyard, fog-shrouded buildings, Satanic rituals and meetings and the involvement of a long-held curse all laid out in a modern setting. There's all the familiar trappings to be found here from this one employing that Gothic atmosphere and style here against the civilized world as the whole effort takes place in a type of modernized London on the outskirts of the city with a lot of more modern conveniences than the period-set efforts at the same time which also comes into play here quite nicely alongside that old-school atmosphere. The option of featuring attacks in the car while driving down supposedly-open roads only to learn of supernaturally-influenced ideas against them or using a rotary chair-lift in another sequence makes for some ingenious suspense scenes but also works the two together quite well so it's a lot more comfortable with each other than it really should've been and helps to move this along at quite a hurried pace that it continues along without the chance of really getting boring or overlong. That helps as well with the finale which is the frenzied final battle with the witch while the traditional house-burns-up scenario so often found here that packs a lot of action into the space and again melds the old-school atmosphere with the more modern setting to get a lot out of this one. It's enough to overcome the minor flaw within this one, which is the haphazard way the finale works out here with this one taking a lot of extra time to get to a point it could've accomplished much faster as the editing doesn't really do this one a lot of favors doing it the way it is. There's enough to get the gist of this scene but it doesn't really get there the way it should and that's quite obvious. The low-budget during many of the scenes here is also quite apparent in the lame stunts and obvious doubles during many scenes that really hampers this one somewhat enough to keep it from a true classic.Today's Rating/PG: Violence.

In all honesty "Witchcraft" is just an average British horror accomplishment from the sixties, but I'm slightly biased and overenthusiastic because I'm a big admirer of the subject matter (witchery and family curses), the director (Don Sharp also made "Psychomania", "Dark Places" and many other overlooked genre movies) and the notorious cool guy who receives top billing even though he only sporadically appears in the film (Lon Chaney in finally another role that suits his grim appearance). Somewhere deep in the remote en rural British countryside, the centuries old feud between the Whitlock clan and the Lanier family sparks up again. For the big upcoming real estate project of the Laniers, a bulldozer ravages straight through the Whitlock family cemetery and destroys the grave of 17th Century ancestress Vanessa Whitlock, whom was accused of witchery and buried alive by the Lanier family. Well, the accusation wasn't false for sure, as Vanessa promptly rises from the tomb and teams up with the grumpy Morgan Whitlock in order to bring the entire Lanier family down. Several members of the Lanier family die in mysterious circumstances, but complications arise when it turns out that Morgan's little niece Amy is in love with a Lanier enemy. "Witchcraft" is a competent enough and well-paced occult thriller with gloomy black & white cinematography, a couple of original ideas in its screenplay and an extremely tense finale. Lon Chaney Jr. is naturally menacing, but the biggest creeps are provided by Yvette Rees as silent the hypnotically staring witch Vanessa Whitlock. If she would appear behind me on a flight of stairs, I would surely throw myself down from them as well! There are also two very nifty and imaginative fright scenes involving a car and its passenger(s) driving through a bumpy landfill and towards certain death, although in their minds it looks as if they're driving on a safe and cozy lane.

All the ingredients for a good story about witchcraft are assembled for this minor British entry, well photographed in low-key style with effective B&W photography and featuring a competent, but rather not well-known British cast, with the exception of LON CHANEY, JR. who has a minor role despite being top-billed.JACK HEDLEY is the land developer who is too late in stopping the Lanier family from building a construction site that disturbs the Whitlock graveyard. The feuding families even have a "Romeo and Juliet" sub-plot going with Hedley's son, David WESTON, involved in a romance with Chaney's grand-daughter DIANE CLARE. The desecration of the grave site causes a 300-year-old woman buried alive as a witch to return from the grave to wreck havoc on the Lanier family.It's a simple plot and it plays fairly well but there is nothing new to the material and it's been done before in a thousand different ways. The vengeance theme gets a workout with various members meeting untimely deaths and there's a big fire at the conclusion where the past is buried once and for all.Biggest drawback is that Chaney doesn't fit into the proceedings with his American accent, so it's probably a good thing his role is a minor one. He was clearly not in the best of health at the time and it weakens even his subordinate role.YVETTE REES as the vengeful, wordless witch who was buried alive gives the film's most chillingly sinister performance.

Having watched horror movies from the age of four, and still going strong today in my 40s. Two films that spring to mind that scared me as a kid were "The Night Walker", and "Witchcraft". unfortunately neither are shown anymore on TV,which to me is a great pity as films like this do give you the creeps and certain scenes from these movies still stand firmly in my memory after all this time. Forget all the gallons of blood and gory mutilation that movies today seem to rely on. Give the audience the old traditional things that go bump in the night, the dark shadows flashing across the walls, eerie sounds etc... With the movie Witchcraft, I can remember a couple of sheer terror moments as a child watching this at my Nans house. One being a woman gets into her car in the morning, she checks into the rear view mirror everything fine.She glances a second time, only this time the witch is sitting in the back seat staring at her. This then results in her crashing the vehicle down an embankment. The second scene is a man taking a bath,and in another part of town the witch is holding a voodoo doll of the man, then submerges the doll into a water vat, thus drowning him. Hope this film will become available on DVD someday.. after all its been 35yrs since I last saw it..