Trivia / Witchfinder General

• Actor-Inspired Element: Vincent Price's casting changed a lot about how Hopkins was written. When the script was initially written, Hopkins was portrayed as "ineffective and inadequate...a ridiculous authority figure". Knowing that Vincent Price was too imposing looking for that, Hopkins became a more straightforward villain.
• Billing Displacement: Patrick Wymark is given top billing for his cameo as Oliver Cromwell, which he filmed in just one day.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Latin America: When Witches Burn
  • Brazil and Portugal: The Witch Hunter
  • Finland: Witch Killers
  • France: The Grand Inquisitor
  • Greece: The Hill of the Hanged
  • Norway: The Witch Burner
  • Serbia: There is No Mercy for the Executioner
  • Spain: The Inquisitor
  • Sweden: The Bloody Snare
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Vincent Price fell from his horse on the first day. Michael Reeves refused to see him, hoping that making him angry would make the character more fierce.
  • Rupert Davies also had live rats placed on him for the scenes where Lowes is in the jail cell.
  • Michael Reeves told Ian Olgivy to really beat into Vincent Prince in the finale. The latter however wore padding in his costume so he wouldn't be injured.
• Executive Meddling: Vincent Price's casting was insisted by the American distributor, American-International Pictures.
• Enforced Method Acting: Vincent Price's serious and vicious performance in this film was partly driven by the fact that he and director Michael Reeves rowed constantly throughout production and Price was channeling a great deal of genuine anger and hostility. This was Reeves' intent all along, as he wanted Price to not rely on his usual winking charm.
• Hostility on the Set: Vincent Price and the director Michael Reeves loathed each other from the start. Much of the problem was that Reeves thought Price was inappropriate for the role (he supposedly wanted Donald Pleasence) and saw his main task on set as preventing Price from hamming or camping it up. Price, on the other hand, had signed up for the film without reading the script, expecting it to be a campy horror-swashbuckler, and was genuinely disturbed by the brutality of the film and the sadism of the character he was supposed to play. It was only when the film was completed that Price realized what the project was meant to be and he and Reeves made amends.
• Looping Lines: Much of the dialogue had to be re-recorded, as the interior sets had tin roofs that echoed.
• Playing Against Type: Vincent Price as Hopkins. While he had made his career playing villains, the vast majority of them were of the Pantomine and Camp variety that the audience were supposed to fall in love with. In here he plays a genuinely psychopathic and horrific character. Price actually accepted the role without reading the script, assuming it was yet another swashbucking-adventure flick.
• Production Posse: Ian Olgivy (Richard Marshall) had worked with Michael Reeves in his two previous films The She Beast and The Sorcerers, as well as some of his amateur short films.
• Referenced by...: The opening witch-burning scene, with the alleged witch tied to a ladder and lowered into a fire, is referenced when Ella is nearly burned in the seventeenth century in HEX.
• Those Two Actors: Hilary Dwyer (Sara) would star with Vincent Price in several more horror films in the 70s.
• Throw It In!: Originally, the film was intended to end with the soldier shooting both Hopkins and Marshall. However, it was noticed too late that an earlier scene had explicitly established that he only had one pistol. As a result Ian Ogilvy improvised Marshall's final psychotic freak-out.
• Uncredited Role: Sally Geeson as a maid.
• Vindicated by History: The film received mixed reviews at release but was eventually reassessed and earned praise as an excellent film and among the best of the filmographies of Michael Reeves and Vincent Price.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Donald Pleasence was said to have been the one Michael Reeves wanted to play Hopkins.
  • The first draft of the screenplay was even more graphic; the first hanging victim would have more death spasms, Father Lowes would get stabbed fifteen times with a steel spike, and a sniper's victim slamming against a tree. Per the Board of Censors, these had to be removed.
  • Plans were to dramatise the Battle of Naseby - a decisive battle in the civil war at the time - and a soldier would be gruesomely beheaded on-screen. As the sequence would require too many extras, it wasn't used.
  • The finale was originally completely different. Stearne would fall in with a group of gypsies, try to rape one of them and get his eyes gouged out by her as she fights him off. Richard then arrives and convinces the gypsies to help him ambush Hopkins. The witchfinder gets beaten brutally, has a "confession" forced out of him, gets partially drowned and eventually hung. Like the above, this was removed because the gypsy characters would require additional extras.

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