The Blackmoor Witch Slayer

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Movie
German title The Blackmoor Witch Slayer
Original title El proceso de las brujas / Il trono di fuoco
Country of production Spain , Germany , Italy
original language English
Publishing year 1970
length 82 (German version), 84 (Spanish version) minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Jesús Franco Manera
script Michael Haller
Jesus Franco Manera
Enrico Colombo
production Harry Alan Towers
music Bruno Nicolai
camera Manuel Merino
cut Gertrud Petermann
occupation

The Witches Slayer of Blackmoor is a German-Spanish-Italian historical , horror and exploitation film shot in 1969 with an international cast with plenty of torture and sex film parts about bloody witch and rebel hunts in England at the end of the 17th century. It was directed by the well-known B-film director Jesús Franco Manera . The main role as a merciless lord judge was played by Christopher Lee . The film had its German premiere on June 5, 1970, exactly four months after its premiere in Italy.

action

After the death of King Charles II (1685), the Chief Justice of England, George Jeffreys , tried to consolidate the rule of the new monarch, King James II , through the ruthless pursuit of alleged rebels and opponents against the new king and brutal witch hunts .

Jeffreys' blood trail runs through the entire kingdom, wherever the Lord Chancellor and Chief Justice appear. Nor does it stop at women and the innocent. Everywhere he senses betrayal and danger, subversive activities and conspiracies. Jeffreys can be tortured and murdered, but above all hang again and again. The rebels who reject the new king are enemies of the state as well as the women who do not give themselves up to him and whom he simply declares to be witches. Because King Jacob demands absolute power like the French kings have and also wants to bring Catholicism back to England - inquisition, torture and murder included.

Lord Jeffreys, a sadist and flagrant who deeply believes in the righteous cause of his mission, is increasingly using his position to force young women to submit to him and to sexually abuse them for his own pleasure. Those who refuse to accept it are tortured on charges of worshiping Satan and worshiping witches. One of his victims is the beautiful young Alicia Gray. She is sentenced to death by Jeffreys. Before Alicia is finally executed, she has to endure the most severe torture on the rack and is finally thrown to death covered in blood.

The blind fortune teller Mother Rosa, on the other hand, seems to fear Jeffreys. He believes the witch has more power than he would like, and he is afraid of her prophecies and possible curses. In Mary, the sister of the murdered Alicia, mother Rosa and Harry Selton, the son of the respected noble Lord Wessex, Jeffreys has made dangerous enemies. They soon become conspirators and bitter opponents of the blood judge . Mary and Harry, who has joined the rebels against James II, fall in love. Ultimately, the rebels fall into the clutches of the merciless judge. In order to save her lover, the blonde Mary is even ready to surrender to the diabolical Lord Judge. With the greatest reluctance, she undresses in front of him and lets him touch and humiliate her.

Eventually fate turns against the blood judge. His chief advocate, King James, was deposed in 1688, and with him, Judge Jeffreys lost all power. Eventually the Bloody Judge is thrown into the Tower of London and sentenced to death. In the German version he is standing under the gallows and a rope is being put around his neck. The executioner, who had previously happily tortured in his name, gives the order to a helper to hold the rope while the large stool on which Jeffreys is standing is kicked away. Jeffreys fidgets, then the rope is slackened and Jeffreys plops onto the scaffolding floor. The hangman gives a quick wave and another helper with an ax comes over and picks twice at the man who is handcuffed.

Production notes

The focus of the film is the historically documented character of the British Lord Judge Jeffreys. Assuming that The Witcheslayer of Blackmoor would be a somewhat factual historical film, leading actor Christopher Lee promised director Manera to play there. However, as Lee later explained in an interview, he never watched the finished film because the director, allegedly without his knowledge, inserted a wealth of excessive scenes of violence, nude and torture. He also vehemently refused to participate in an erotic scene.

As a result of the great success of Michael Reeves ' Der Hexenjäger (1968), a small wave of witch films briefly started in Central Europe. Manera's film and Adrian Hoven's German torture strip Witches Tormented to the Blood with Herbert Lom in the leading role were made almost at the same time . The race for the earlier premiere was won by Franco Manera's film, which premiered (in Italy) exactly two weeks before witches were tortured to the blood .

The shooting took place between August 8 and October 10, 1969, mainly in Portugal and Spain . In Leiria , north of Lisbon , Franco shot all the shots that featured “British” architecture , while the battle scenes were created in the lavender fields of Casa de Campo , ten kilometers from Madrid .

The Blackmoor Witches Slayer was one of a total of seven films that Manera and Lee made together in a very short space of time in the late 1960s. Especially the Fu Man Chu films by the two caused a sensation. In an interview in which he made it a point to have his character oriented as closely as possible to the real, historical figure, Lee describes the Lord Judge Jeffreys, played by him, as a “ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde "

As Franco Manera explained in an interview, thanks to the numerous donors of the international co-producers, he had a considerable budget, which enabled him to have a considerable international cast. On the other hand, it meant that the co-producers had the most varied of intentions with Der Hexentöter von Blackmoor : Some wanted a historical film, others a horror film and the third a film with a lot of sex and violence elements.

Dennis Price was supposed to take on the role of old Lord Wessex. But he fell ill, and this part went to Leo Genn .

Manera and Howard Vernon , who plays the sinister executioner, decided to closely model this character on the executioner played by Boris Karloff in The Executioner of London .

As was often the case in films from the late 1960s by her husband, producer Harry Alan Towers , Austrian Maria Rohm had to complete several nude scenes here as well. For example, when she reluctantly had to submit to Jeffreys' approaches or when she went into the bathroom completely undressed.

As Manera explained in an interview, the German film distributor chose the title Der Hexentöter von Blackmoor in order to insinuate a proximity to the German Edgar Wallace films or similarly based mystery horror thrillers (e.g. The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle ), although the name Blackmoor doesn't appear at all in the entire film.

In the German dubbed version, Heinz Drache was the German voice of Christopher Lee.

The indexing of the film was lifted again in 2007, a re-examination by the FSK in April 2020 resulted in an age rating of 16 and over for the uncut version.

criticism

The film's large lexicon of people named The Witches-Slayer of Blackmoor, as did Franco Manera's recently made women's prison film The Hot Death "Trash Movies"

In the lexicon of the international film you can read about the film: "The primitively made pseudo-historical story serves as a pretext for wide-ranging scenes of torture and other atrocities, sometimes combined with sadistic sex acts." The Protestant film observer also does not think much of the film: "A horror film with also a lot of sadism, which does not manage to achieve anything beyond its demonstration."

Spain's Guia del video-cine stated regarding this horror film, which was shown in Spain under the title El proceso de las brujas : “Simpática, pero no en exceso interesting coproducción acerca de un sádico inquisidor inglés, construida sobre el contraste nacido de la truculenta maldad de Christopher Lee y la angelical belleza de la exquisita Maria Rohm. Excellent photography e intervención de un Howard Vernon tras los pasos de Boris Karloff in "La torre de Londres". "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Bloody Judge was also the much more apt British distribution title for this film
  2. ↑ The film ends differently in its international distribution versions. In another version, Jeffreys watches an execution from the window while a speaker reads his death sentence from off-screen. It is exactly the same scene that is supposed to be his own execution in the German version. In a third version, Jeffreys confesses his crimes to old Lord Wessex before he dies of a heart attack. All of these endings are pure fiction. The real Jeffreys died of kidney failure in 1689, incarcerated in the Tower
  3. ↑ Lee interview, part two , on The Witcheslayer of Blackmoor
  4. ↑ Lee interview on YouTube
  5. ↑ Manera interview on YouTube
  6. ↑ Manera in an interview, 3rd part
  7. ↑ https://www.schnittberichte.com/ticker.php?ID=7497
  8. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 7: R - T. Robert Ryan - Lily Tomlin. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 92.
  9. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films Volume 3, S. 1610. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987.
  10. ↑ Evangelical Press Association Munich, Review No. 263/1970.
  11. ^ Carlos Aguilar: Guia del video-cine, p. 933, 4th edition. Madrid 1992
  12. ↑ Translation: “Sympathetic but not overly interesting coproduction about a sadistic English inquisitor, which is based on the contrast of the bloodthirsty wickedness of Christopher Lee on the one hand and the angelic beauty of the wonderful Maria Rohm on the other. The camera work and the appearance of Howard Vernon, who follows in the footsteps of Boris Karloff in "Tower of London", are excellent. "