It is now time to explore an influential and transitionary horror film from 1969, The Witchmaker. This film combines early-60s tastefulness with late-60s nihilism, making for an entertaining experience.
Of course, some of your universe's critics fail to recognize the genius of The Witchmaker. For example, reviewer moonspinner55 writes, "Apart from the 'spooky' music, amateurish makeup effects and awkward performances, there's not a whole helluva lot happening here." Reviewer dmanyc writes, "It drags soooooo slooowly. The scares are meh to nonexistent." And reviewer pod-man writes, "it is one big bore of an extremely low budget movie."
Read on for the truth about The Witchmaker...
In the Louisiana bayou, a young blonde woman takes a dip while wearing a white bra and panties. She wades through the water, then dries herself off on the bank and begins to dress when she is suddenly interrupted by a man wearing some kind of fur. He knocks her out, draws an ankh shape around her navel, then ties her feet and hangs her upside-down from a tree. He slashes her throat with a knife and lets her bleed, collecting her blood in what appears to be a hotel ice bucket.
The young lady’s funeral is attended only by one elderly mourner and a priest. When they leave, a boat pulls through the bayou along the edge of the cemetery. The boat is driven by prolific character actor Burt Mustin, who tells one of the passengers that eight young women have been murdered recently. “Nice girls, every one of them. Every one hanging there like a cut hog, a hex wrote on their chest.”
The boat’s passengers are Dr. Hayes and his four college students. Dr. Hayes says, “Surely the authorities should send someone down to—“
“Oh, they do, they do,” Mr. Mustin interrupts. “I’m getting rich just running around the swamp in my boat here. They allow it’s a ‘prevert.’”
“You do mean pervert, don’t you,” corrects one of the two female students.
“Prevert, pervert, it’s all the same, cause they ain’t caught ‘em. Course some folks say we got a witch in the swamp again.” He says the town was famous for its witches.
Dr. Hayes tells Mr. Mustin they are in the bayou scouting locations for a movie, though the students quickly correct this ruse amongst themselves, as Tasha says, “If you start telling people you’re doing psychic research, they think you’re some kind of a nut.” Tasha is a “sensitive.”
As the boat continues down the bayou, Mr. Mustin explains that witches are immortal as long as they get blood. “I don’t know what she does with it exactly, but she has to have it or die.” Furthermore, the blood was drained from the eight murder victims.
The boat stops at a dock and the passengers get out, as they have rented a nearby cabin for five days for $21. Mr. Mustin drives the boat away, leaving the psychic researchers (plus one magazine reporter, Vic, who concludes that sensitive Tasha is “spook-oriented”) alone in the cabin—or so they think, as the filmmakers show that they are being watched. As they get comfortable in the cabin, Dr. Hayes explains to Vic that electronics interfere with psychic phenomena, which is one reason their investigation is taking place in the undeveloped bayou. Another reason is occult activity—the rumors about witches.
Of course, the first thing Tasha and student Sharon do is change into their bikinis and rub suntan oil on each other at the edge of the water. (This allows the filmmakers to hint at nudity tastefully while not showing anything—for example, Tasha’s breasts are hidden by hanging moss from the camera’s POV.) Sharon tells Tasha she dated Owen but he drank only carrot juice and showed no sexual interest in her. As they sunbathe, they are watched by the man in the woods, who is dressed as if en route to a renaissance faire.
The stalker does some kind of spell using a black rock and a white rock, resulting in Tasha covering her breasts with her hands and running through the trees. The stalker returns to his own cabin in the forest, which is equipped with a hidden staircase down into a cave that must be underneath the bayou (Louisiana being famous for basements and underground cemeteries and such). He reaches an open area and says, “Hail Satan.” Torches suddenly light up to reveal an altar with a bronze Satan statue. The stalker performs another spell in this room, drawing an ankh in someone else’s blood.
In a puff of smoke, an elderly witch named Jessie appears. The stalker introduces himself as Luther the Berserk (he is The Witchmaker of the film’s title). She asks why she has been summoned and he starts, “There is a woman—“
Jessie begins laughing, which goes on for a minute or two. “There generally is,” she says. “Now that I have had my little joke, suppose you tell me about here.”
Luther the Berserk says the woman is beautiful and he wants to bring her into the coven (of course, he pronounces it correctly, with a long o sound as in coe-ven). “I am told you are a past master.”
“Flatter hasn’t turned my head in 200 years,” she says. “But I like it.” She bargains with Luther. “The Master gets her soul. You get her body. What does old Jessie get? Huh?”
“What you want most, Jessie. Youth, beauty, a new life.”
She tells him what they will need. “The blood of a maiden drawn of steel, on a night when the moon is full.”
“Tonight, Jessie. Tonight.”
Back at the rented cabin, Dr. Hayes gives Tasha a tranquilizer, both because she freaked out while sunbathing and also because “it sure tunes up her receiver.” The psychic investigators begin their psychic investigation, using an electronic measurement device while Tasha spins an arrow on a plate to locate a ghost or a witch or something. Elsewhere, Jessie uses Tasha’s openness to send some kind of psychic signal, causing Tasha to stand up suddenly and scream, “Leave me alone!”
Luther the Berserk confers with Jessie in their underground lair. “If I ‘speak’ to her again, I will control her until she dies. Or until I die. Or until she takes her vows as a witch.”
Later that night, Jessie controls Tasha psychically, making her leave the cabin and beckon to Sharon. Sharon chases Tasha through the forest, only for Tasha to be tackled by Luther the Berserk, who kills her with a rock and carries her back to his lair. The filmmakers cut to another ceremony at the Satanic altar, where Sharon’s blood is already in a copper pot. Jessie takes some of the blood and slips her bloody finger into the Satan statue’s mouth. Then she lies on a table marked with an ankh while Luther the Berserk prays to Satan so that Jessie is reborn as a young, beautiful woman.
Meanwhile, the others have discovered that Sharon is missing so they search the woods. Vic finds an abandoned sweater and shows it to Dr. Hayes, but he doesn’t know if it’s Sharon’s: “I get forty, fifty kids in a class, they just become one big blur. I wouldn’t know what they were wearing.”
Suddenly, Vic sees a skeleton hanging from a tree, presumably the young woman killed in the film’s opening.
Minutes later, they find Sharon’s body hung from a tree with an ankh drawn in blood on her torso. Vic releases her body and Dr. Hayes, perhaps inappropriately, holds her in the dirt. “Remember, Vic, when I said a class of kids was one big blur? It isn’t exactly true. Some of them stand out. Some of them…stand out, Vic.”
The next morning, in a shot similar to one in The Evil Dead (1981), the survivors bury Sharon’s body near the cabin. Dr. Hayes pounds a makeshift cross into the dirt with a shovel. “It’s only temporary,” he says. “They’ll want to have a ceremony back home.”
The men discuss how to get back to civilization, but there appears to be no way. Owen suggests building a boat, but Vic says their only tool is the shovel. Using an archaic term that demonstrates his vocabulary as a magazine writer, Vic says, “I hate to be a crepe hanger, but we’re stuck here till Friday.”
Later, Vic comforts Tasha, who says she dreamed of Sharon hanging in a tree all night. Telling her not to cry, Vic says, “Doc’s gonna need your help. Now what good is a beautiful sensitive with red eyes and a runny nose?”
Dr. Hayes gives a lecture about witchcraft to Vic in the cabin, saying that millions of people believed they were witches, and some thought they could fly to their witch’s sabbaths. “We have the formula to the flying ointment they rubbed all over their bodies prior to a sabbath. It had enough hallucinogenic and psychedelic drugs in it to make anyway think they were flying.”
“Maybe that was the original trip,” Vic theorizes.
At night, they conduct another psychic ceremony. It lasts less than a minute, as Tasha doesn’t detect much psychic activity. Everyone goes to bed except Owen, who sits on the porch with a rifle, on guard duty. Eerily, the now-young Jessie controls Tasha, forcing her to leave the cabin and seduce Owen. “I want you to make love to me, but not here. Let’s get away from the house a little bit, shall we?” She lures him into the forest, where she suddenly reveals herself as Jessie and stabs him.
Later, in their underground lair, Luther the Berserk initiates Tasha into the coe-ven. She swears allegiance to Satan and Luther, rather cruelly, brands her back with a hot knife blade.
Tragically, back at the cabin, the survivors create a second grave for Owen’s body. Inside the cabin, they all grill Tasha, who insists she was in bed all night, though they have evidence she was outside. She psychically blasts Vic away from her, which nobody ever mentions, and Dr. Hayes gives her a sedative. Then Dr. Hayes eulogizes Owen: “Poor Owen. All his life he went with the weights and the wheat germ. Treated his body like a fine watch. Now he’s just as dead as if he’d been a bum or a wino.”
They hypnotize Tasha, who tells them she will sign something in blood on Candlemas, the next night. She will use Maggie’s blood—and Maggie is taking notes during the hypnotism session.
Shockingly, Luther the Berserk suddenly appears in the middle of the room. Dr. Hayes and Vic attack him as the lights go out, but when the lights come back on we see Vic is strangling Owen’s dead body!
After another strategy session (i.e., the two men discussing what to do while the women are elsewhere), they come up with a plan. Dr. Hayes says, “Maggie, you were raised on a farm. Do you know what wild garlic looks like?” He tells her to collect as much as she can find. Apparently, garlic makes mortals invisible to witches. They also plan to trap a wild pig to use its blood.
At night, Luther the Berserk prepares for the Candlemas ceremony, as a wider shot of his lair reveals that much of a castle (including a hanging chandelier) is buried underneath his swamp shack.
Luther calls the names of various members of the coven—Goody Hale, the Hag of Devon, Fong Qual, the Nautch of Tangier, Marta of Amsterdam, and of course Amos Coffin (played by Los Angeles horror host Larry Vincent). The immortal witches appear magically, then begin their debauched celebration, which involves hugging each other and eating food from a nice spread on a big table. And juggling.
Luther stops the debauchery to work with Jessie to kidnap both Tasha and Maggie, but the good guys’ plan works and they manage to knock Luther out due to Vic’s garlicky invisibility. They stop him from killing Maggie and Vic supplies the coe-ven with the pig’s blood. Dr. Hayes tells Maggie that replacing human blood with pig blood “should be like putting salt in a sugar bowl. If they drink it, it just might kill them.” (I must confess I was unaware of this property of salt mixed with sugar.)
Unfortunately for everyone outside the coe-ven, Luther wakes up, beats up Dr. Hayes, and grabs Maggie to take her to the Candlemas ritual, which is now at the belly-dancing stage. They begin the ceremony before Luther arrives, drawing an ankh on Tasha’s stomach. The coe-ven members drink the pig blood. Just as Tasha is about to sign a document in her own blood, the other witches realizes the blood was poison. They all pop out of existence. Vic splashes more of the pig blood onto Jessie, turning her into a bloody mess.
Luther finally returns to his underground castle to find a dead Jessie and a missing Tasha. Furious, he chases Vic and Tasha through the forest. When he catches up with them, he rather dexterously rips off Tasha’s nightgown as he pushes her into a patch of quicksand. Vic wraps a wreath of garlic around Luther’s neck, cancelling his powers, and pushes him into the swamp. Vic rescues Tasha but Luther drowns.
Then, in a shocking coda, Tasha pushes Vic into the quicksand while she laughs evilly at him.
The End
One cannot discuss The Witchmaker without dwelling on the performance of John Lodge as Luther the Berserk. (One must not confuse this John Lodge with actor John Davis Lodge, grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge, governor of Connecticut, and ambassador to Switzerland.) John Lodge was a TV actor who stopped acting in 1971, two years after The Witchmaker was released. His performance, like Mr. Lodge himself, is big and bold, swinging from subdued to excessive but always present in the moment. One cannot help but believe in Luther the Berserk and his mission as an immortal witch to complete his coe-ven, and by extension one cannot help but believe in the plight of the poor mortals who oppose him.
Burt Mustin should also be mentioned for his recognizable face and affable personality. Mr. Mustin's show business career started in radio in 1921 and lasted until 1976. Intriguingly, Mr. Mustin announced his retirement from acting while filming an episode of the sitcom Phyllis, and he passed away one month after the episode aired.
In addition to the fine acting, The Witchmaker creates its own magical world full of brightly costumed witches with big personalities along with complex witch mythology encompassing garlic and pig blood and underground swamp castles. It would prove to be the second and final film directed by William O. Brown after an exploitation comedy called One Way Wahine about a young woman moving to Hawaii. If only Mr. Brown could have expanded on the world created in The Witchmaker, he might have made an impression on horror films comparable to the works of George Romero and Wes Craven produced around the same time. As it is, we have The Witchmaker to study and admire, so his contributions were influential indeed.