on Dec 1 at 2300 PST on TCM don't miss Vincent Price in the very scary & timely Witchfinder General

" Price's witch-finders are allowed to call victims perpetrators and sling them up in the moral vacuum that exists on the ungoverned fringes of this and any civil war (his title implies that he has some marshal commission to do so). Figures who are split off from the wider conflict of the 1642 – aspects again more in keeping with an early Peter Watkins docudrama – filter into the quietism of the film's forest of symbols. Loitering military bands, forgotten human carcasses decaying in the bracken, and other social consequences of the breakdown in systems of authority – starvation, criminal and fatalistically disinherited social order and behaviour – allow Reeves' the chance to execute what Wood called “stunning set pieces of mise-en-scene”. Instead of Hammer or Corman, this fraught moral geography now seems more consistent with Bresson's Lancelot du lac (1974), Nelson's Soldier Blue (1970), and other films of the times where the recreation of military history and it myths seems to have been derived from the unending casual destruction of innocence broadcast nightly from Vietnam. The only supernatural component in Reeves' film is contained within the frightened social imagination of Civil War England and in the rhetoric of the witch-finders. We are closer to Mi Lai and Jonestown than to Elm Street. "