Talk:Witchfinder General (film)

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Featured article star Witchfinder General (film) is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do.
This article is within the scope of the following WikiProjects:
Witchfinder General (film) was selected as the Portal of Horror Horror-related article of the month for November 2006.

Contents

[edit] GA passed

Congratulations. This is a very good article on its way to becoming featured. A few requests/suggestions:

  • Is there an original film poster from the British release available for the infobox?
I have been unable to locate a "regular" style UK poster. There's a "horizontal" quad UK poster reproduced in a book I have on horror films, which I've seen copied a few times online. I'll upload it and see how it looks in the infobox, but right now I suspect the DVD cover will look better. If it doesn't work in the infobox I'll probably add it somewhere else in the article.--Hal Raglan 13:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Added original British Quad poster to infobox.--Hal Raglan 03:03, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Are there any screenshots of important scenes/characters from the film?
As there is no R1 DVD available, I cannot provide screengrabs taken from the film (my computer only plays R1s). But I've seen a few murky screengrabs in various places online that might do the trick.--Hal Raglan 13:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Added screenshot of Ian Ogilvy and Hilary Dwyer.--Hal Raglan 03:45, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
You are absolutely right that the intro should mention the screenplay is based on Bassett's novel. I'll see what I can dig up on Bassett and the book. Based on the very little I know at the moment, the articles will have to be extremely short stubs.--Hal Raglan 13:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Created stubs for Bassett and the novel.--Hal Raglan 03:37, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Is it UK or U.K.? Both are used (in the version I printed out Saturday, anyway).
It should be "UK". I'll run thru the article and fix any "U.K." references.--Hal Raglan 13:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Done!--Hal Raglan 03:57, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Well-referenced and nice prose. Dmoon1 04:44, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for taking a look at the article. I appreciate your suggestions!--Hal Raglan 13:38, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] References section

For some mysterious reason, the References Section of this article became very strange after a recent, and extremely minor, edit I made. In an attempt to correct the error, I reverted to the previous version of the article, but the References Section is still weird. I can't figure out what the problem is. For anybody with more technical wikipedia knowledge, please take a look and see if this can be easily corrected. Thanks.Hal Raglan 20:06, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Never mind. A couple of hours later, the problem seems to have magically taken care of itself.Hal Raglan 00:48, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Ouch! I just tried the same minor change again (fixing "an historical" to "a historical" in two separate sections) and the References Section has turned weird once more. Instead of 31 references, there are suddenly 52, although no additional references have been added. In the introduction, what was once Reference 1 has become Reference 32, Reference 2 is Reference 33, and so forth. Its very odd. I'll take a look at it again tomorrow to see if it magically fixes itself again.Hal Raglan 01:37, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, this seems to be a wikipedia-wide problem at this time. I've added the ?action=purge remedy in the URL which seems to have fixed the problem.Hal Raglan 02:47, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cast section

This article needs at least a cast section. Cbrown1023 13:57, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

I totally disagree. Cast sections take up needed room. This article is currently a Featured Article candidate. If you look at the majority of film related Featured Articles, including the first three Halloween titles, Jaws, Night of the Living Dead, Summer of '42, Gremlins, and my own Tenebrae, you'll notice none of them have cast sections. The infobox already contains brief major cast, as well as production crew, details. If the reader wants more name-list info he/she can go to imdb.com.--Hal Raglan 21:38, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
I broke down and added a Cast section. I think it adds little, if anything, to the article but after looking at a few other film FAs, including Blade Runner, V for Vendetta, and Casablanca, as well as the Star Wars films, I saw that they all contained Cast sections.--Hal Raglan 12:40, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

there is no need for Cast sections. have one if you want but its not at all necessary.

[edit] BBFC

The article consistently refers to the BBFC as the "British Board of Film Classification", however until 1984 it retained its original name of the "British Board of Film Censors". "Classification" is anachronistic with regard to this article, and I'll change the references to "Censors". -- Arwel (talk) 23:21, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Home Video Versions

An editor inserted the following into the Home Video Versions section of the article: "At the end of his book "Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil's Aeneid" (Lexington Books, 2007), classicist Dr. Lee Fratantuono of Ohio Wesleyan University makes the argument that Reeves' "Witchfinder General"/"The Conqueror Worm" can be viewed as a cinematic retelling of Virgil's epic of fury, The Aeneid." While this could very well be true, it has nothing at all to do with the section's subject. I can't think of a suitable place to put this interesting piece of trivia, so I'm including it here for now.-Hal Raglan 03:42, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the information once again, after finding it inserted into the "Influence" section. As the section is intended to detail the film's influence on subsequent films and popular music groups, the trivia does not belong here either. While interesting, the information probably best belongs in an article devoted to The Aeneid, not here.-Hal Raglan 19:30, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
The same editor has once again jammed the information into the article, this time in the "Historical Accuracy" section, where it is plainly out of place. While I've again removed the info, I've requested that the editor provide some explanation for his recent edits.-Hal Raglan 01:41, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Considering the citation provided is one of the most extensive analyses of the film in print, far exceeding in length the articles on the film in standard film histories, and providing a lengthy "reading" of the film that is rare if not unique among academic/scholarly works...an argument could be made that it certainly should be mentioned, and in the film article, not the Aeneid article. There are thousands of books on the Aeneid; trying to find scholarly studies that consider Witchfinder General is intensely difficult. If you want to quibble over where to insert the material, go ahead. You don't own the Wikipedia articles. If you want to determine where the information is best placed, go ahead. But it's certainly just as valid an insertion of relevant material as certain other tidbits in your existing article.
Thanks for your response. I assume you have a copy of the book in question? Can you provide at least one or two quotes from the book that concisely demonstrate the writer's discussion of the apparent influence of the Aeneid on Witchfinder's narrative? If so, I think this tidbit (as you refer to it) could be placed in the "Response" section of the article with no problems.-Hal Raglan 14:02, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I do have the book. Since you wrote the article and best know how to make it as complete as possible, you can perhaps figure a way to best summarize this. On pp. 394-395 of the book (title and author and publisher and date above), the author writes: "The Aeneid, strangely, has rarely received any treatment in film (unlike both of Homer’s epics, and even Apollonius’ Argonautica). One filmmaker, how-ever, has captured exactly the point of Virgil’s great epic of madness and its horrifying conclusion. The British director Michael Reeves (1943-1969) made only three films before his untimely death from a barbiturate overdose. His last and most famous film, Witchfinder General (1968), is a fictionalized account of Matthew Hopkins, a brutal witch hunter in mid-seventeenth century England. Hopkins executes the aged father of a beautiful young woman—even after the young woman had agreed to submit to his sexual advances in the hope of saving her father. The young woman’s soldier fiancé, away fighting a (civil) war during all the horror, returns to find his beloved Sarah an emotional wreck, devastated by the loss of her father and her rape. He vows to hunt down the Witch-finder. He successfully tracks down Hopkins and, at great personal risk, finally kills him in a terrible act of brutal vengeance. As he rains down blows on his dying enemy, a friend of his finally intervenes and fires his gun, killing Hopkins and ending the sadistic revenge. The soldier looks up at his friend, bloody axe still in hand, and cries out repeatedly in furious rage that his enemy has been snatched from him, that his revenge is not sated. As Sarah watches her beloved’s final and complete descent into an insanity of madness, she can only scream, and the film closes with her screams of horror and a frozen frame on her terri-fied face. For its American release, the film was renamed The Conqueror Worm (from the Poe poem) and given a short voiceover prelude and postlude from Poe’s verse. As we see the frozen face of Sarah’s horrified recognition that her lover has been overcome by unconquered madness, we hear Poe’s words:....

The author then goes on for another 6 pages on the film and its parallels to the Aeneid.