A Matter of Faith - on BURN, WITCH, BURN

BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962) is a thriller about faith.  The first line of the film, spoken by its protagonist, a smug professor named Norman (Peter Wyngarde), writing on a chalk board: I do not believe.  He discovers his wife, Tansy (Janet Blair), has been using witchcraft to protect him from a dangerous rival at the college where he teaches.  Demanding she destroy the protective charms which are an affront to his core credo in rationality, his luck immediately takes a turn for the disastrous.

The film’s silly title – its original British title, NIGHT OF THE EAGLE, isn’t much better - belies a relatively subtle and intelligent horror film, a throwback to the suggestive frissons of the series of psychological horror films produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the forties.  The smart script is credited to Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, from a fine novel, CONJURE WIFE, by Fritz Leiber.  The director, Sidney Hayers, made CIRCUS OF HORRORS a couple years earlier, but the bulk of his career was in television.  There are sequences in BURN, WITCH, BURN which recall some of his better television work, particularly for the 1960s series THE AVENGERS, but better rendered, with a higher budget.  Suggestive, fearful shots of Norman from a pursuing camera are very reminiscent of Hayers’s work on THE AVENGERS episode, “The Hidden Tiger.”

BURN, WITCH, BURN lacks the visual elegance of the best of the Lewton films: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, CAT PEOPLE, THE SEVENTH VICTIM, ISLE OF THE DEAD, and THE LEOPARD MAN, or the late fifties film, NIGHT OF THE DEMON, directed by the best of the Lewton directors, Jacques Tourneur; and a climatic chase at the end involving an eagle, though effective wham-bam filmmaking, is discordant with the more subtle terror of the rest of the film.  In the film’s best scene and true climax, a supposed witch sets fire to a house of cards and asks the professor, “Do you think your house is burning down?”  The central conflict between rationality and the supernatural, between belief and skepticism, cannot be more eloquently or potently illustrated.  Unfortunately, even here, the suspense is undermined by a cut to the professor’s house; the audience should have been allowed to simmer alongside the hero in uncertainty.