Witchcraft

Witchcraft (1964)

Hex Marks the Spot!

When her grave is disturbed by modern-day land developers, a 300-year-old witch is accidentally resurrected and terrorizes an English village.

Date of release
1964-03-01
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (35)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Horror
Director
Don Sharp

Casting

Interesting facts

Witchcraft is a 1964 British horror film directed by Don Sharp and starring Lon Chaney Jr., Jack Hedley and Jill Dixon. The script was written by Harry Spalding.

Production

Writer Harry Spalding says he got the idea to make a film from an incident that happened in San Francisco when an old cemetery was converted into a real estate development.

Don Sharp had received good notices for his direction of Kiss of the Vampire (1963) and was receiving lots of offers to do horror movies. He says Milton Subotsky wanted to work with Sharp and offered him a choice of three scripts to make but Sharp liked none of them. He wound up making Witchcraft.

Sharp liked the script for Witchcraft, calling it "a damn good story", although he felt that it suffered credibility problems being set in the present day.

According to one account the film was shot over 14 days, which was twice what Robert L. Lippert such productions took in the US. Sharp said in an interview that it took twenty days. Filming took place in January 1964 at Shepperton Studios just after 110 technicians had been fired from the studio.

Spalding says that director Don Sharp "realized the thing very well" and burnt down an actual house for the climax.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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