"Director: Otakar Vávra"

• Witchhammer | DVD | (13/11/2017) from £10.58   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  The time is the seventeenth century. The beggar Maryna Schuchová hides the Host in her scarf at the Communion. She admits to the parish priest Schmidt that she intended to give it to the midwife Groerová to heal her ailing cow. The young priest declares her a witch and convinces the Sumperk countess De Galle to summon the inquisitor Boblig from Edelstadt. This failed student of law sees the offer as a great opportunity. He uses torture and threats to force the women from the to testify to their meetings with the devil and learn by heart the lies he has made up for the inquisition tribunal. Boblig accuses the wealthy burghers of witchcraft as well, and so wants to seize their possessions.

• Witchhammer | Blu Ray | (13/11/2017) from £19.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Otakar Vávra's Witchhammer, co-written by Ester Krumbachová (Daisies, Fruit of Paradise) from Václav Kaplický s 1963 novel, chronicles the series of notorious 17th Century Czech witch trials, undertaken using the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (the Witchhammer of the title), the Catholic treatise on witchcraft which endorses the extermination of witches and developed a detailed legal and theological theory for this purpose. Using genuine court transcripts from the forced confessions of those accused of sorcery and collusion with the Devil, it is a powerful and often shocking allegory of life under totalitarian rule. With echoes of Bergman and Franti ek Vlá il, and with literary antecedents in Arthur s Miller s The Crucible and Aldous Huxley s The Devils of Loudon, it is a disturbing political fable; and like Ken Russell's controversial, expressionistic adaptation of Huxley s text, The Devils (1971) and other films of the period such as Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (1968) and Michael Armstrong's Mark of the Devil (1970), it serves as both grim genre film and compelling historical drama.