Michael Reeves

Michael Reeves (17 October 1943 – 11 February 1969) was an English film director and screenwriter. He is best known for the 1968 film Witchfinder General (known in the US as Conqueror Worm). He died at the age of 25 from an accidental alcohol and barbiturate overdose.

Reeves was born in Sutton, Surrey, and grew up in Suffolk, whose landscape made a deep impression on his best known film, Witchfinder General. His father died when he was young, but his mother was a devoted single parent. As a child he began making short films, some of which starred his lifelong friend, the actor Ian Ogilvy. As a boarder at Radley College he obsessively broke bounds to attend the cinema, and was utterly single-minded about his ambition to work in film.

Upon leaving school he turned up on the doorstep of his favourite director, Don Siegel, who promptly employed him as an assistant. Subsequently he worked in Italy, where he was assistant director for Castle of the Living Dead with Christopher Lee. While still in Italy, he directed his first feature film, The She Beast (1965; Italian title La Sorella di Satana or Il Lago di Satana), also called Revenge of the Blood Beast. Like Castle of the Living Dead, The She Beast was made very cheaply. It was remembered for an appearance by horror icon Barbara Steele, of whose time Reeves was given only four days. Back in London in 1966, Reeves made The Sorcerers, starring Boris Karloff, an effective 'swinging London' picture with supernatural overtones. Both films also starred Ian Ogilvy.

It is for his third and final movie, Witchfinder General, that Reeves is best remembered. He was only 24 years old when he co-wrote and directed it, but it is often called one of the greatest horror films that Britain has produced. Made on a very modest budget in East Anglia and adapted from the novel by Ronald Bassett, Witchfinder General tells the story of Matthew Hopkins, the infamous lawyer-turned-witchhunter who blackmails and murders his way across the countryside. Reeves imbues the film with a powerful sense of the impossibility of behaving morally in a society whose conventions have broken down, and though it is by no means free of the conventions of low-budget horror, it stands as a notably powerful and evocative film.

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