A fascinating quirk within the Kneale canon, The Witches is a Hammer film adaptation of a novel by bestselling author Norah Lofts under her parallel murder-mystery career pseudonym Peter Curtis. Her work as a schoolteacher takes Gwen Mayfield (Fontaine) to the sleepy English village of Heddaby, where she finds herself becoming enmeshed with a secretive occult group.
Recently co-opted as an embryonic example of ‘folk horror’, in Kneale’s hands The Witches becomes an entertaining study of weird beliefs flourishing in cosy, familiar surroundings, peopled by a cast of well-known British faces (Kay Walsh, Leonard Rossiter, Michele Dotrice).