Crew
Director – Ray Austin, Screenplay – Klaus Vogel, Producer – Ralph Solomons, Photography – Gerald Moss, Music – Ted Dicks, Art Direction – Paul Bernard. Production Company – Univista Productions Ltd.
Cast
Ann/Anne Michelle (Christine), Vicki Michelle (Betty), Patrician Haines (Sybil Waite), Keith Buckley (Johnny), Neil Hallett (Gerald Amberley), James Chase (Peter), Paula Wright (Mrs Wendell)
Plot
Christine applies to the modelling agency of Sybil Waite. Sybil is very taken by Christine and says she has an assignment that week in the countryside. She personally drives Christine to the location at the Wychwood country estate, while Christine also brings along her sister Betty. Betty discovers that there is witchcraft altar set up in the basement of the house. The owner Gerald Amberley confirms that they are part of a witchcraft coven. Christine becomes intrigued and asks to join and is duly inducted in a ceremony. It appears that the lesbian Sybil has designs on Christine. Meanwhile, Christine starts thinking about introducing the virginal Betty to the coven.
Virgin Witch taps into the fascination with The Occult and Black Magic that emerged following the success of Rosemary’s Baby (1968). There came a point not long after this where the genre was dominated by clichés of people in red hooded robes conducting Satanic ceremonies. Unlike these others, the witchcraft going on here seems less diabolical and more like a hippie pagan orgy. Neil Hallett even tries to make a case for what is being practiced as being white witchcraft at one point.
Several films from around the period that Virgin Witch was made have been identified as belonging to the nascent genre of Folk Horror – Matthew Hopkins – Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). Virgin Witch could be another of these – it sits right on the edge, concerning itself with Witchcraft, while there is talk of how the estate rests on an ancient ritual ground known as Wychwood.
Virgin Witch is also very much a British sex film. This era saw a considerable amount of nudity unleashed on screen following the relaxing of censorship standards around the Western world in the late 1960s. This is a film that inhabits a world where it is perfectly normal for a total stranger to walk up to a girl on the street and pinch her on the bum as happens in the opening scenes. Indeed, there are times what we have here almost verges on being an erotic or porno film. Anne Michelle goes to apply at the modelling agency of Patricia Haines and is ordered to undress. Ray Austin’s camera takes this in in slow languorous focus as Anne undresses and as Haines, who has a clear lesbian interest, looks on with long meaningful glances and then comes and kneels before Anne as she insists on taking her measurements. Thereafter there are plenty of nude modelling shots, scenes of characters making out and shower scenes replete with someone peeping in through a hole in the wall, not to mention nude coven rituals and orgy scenes.
It is interesting to try and read what Virgin Witch is saying with its sexual politics. The two sisters are seen as sexual innocents. Most of the men clearly desire the girls and repeatedly tell them how good looking they are, but appear as benevolent or would-be paramours. (In the 2020s, the very act of sexualising the woman and being vocal about it would automatically paint the men as creeps). By contrast, the real threat seems to be Patricia Haines as the predatory lesbian agency head. The film ends with Anne Michelle having wrested control of the coven from Haines and driven her off, which is also seen as the point where Anne has lost her figurative innocence.
It all has a peculiar innocence to it. Anne Michelle quite casually just asks to join the coven and then openly starts making plans to introduce her virginal sister Vicki to a ritual. Almost certainly one of the films that came a few years later would have Anne being seduced into the coven or hoodwinked against her will, while the scenes of the virgin sister being inducted would surely come with far more sinister intent than they do. By contrast here, it seems more like she is just deciding to do no more than try out an alternate religion to see what it has to offer.
Virgin Witch was made by Ray Austin (1932-2023), a director who did most of his work in British television, including episodes of classic shows such as The Avengers, The Saint, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Space: 1999, The Professionals and some US tv shows such as Hawaii Five-O, Wonder Woman, The Love Boat, Simon & Simon, Hart to Hart, The Fall Guy, Magnum P.I., among many others. This was the second of only three theatrical films Austin would make and he subsequently made the horror film House of the Living Dead (1974). In genre material, he also made the tv movies The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair (1983) and Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1987).
Trailer here