Released at the advent of the 1960s, Night of the Eagle, a British and American co-production proffered in the United States as Burn, Witch, Burn!, presents an intersection in diverging styles of horror cinema, perceptions of witchcraft, and respective contemporary feminisms of the U.S. and England. Noted genre authors and Twilight Zone writers Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, both on the payroll of American International Pictures, shared a fondness for the American horror novelist Fritz Leiber’s work Conjure Wife (1943), previously adapted to film as Weird Woman (1944) in a Universal horror anthology series with Lon Chaney Jr. The duo scripted an updated version for AIP, who handed the project over to the team behind their recent Circus of Horrors (1960), director Sidney Hayers and writer George Baxt, who would soon be recognized for creating the gay literary detective Pharoah Love.
American International had a joint production deal with its UK B-movie brethren Anglo-Amalgamated, and the two studios clearly had slightly different intentions for the material. Night of the Eagle was filmed in the UK as a seriously moody and stressful affair that harkened back to the films of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. With its outmoded, Brontësque obsession with African diasporic rituals in the Caribbean as opposed to the interest in paganism that was beginning to blossom in British folk horror by 1960, and an encroaching sense of paranoia that froths into some sincerely frightening optically printed spooks in the last act, the film earns its frequent comparisons to both I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Night of the Demon (1957). But AIP’s interests were more in the William Castle vein, and in addition to notable edits, Burn, Witch, Burn! clearly superior in title if not form, tacks on an opening narration that serves as a spell of protection upon the audience. (American audiences were also given throwing salts and additional printed incantations).
Professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde), academic heartthrob and lecturer on all things rational, emphatically does not believe, he tells his students. “Belief” is the gateway drug to all manner of unnatural coping mechanisms. Taylor is working on a lecture decrying “neurosis in the modern man” (emphasis my own). He purports that healthy skepticism will prevent nerves from degrading into psychosis. Taylor has a beautiful home, a cottage on the shore, a doting American wife, Tanzy (Janet Blair), and is up for a big promotion in his department. His elder fellow faculty and their own pernicious missuses are none too pleased over the successes of this bookish young hotshot. Wyndgarde’s role was intended for Peter Cushing, who was either ill or committed to a rival Hammer project, depending on your source, and so the oddball, effeminate Wyndgarde was cast in his place. Wyndgarde, openly bisexual and subject to Britain's draconian decency laws for much of his adult life, resembles Cushing to a remarkable degree, but his unique onscreen masculinity only furthers the subversive gender politics, intentional or otherwise, broiling under the film’s surface.
Norman soon stumbles with horror upon what, exactly, his wife has been up to on her seaside sojourns: witchcraft. Poppets in the pantry, tiny skulls in the cupboard, shriveled spiders in the dresser drawer. This is not the sort of thing a man of science can condone, though Tanzy is defensive. She only practices protective spells to keep Norman from harm directed at him by the other wives. Non-believer Norman demands the trinkets be destroyed. He should’ve listened, of course. Conjure wife, happy life. Immediately upon the destruction of his betrothed’s baubles, everything begins to go wrong for Norman, as if he has stumbled out of the collegiate Cornwall countryside and into Final Destination. In a fascinatingly jarring and backwards subplot, thoroughly disturbing in its depiction of campus bureaucracy, a female student accuses Norman of rape. The girl’s dirtbag boyfriend barges into Norman’s office with a gun—not to defend or avenge her, but to accuse Norman of failing him out of the school so that he can usurp his girl. Car crashes, fires, and possession soon follow.
By envisioning a suburbia in which seemingly all domestic women practice witchcraft—a decade before George Romero’s Hungry Wives (1972)—the film’s many male authors present an odd refraction of Europe’s history of hunting the supernatural woman. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici writes that the British witch hunts of the 16th century largely occurred to remove “unproductive” women—in the commercial or reproductive sense—from areas of privatized land. The accusation of magic is explained by Francis Bacon’s writing in 1870 that “magic kills industry” as it is a refusal to sweat and toil—the very reason Norman’s weathered, tenured colleagues grumble and object to the newcomer Taylors’ upward mobility. The subjugation of witches, according to Fedirici, was meant to further transform women into economic resources. But in Night of the Eagle, the college’s women are in complete control (Norman’s student accuser notwithstanding). They are responsible for their husbands’ successes and failures. Without the protective spells of their wives, the men are clueless, powerless, and lost.
Night of the Eagle’s brew is so heady that I have not even touched on the titular terrifying eagles, but one last discovery: during Tom Cruise’s brief outing attempting to resuscitate United Artists in the mid-aughts, the studio pursued yet another adaptation of Conjure Wife. One would hope that Cruise would’ve starred, though it may have been familiar territory for him after Eyes Wide Shut (1999). In Night of the Eagle, emasculation is in the trees, and it’s coming.
Night of the Eagle screens this evening, August 31, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of the series “That Very Witch.”
