White Angel, Black Witch (Part Two)

The different narrations are the key to the re-framing of the surviving footage from Angeli Bianchi, Angeli Neri used in Witchcraft '70. It isn't so much the content of the narration, (indeed, much of the US narration clearly uses the same script as the UK version of the original), but rather the tone. In the UK version, the narration takes on a somewhat mocking tone, making clear the film's intent to present its subject matter of suburban witches and satanists as figures of fun, rather than menace. (In a side note, I find it somewhat ironic that narrator Edmund Purdom takes such a condescending, even facetious tone, making clear his disdain for the whole project, when he ended his once illustrious acting career a few years later appearing in - and directing - dross like the slasher flick Don't Open 'Til Christmas. Trust me, that was nothing to be smug about). The US narrator, by contrast, takes on a far more hectoring and judgemental tone, making clear that whilst these people might appear bizarre, they are actually highly dangerous. There's absolutely no doubt that the US reconstruction of the film is aiming to tap into the unease and fear in the US created by the activities of Charles Manson and his 'family' at the time of its release. Indeed, at its climax it makes an overt link between the supposed hippie black magic orgy and Manson.

Interestingly, the UK version also seems to make an attempt to tap into then contemporary British fears about the activities of black magic adherents, opening with a segment concerning grave robbing in Highgate cemetery. I'd be interested to know whether this sequence (which feels as if it was rather arbitrarily inserted) is also in the continental versions of the film, as it seems to be a reference to the alleged activities of amateur occultists in their hunt for the 'Highgate Vampire' in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Obviously, this sequence, like just about everything else in the film, was staged for the cameras, (the 'police car' is simply a Ford Zodiac with a blue light stuck on the roof - there is no 'police' lettering on the side and it isn't even white, as most police cars were at the time), as was the norm for mondo movies. As I intimated in the earlier post, this is another reason that Witchcraft '70 goes to such lengths to reframe this material, so as to emphasise its 'authenticity'. The staging, or the 'recreation of certain scenes for the purposes of drama', though once reviled, and used as a critical stick to beat the mondo genre, has, interestingly, now become semi-respectable. A whole genre of TV 'reality' programmes like The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea are now built around it. Sadly, I find them far less entertaining than the more honest fakery of the mondo movies. Now, if they were to do a 'reality' series about the activities of a witches coven in Chelsea, or satanists in Essex, I might watch...