MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*
Initially I meant to give NAKED WITCH a quickie review, because it was a chore to watch director/co-writer Larry Buchanan pad the already short film with enervating tracking shots of the Texas wilderness. But upon re-examination, I must admit that the script is probably the best original writing by Buchanan, eclipsing even the risibly titled MARS NEEDS WOMEN.
To be sure, Buchanan gives off mixed signals. The main script centers upon a witch who comes back to life to take vengeance on those who maltreated her in life. Yet Buchanan begins the film with a tedious prologue-- a voiceover lecture accompanied by illustrations from Bosch-- talking about the long history of evil witches making compacts with Satan-- even though the Naked Witch is never said to have made any such pact. Padding is the usual suspect here too.
An unnamed student goes to Luckenback Texas to research the folklore of witches. Most of the German-descended townsfolk won't talk to him, but a pretty young blonde, Kirska, takes him to the house she occupies with her grandfather. She gives the student a guest bed, in which an unnamed witch of the 19th century, referenced only as "The Widow," slept a century ago. The fellow opines that all witches were just scapegoats for societal troubles, so Kirska also offers to loan him a book on local folklore. He's not overly flirty toward Kirska, but he pays her a compliment, so when she returns with the book, she wears a sexy black nightgown. The student, perhaps feeling out of his depth, declines to make a pass, so she leaves him to his reading.
The book chronicles more real history than a latter-day writer could have possibly known. Sometime in the 1800s, the Widow (Libby Hall), an unmarried and unpopular woman in Luckenbach, sleeps with a rich married man, one Schoennig, with the idea that he means to divorce his wife and marry her. Schoennig-- who is also Kirska's ancestor-- not only reneges on promises, he accuses her as a witch to get her out of his hair. The community duly executes the Widow via burning (not shown) and then nails down her corpse in a grave with a metal stake. The execution's imagery slightly resembles the one in Bava's 1960 BLACK SUNDAY, but since that film wasn't released to the US until 1961, Buchanan might not have seen SUNDAY before completing the film in the same year, only to have it sit on a shelf until 1964.
Night falls, and the student goes chasing after the Widow's grave. He unearths it with ease, finds the corpse nailed down by the stake, and pulls out the stake, his voiceover telling us he has some idea of exhibiting it. He wanders back to his lodgings-- it's still not entirely sure that he hasn't been under a spell-- and falls asleep. Behind him, the Naked Witch resuscitates, though her film-nudity is confined to side-boobs. She follows the student to the house and takes the stake from him while he sleeps. Then, to save Buchanan the trouble of more angled shots, she seeks out Kirska's room, rips the black nightgown right off the girl's body and flees. Clothed now, she goes after the few surviving descendants of her seducer, killing two men by using the stake as a dagger.
Since the Witch never has dialogue-- not even being quoted within a voiceover, as occurs with the Widow in the book-flashback-- there's no explanation as to where she got her supernatural powers. During the flashback the Widow prays to be avenged on her accuser's family, but she does not pray to Satan, so for all the audience knows, she was granted her powers by a vengeful Heaven. The student tracks her to a pool, where she mesmerizes him and has sex with him. Then she goes after Kirska, also using remote hypnotism to pull her out of her house. The student recovers his wits and intervenes, though his "struggle" with the Witch is so desultory, it's obvious to the viewer that the actress intentionally falls down so as to be killed by the stake, this time for good.
One source claimed that WITCH was the first cinematic use of a recrudescent witch anywhere. Obviously BLACK SUNDAY puts the lie to this claim, though offhand I don't know of any American feature films in which a dead witch comes back to malefic life.
This is a clansgressive film with respect to both the sex and violence that the Witch doles out to 20th-century persons born outside her natural timespan.
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