Mark Fry - The Witch.

Acid folk and scary children's television:

Witchploitation Documentary: Legend of the Witches 1970 (NSFW for Witch Nudity and Campy Footage of Occult Ritual.)

This blog has a long-standing fondness for the very odd genre of the witchcraft-themed exploitation documentary which flourished (if that's the right word) in Britain in the early 70s.  The occult revival held a prominent place in the popular British cinema of the 60s and 70s - while films like Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan's Claw have come to be regarded as classics today, few remember some of the lesser and trashier entries in the cycle, such as Ray Austin's Virgin Witch (72) (trailer here), Tigon's Curse of the Crimson Alter (69), and Norman J. Warren's 1976 classic of total schlock Satan's Slave (full film here).

Being so prevalent in the fictional cinema of the period, it is unsurprising that witchcraft also seeped into the seedier corners of British filmmaking.  Now appearing quaint and incongruous, putative "documentaries" were often produced as a means of slipping copious nudity past the censor, these films finding a ready audience among the so-called "dirty mac" set in Soho sex cinemas.  Several of these documentaries were made around the theme of the witchcraft revival, often featuring Alex and Maxine Sanders, whom I've blogged about before here.  Shot mostly in the summer of 1969 and released in '70, Malcolm Leigh's Legend of the Witches is probably the Citizen Kane of witchploitation documentaries - however much that is worth.  Although languorously edited and frequently tedious, Legend takes the subject of paganism far more seriously than most films of this type, and more surprisingly, it is often extremely well-made.  The black and white cinematography is gorgeous, Leigh's compositions are striking, and certain passages are undeniably atmospheric and eerie (to those who can't wade through the whole thing, I'd recommend watching the final 12 minutes or so as a highlight.)  It's bizarre to consider how bored or cheated or baffled the dirty mac brigade must have felt about all this: 

Witchploitation documentaries have recently made a surprising come-back as prime found footage for the video art of witch house and various other hipster sub-genres.  Legend of the Witches provides the backdrop for Cosmotropia de Xam's beautiful, scary and brilliant video for (deep breath) Mater Suspiria Vision's ghost-drone remix of Crossover's I Know Your Face.  Probably best avoided by those sensitive to strobing imagery and general freakouts:

W.I.T.C.H. The Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell.

Formed in 1969 from the ashes of the NYRW (New York Radical Women), the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.) was a decentralized association of covens dedicated to feminism, socialist activism, and surrealist guerrilla street theater.  As such, they neatly embodied many of the most significant tendencies of the emergent counterculture: the often precarious mixture of political radicalism and dadaist spectacle patented by the Yippies, as well a brand that echoed the burgeoning revival of witchcraft and occultism.  According to an early manifesto:

                 WITCH is an all-women Everything.  It's theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells.  It's an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression - particularly the oppression of women - down through the ages.  Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary.  Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists (turn dross into gold and you devalue the whole idea of money!)  They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all - one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.

Their first act was to place a hex on the Black Iron Prison of Wall Street.  According to an article on Jo Freeman.com: "Because WITCH actions could be done with a small group and were both fun and political, they quickly spread around the country. Boston women hexed bars. DC women hexed the Presidential inauguration. Chicago women zapped everything. On January 16, 1969, eight undergraduate women at the University of Chicago hexed the chairman of the Sociology Department, which had recently fired a popular woman professor. Dressed in black with their faces painted white, they told him to "beware of the curse, the witch's curse."  The WITCH acronym was used to mean a variety of different things on different occasions: Women Inspired to Tell their Collective Histories, Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays, and, most comically, Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment during a demonstration against Bell Telephone.  Here is a wonderful picture of the witches dancing on front of the Chicago Federal building on October 31, 1969:

Pictures from custom buttons and occult chicago            

Witchcraft Today 3: The Power of the Witch (1971) and Black Widow: Come to Sabbat and In Ancient Days.

"The revival of public interest in witchcraft is one of the most curious features of life today..."

The Power of the Witch is an excellent documentary that aired once on British television in 1971:



For a bonus flavor of the occult revival in Britain in the late 60s/70s, dig the irresistibly campy sounds of Black Widow:










The Occult Art of Rosaleen Norton.

Rosaleen Norton was an Australian occultist and artist whose work frequently ran foul of the law in the conservative Australia of the forties and fifties. In the early fifties, Norton moved to an area of Sydney known as King's Cross, a place which had become notorious as a red light district and nexus of organized crime and various bohemian/occult shenanigans. The Cross was also the home of the novelist, poet, journalist, and actor Dulcie Deamer, who was called the Queen of the Bohemians. Norton herself attained a significant degree of tabloid notoriety as "the Witch of King's Cross", amid a torrent of police raids, mostly unfounded tales of Satanic black masses and animal sacrifices, and a scandalous affair in which her friend and lover Eugene Aynsley Goosens was arrested by customs in possession of a considerable occult booty: some 800 erotic pictures, ritual masks and incense sticks. Something of the ambiance of the Cross in that period, and Norton's distinctive appearance and presence, is conveyed in this charming vignette: