The Conqueror Worm
A few nights ago I was flipping channels and caught a late night showing of the late 60’s British horror movie “Witchfinder General” starring Vincent Price, which was released in the US under the somewhat ambiguous title “The Conqueror Worm”, which was taken from the name of a poem by E.A. Poe, and involved an attempt to capitalize on the Roger Corman “Poe” flicks that were popular at the time.
“The Conqueror Worm” was what it was called that night I first saw it as an 8 year-old turning on my bedroom TV at midnight on a Saturday to catch a show called “Creature Feature” in the hopes of seeing my beloved Godzilla / giant bug / zombie-killer monster movies. Instead I got treated to a woman being dragged at the end of a rope thru village streets, surrounded by a mob of blank-faced townsfolk, screaming shrilly at her powerlessness to prevent what was happening to her as she was strung up in a noose and hung – an action which effectively choked off her totally unnerving shrieking.
This is how the movie begins. As an 8 year-old I experienced this opening scene as a seminal revelation of horror that disturbed me to the depths of my soul, not least because it gave me the first erection I ever had in my life, something that I did not at all understand.
‘What kind of world is this portraying?’ I thought, not in those words, but the meaning was the same. I had never seen anything like it. It was an alien vision, something I would never have suspected. Did this kind of thing actually happen? Was there at one time a world so brutal that people would do this kind of thing to one another – cause a helpless person to scream in utter abandon as she was tortured and killed? And why am I at the same time feeling a flame of perplexing excitement deep down, something I have never felt before? What is happening to my body? How can something that repulses and horrifies me beyond words at the same time make my penis grow? Suffice it to say this movie frightened me on a level far beyond my ability to understand at the time, and which I still do not fully understand to this day. Now that is a horror film!
I remember telling my mom a few weeks later that I thought something was wrong with me. We were in the car on the way home from the grocery store. I told her what had happened to me, that a part of my body had changed while I watched this terrible scene. She laughed and assured me that I was totally normal and had nothing to worry about, tho I wonder what went thru her head concerning the stimulus that caused this first reaction. I imagine her looking out the window after this consoling speech with eyes as wide as banjos, thinking – ‘O my God!’
I did not finish the entire movie on that night so long ago. That first scene disturbed me enough, and the depictions of sadism that followed, what with its victims screaming in the most amplified and unhinged way as Vincent Price as “Mathew Hopkins: Witchfinder General” blathers on about doing the “Lord’s work” – was simply too much for me as an 8 year old. It stirred the blackest feelings I have ever known, a desire to destroy such people as would do this kind of thing to other people, and an unarticulated recognition that I had such a being as this inside of me, a capering imp who might do something so degenerate as masturbate to a snuff film. How can this be?
I apologize to all for getting so graphically crude, but in the spirit of Alatheia, it is true!
In summation, “The Conqueror Worm” was an iconic event in my early life that revealed to me a violent split in my nature – an overt disgust and hatred for all forms of coercion against human beings / and a secret, hidden erotic charge at the idea and spectacle of it. How black and twisted was I?
Since then I have studied much history, specifically the darkest, most violent aspects. I learned that what I witnessed in that opening scene was actually tame in comparison with reality, and that the torture and executions and witch burnings of the long-running Inquisition were far more brutal (and on a much vaster scale) than anything a movie could show, let alone a 1960’s horror movie that was nevertheless considered disturbing enough to merit extensive cutting for its European audience (yet received almost no censorship at all for its American release) Accused “witches” were at times actually taken from the fire in a half-burned state so that they could wallow on the ground in an hour of agony before being put back on the fire. Even in our own times a movie would not be allowed top so graphically display such a reality, unless it were an underground film…and yet these things actually happened.
A few nights ago I found “The Conqueror Worm” playing on a Satellite channel, hosted by Rob Zombie. After seeing his movie entitled “The Devil’s Rejects”, with its focus upon a family of sadistic murderers who commit all sorts of “erotically charged” cruelty on their victims, this made sense to me. As fate would have it, I caught it at the very beginning, and finally watched the entire film. I can honestly say that, for me, the passage of years has not dimmed the horror that this movie possesses. It contains all the qualities we know in our own time – a repressed, warped sexuality that finds its outlets in base cruelty and torture while cloaking itself in the guise of the doing “God’s work”, the drunken intoxication of power and its abuse, the malleability of a herd mentality that is willing to allow the focus of its anger and fear to be turned upon government and church sanctioned targets and “outcasts” such as witches (or gays, immigrants, Muslims, Satanists, etc.) and the wholesale slaughter of these targets of demagogic hatred and fear.
Not only that, we see the cynical motives of those who wield coercive power over the town and country folk. Not only do they “get off” on exercising power over others, they solicit sexual favors from them in exchange for a fleeting and false sense of security, and get paid for every “witch” that they burn…..plus, the scenes of dunking men and women in the water to prove they are disciples of Satan, and those Bodkin-in-the-wart-on-the-back screams still possess the power to disturb.
I have since learned that I am not so much the freak as I once thought. Crowds of townsfolk showed up to witness public executions, and many brought their children, for it was a family event! Sure, it was all framed in the context of witnessing justice, and the “defeat of evil”, and the children were given an unforgettable education on the consequences of defying the herd, but it is my assertion (and not just mine) that an erotic current, perhaps made all the more powerful by a repressed sexuality, ran thru many of the spectators just as it did for the torturers and executioners, something none of them would have admitted to each other or even to themselves, but kept secret. I bet it disturbed a lot of them as well, much more than it did me, who simply witnessed it on a TV screen.
My discovery of this nature within myself has led me to a natural outlet for it. On the one hand I am a committed Libertarian political activist who fights against the use and spread of coercion as a basis for human life and society; and on the other hand I have discovered the world of BDSM, which is an advanced evolutionary development precisely because it allows human beings to explore their sado-masochistic nature in a safe, consensual environment that is utterly devoid of actual coercion.
I sometimes have moments of sympathy for sadistic serial killers, only in so far as I understand them to be people like myself who nevertheless suffer from a radically disproportionate inclination towards the marriage of cruelty, violence, and eros within themselves, whereas my discovery of my own version of this has always been safely manageable, and completely within the bounds of my own control.
Aside from those sadistic individuals who realize that the ability to enact terroristic violence against other humans under the guise of a “noble cause” such as God or Government / Church & State can earn them power and financial rewards, I wonder about those who actually believe their own bullshit. I wonder about those who feel the erotic current inside themselves as they observe other human beings and, because of religious indoctrinations that may tell them that this power comes from an alien entity that is out to destroy them and the whole world, seek to destroy this part of themselves when they try to destroy others. This is the fear-based motivation that drives particularly committed members of the religious right to try to destroy homosexuals, and it is a basis of all hatred everywhere. As Clint Eastwood say’s in High Plains Drifter – “Its what men know about themselves inside that makes them afraid”.
Is this a part of my violent hatred for those who would torture and kill others in the name of a noble cause? Am I attempting to destroy this nature in me when I declare war upon them? Whatever the reason, the opposition to coercion is a worthy cause, as is the adoption of consensual outlets for the “darker” aspects of our nature
Yes, the movie Witchfinder General, or – “The Conqueror Worm”, had a seminal effect on me. Has anyone else seen it?
-Werbinox
“The Conqueror Worm” was what it was called that night I first saw it as an 8 year-old turning on my bedroom TV at midnight on a Saturday to catch a show called “Creature Feature” in the hopes of seeing my beloved Godzilla / giant bug / zombie-killer monster movies. Instead I got treated to a woman being dragged at the end of a rope thru village streets, surrounded by a mob of blank-faced townsfolk, screaming shrilly at her powerlessness to prevent what was happening to her as she was strung up in a noose and hung – an action which effectively choked off her totally unnerving shrieking.
This is how the movie begins. As an 8 year-old I experienced this opening scene as a seminal revelation of horror that disturbed me to the depths of my soul, not least because it gave me the first erection I ever had in my life, something that I did not at all understand.
‘What kind of world is this portraying?’ I thought, not in those words, but the meaning was the same. I had never seen anything like it. It was an alien vision, something I would never have suspected. Did this kind of thing actually happen? Was there at one time a world so brutal that people would do this kind of thing to one another – cause a helpless person to scream in utter abandon as she was tortured and killed? And why am I at the same time feeling a flame of perplexing excitement deep down, something I have never felt before? What is happening to my body? How can something that repulses and horrifies me beyond words at the same time make my penis grow? Suffice it to say this movie frightened me on a level far beyond my ability to understand at the time, and which I still do not fully understand to this day. Now that is a horror film!
I remember telling my mom a few weeks later that I thought something was wrong with me. We were in the car on the way home from the grocery store. I told her what had happened to me, that a part of my body had changed while I watched this terrible scene. She laughed and assured me that I was totally normal and had nothing to worry about, tho I wonder what went thru her head concerning the stimulus that caused this first reaction. I imagine her looking out the window after this consoling speech with eyes as wide as banjos, thinking – ‘O my God!’
I did not finish the entire movie on that night so long ago. That first scene disturbed me enough, and the depictions of sadism that followed, what with its victims screaming in the most amplified and unhinged way as Vincent Price as “Mathew Hopkins: Witchfinder General” blathers on about doing the “Lord’s work” – was simply too much for me as an 8 year old. It stirred the blackest feelings I have ever known, a desire to destroy such people as would do this kind of thing to other people, and an unarticulated recognition that I had such a being as this inside of me, a capering imp who might do something so degenerate as masturbate to a snuff film. How can this be?
I apologize to all for getting so graphically crude, but in the spirit of Alatheia, it is true!
In summation, “The Conqueror Worm” was an iconic event in my early life that revealed to me a violent split in my nature – an overt disgust and hatred for all forms of coercion against human beings / and a secret, hidden erotic charge at the idea and spectacle of it. How black and twisted was I?
Since then I have studied much history, specifically the darkest, most violent aspects. I learned that what I witnessed in that opening scene was actually tame in comparison with reality, and that the torture and executions and witch burnings of the long-running Inquisition were far more brutal (and on a much vaster scale) than anything a movie could show, let alone a 1960’s horror movie that was nevertheless considered disturbing enough to merit extensive cutting for its European audience (yet received almost no censorship at all for its American release) Accused “witches” were at times actually taken from the fire in a half-burned state so that they could wallow on the ground in an hour of agony before being put back on the fire. Even in our own times a movie would not be allowed top so graphically display such a reality, unless it were an underground film…and yet these things actually happened.
A few nights ago I found “The Conqueror Worm” playing on a Satellite channel, hosted by Rob Zombie. After seeing his movie entitled “The Devil’s Rejects”, with its focus upon a family of sadistic murderers who commit all sorts of “erotically charged” cruelty on their victims, this made sense to me. As fate would have it, I caught it at the very beginning, and finally watched the entire film. I can honestly say that, for me, the passage of years has not dimmed the horror that this movie possesses. It contains all the qualities we know in our own time – a repressed, warped sexuality that finds its outlets in base cruelty and torture while cloaking itself in the guise of the doing “God’s work”, the drunken intoxication of power and its abuse, the malleability of a herd mentality that is willing to allow the focus of its anger and fear to be turned upon government and church sanctioned targets and “outcasts” such as witches (or gays, immigrants, Muslims, Satanists, etc.) and the wholesale slaughter of these targets of demagogic hatred and fear.
Not only that, we see the cynical motives of those who wield coercive power over the town and country folk. Not only do they “get off” on exercising power over others, they solicit sexual favors from them in exchange for a fleeting and false sense of security, and get paid for every “witch” that they burn…..plus, the scenes of dunking men and women in the water to prove they are disciples of Satan, and those Bodkin-in-the-wart-on-the-back screams still possess the power to disturb.
I have since learned that I am not so much the freak as I once thought. Crowds of townsfolk showed up to witness public executions, and many brought their children, for it was a family event! Sure, it was all framed in the context of witnessing justice, and the “defeat of evil”, and the children were given an unforgettable education on the consequences of defying the herd, but it is my assertion (and not just mine) that an erotic current, perhaps made all the more powerful by a repressed sexuality, ran thru many of the spectators just as it did for the torturers and executioners, something none of them would have admitted to each other or even to themselves, but kept secret. I bet it disturbed a lot of them as well, much more than it did me, who simply witnessed it on a TV screen.
My discovery of this nature within myself has led me to a natural outlet for it. On the one hand I am a committed Libertarian political activist who fights against the use and spread of coercion as a basis for human life and society; and on the other hand I have discovered the world of BDSM, which is an advanced evolutionary development precisely because it allows human beings to explore their sado-masochistic nature in a safe, consensual environment that is utterly devoid of actual coercion.
I sometimes have moments of sympathy for sadistic serial killers, only in so far as I understand them to be people like myself who nevertheless suffer from a radically disproportionate inclination towards the marriage of cruelty, violence, and eros within themselves, whereas my discovery of my own version of this has always been safely manageable, and completely within the bounds of my own control.
Aside from those sadistic individuals who realize that the ability to enact terroristic violence against other humans under the guise of a “noble cause” such as God or Government / Church & State can earn them power and financial rewards, I wonder about those who actually believe their own bullshit. I wonder about those who feel the erotic current inside themselves as they observe other human beings and, because of religious indoctrinations that may tell them that this power comes from an alien entity that is out to destroy them and the whole world, seek to destroy this part of themselves when they try to destroy others. This is the fear-based motivation that drives particularly committed members of the religious right to try to destroy homosexuals, and it is a basis of all hatred everywhere. As Clint Eastwood say’s in High Plains Drifter – “Its what men know about themselves inside that makes them afraid”.
Is this a part of my violent hatred for those who would torture and kill others in the name of a noble cause? Am I attempting to destroy this nature in me when I declare war upon them? Whatever the reason, the opposition to coercion is a worthy cause, as is the adoption of consensual outlets for the “darker” aspects of our nature
Yes, the movie Witchfinder General, or – “The Conqueror Worm”, had a seminal effect on me. Has anyone else seen it?
-Werbinox
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