
The Power of the Witch: Real or Imaginary?
Witchcraft in early 1970s Britain gets a rare television treatment, broadcast once in the UK in 1971 and rarely seen since. The film gathers the movement's leading figures on camera: Eleanor Bone and Cecil Williamson, who ran occult museums and covens, along with Alex and Maxine Sanders, prominent Alexandrian witches, and Doreen Valiente, one of the writers of modern Wiccan liturgy. They speak plainly about ritual, belief, and practice, giving a firsthand account of a subculture usually filtered through tabloid coverage or horror-film cliché. The documentary also turns to a real unsolved case, the 1945 killing of farm laborer Charles Walton on Meon Hill in Warwickshire, a murder that was never solved and that locals and investigators at the time linked to occult motives. Shot in the plain, slightly stiff style of British current-affairs television of its period, it works now as both a document of the witches themselves and a time capsule of how the press and public discussed them.