This offbeat, low budget horror classic was a must view—inspirationally speaking—for the completion of America in Chains, the companion to Stillbirth of a Nation. Witchfinder General was set in the 1640s, while the war between Cromwell’s Puritan Roundheads raged against the King’s cavaliers. Much of the human material tossed into the all-consuming moral grave of plantation America was captured and bound off during this savage war.

Against this witch-burning backdrop, which would be contemporaneous with that of The Last Valley starring Michael Cain, set during the thirty years war in Germany, horror icon Vincent Price plays a puritan inquisitor, acquiring living fuel for the stake. I was not impressed with the action, nor the lack of masculine male characters. However, the period costumes, location settings and Price’s sinister depiction of the ultimate political correctness enforcer, touched me not only as a white slavery researcher, but as an outlying member of this postmodern American culture of political correctness, which recalls nothing more vividly than the orthodoxy of the witch-burning craze of the 1600s.