London Short Film Festival

The Final Girls bring an evening of two of the original 1970’s documentaries showcasing our cultural obsession with witchcraft and the occult. 

Secret Rites (1971) is a pseudo documentary that illustrates a series of initiation rites for a newbie witch into a Notting Hill-based coven. Much more straight faced, The Power of the Witch (1971), is a rarely-seen documentary that works as a capsule of an era, featuring interviews with King and Queen of the witch craze themselves, Alex and Maxine Sanders. Both are fascinating artefacts of the 1970’s London counterculture that clash with the witchsploitation film craze of the same era.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussed hosted by The Final Girls about the figure of the witch in British documentary and horror cinema, illustrated with clips.