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Fans of the BFI's Flipside series of DVDs can breathe a sigh of relief as, following a lengthy hiatus, they return with their 39th release, looking this time at the world of witchcraft in the UK. This was the subject of one of the country's frequent moral panics in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the topic was regularly splashed across the pages of the Sunday papers. Earlier Fleet Street concerns over ungoverned hippie lifestyles of permissive sex and psychedelic experimentation now expanded to the supposedly linked subject of Satanism - although it's safe to say that the research carried out by these tabloid hacks probably went no further than a perusal of the lurid covers of the many Dennis Wheatley paperbacks then clogging the shelves of every bookshop in the country. A key figure in those days was the tirelessly self-promoting Alex Sanders, "Europe's king of the witches", who features prominently in both of these documentaries, alongside his glamorous wife Maxine.
Each of the two films comes heralded by an onscreen X-certificate, setting the mood for some suitably "adult" fare. Legend of the Witches (Malcolm Leigh, 1970) opens with striking shots of stark countryside and the restless sea, while its portentous narration recounts the myth of the Moon Goddess Diana and her search for a companion. The archetypal voyeuristic figure of "the man in the raincoat", lured into the cinema by naked witches portrayed on the lobby-cards outside, must surely have been shifting uneasily in his seat by this point....