Burn, Witch, Burn!

• Adapted from Fritz Leiber's 1943 novel Conjure Wife by genre heavyweights Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who were each paid $5,000 by AIP's James H. Nicholson; producer Albert Fennell later brought in George Baxt to rework the script once the project moved to Britain.
• Shot on a lean £50,000 budget over roughly six weeks, mostly on location in Cornwall (Porthcurno and St Just in Penwith) plus Elstree Studios, with the university exteriors filmed at Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire.
• Peter Wyngarde landed the lead role of Norman Taylor late in the game — the part had circled both Peter Cushing (who opted to do Hammer's Captain Clegg instead) and Peter Finch before falling to Wyngarde.
• For the US release, retitled Burn, Witch, Burn! by AIP, voice artist Paul Frees recorded a spoken prologue intoning a protective incantation to shield the audience from the film's 'evil spell.'
• It's the second of three screen versions of Conjure Wife, following Universal's Weird Woman (1944) with Lon Chaney Jr. and preceding the 1980 comedy Witches' Brew.
• The score is by William Alwyn, and the film earned a 1963 Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation.

The eagle never physically attacks Norman — Flora works the climax through an auditory hallucination piped over the college loudspeaker, and the bird 'dies' the instant Lindsay cuts the sound. Read straight, the film leaves a door open that none of the witchcraft is real, only the power of suggestion weaponized against a man who built his whole identity on not believing.

Norman's professed rationalism is the actual curse. Every disaster traces back to his ego: he burns Tansy's charms to win an argument, and the film punishes intellectual arrogance more than any spell does. The horror is a man so certain he's right that he dismantles the only thing keeping him alive.

The story runs on a quiet gender war dressed as a ghost story. Tansy and her rivals do the real work in the shadows while the men lecture and posture; the women's underground network of conjure-craft is the true engine of academic power, and Norman's crisis is really the terror of realizing his success was never his own doing.

Norman Taylor, a smug psychology professor who lectures that superstition is for the weak-minded, tears apart his house when he finds his wife Tansy's hidden charms — the conjure-craft she picked up in Jamaica and has been quietly using to armor his career. He burns every talisman to prove a point. Bad call. Stripped of her protection, the couple gets hunted by forces Norman refuses to name until a rival's spell sends a stone eagle off the college roof and straight for his throat. Rationalism meets the hex it can't argue with.