Witchhammer

• The film opened in Czechoslovak theaters in January 1970 and drew roughly 1.5 million viewers before state censors pulled it from circulation later that year — swept up in the wave of films banned during the crackdown that followed the Warsaw Pact invasion — and it wasn't shown publicly again until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
• The screenplay, co-written by director Otakar Vávra and Ester Krumbachová, was adapted from Václav Kaplický's 1963 novel of the same name, itself drawn from the real trial records of the Šumperk-area witch hunts of the 1670s.
• Slovak actor Elo Romančík plays dean Kryštof Lautner, the priest who turns against the trials and ends up one of the accused — not the inquisitor. The tribunal's actual villain, inquisitor Boblig, is played by Vladimír Šmeral.
• Much of the film was shot on location at Velké Losiny château in North Moravia, the real seat of the historical witch trials the story is based on.
• Despite barely playing in its own country, Witchhammer won an award at the 1970 Mar del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina and is regarded as one of Vávra's finest films.

The stolen host isn't really a religious matter at all — once inquisitor Boblig gets hold of the accusation, it becomes a manufactured crisis he can ride to seize the property of wealthy accused burghers, suggesting the entire witch hunt is a land-and-money grab dressed up as piety.

Lautner's gradual breakdown represents the inevitable collapse of rationality when faced with an authoritarian system that demands irrational compliance; his eventual forced confession, extracted only after dozens of others' coerced testimonies outweigh his denials, is an admission that logic cannot survive in a tribunal built on lies.

The absence of any actual magic or supernatural events throughout the runtime argues that the 'witches' are merely scapegoats for societal anxiety, making the true horror the banality of the paperwork authorizing their deaths.

In 1670s Moravia, an old beggar woman is caught hiding the communion host in her scarf — she meant to feed it to a sick cow to cure it. The parish priest calls it witchcraft, and the local countess sends for inquisitor Boblig, a failed law student turned zealot. Boblig tortures the accused into naming more names, and the confessions spiral outward from village gossip until they reach dean Kryštof Lautner, a priest who dares to oppose the trials and becomes a target himself, his wealthy friends' property ripe for seizure along the way. The film strips away supernatural flair to reveal a cold, procedural horror where confession is just a formality before the flame — a grim allegory (Vávra had 1950s Stalinist show trials in mind when he made it) where the real monsters wear clerical collars and wield legal statutes instead of claws.