Not Poe, but Poeish, and with a title taken from the master, The Conqueror Worm was the last of three features made by Michael Reeves, considered one of the most exciting young directors in Great Britain before he died at age twenty-five. Reeves's work concentrated on the corrosive effects of violence at a time when the British cinema was hardly treating the subject at all, let alone in the explicit and unusual fashion of his pictures. Vincent Price plays the Witchfinder General in Civil War England; his self-appointed mission includes political persecution, torture, and generally psychopathic behavior in the name of religion. The horror is shocking, the sex graphic, and vice versa; but, as Tom Milne pointed out, much of it is muted in the service of an overall "sense of a time out of joint."