it. The film's screenplay and story is credited to Daniele Stroppa, but Claudio Lattanzi had claimed to have had a hand in working on the story at Stroppa's location as he was going to direct it. Lattanzi pushed on producer Massaccessi to get actress Bette Davis for the role of the witch in the film, but later cast Hildegard Knef in the role. Other cast members included David Hasselhoff who was popular in Italy due to his series Knight Rider and under Lattanzi's suggestion, Leslie Cumming who had previously been in Killing Birds. Early on, Lattanzi left production and was replaced with Luigi Cozzi who left the film two weeks into pre-production finding the story "too predictable and banal". Cozzi was in turn replaced with Fabrizio Laurenti, who had previously debuted with his 30-minute vampire film titled The Immigrant. Massaccesi said he liked The Immigrant enormously but noticed on set that Laurenti had difficulties working with an international cast including Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff. Massaccesi agreed to finance Laurenti's next film, despite feeling the director "still has a long way to go". The film was shot in Scituate and Cohasset, Massachusetts. The film's score by Carlo Maria Cordio was taken from Killing Birds and was used again later in La Casa 5. Release Witchery was released as early as 1 December 1988 in West Germany as Hexenbrut. This was followed by a theatrical release in Japan on 1 July 1989 and a home video release in the United States on 6 July before being released theatrically in Italy on 6 August where it was distributed by Aristi Associati/Gruppo Berna. Film historian Roberto Curti noted that the film did very good box office in Italy, becoming the 60th highest-grossing film of the year with 1,283,194,000 Italian lire. This placed the film below James Cameron's The Abyss that year. Following Witchery, Laurenti made another film for Massaccesi titled The Crawlers. Reception In Italy, film critic Maurizio Porro wrote in Corriere della Sera recommended the film to genre fans who would "enjoy [...] the usual American-style doggerel on family neuroses". In the United States, "Lor." of Variety reviewed the Vidmark video cassette, stating that the film was a "well-made Italian gore thriller" and that the pic's "in-jokes make it fun for horror fans, though some grisly gore content marks it toward the hardcore fringe". See also La Casa series - an Italian