Macbeth (1971) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

•  A castle on a rock, surrounded by nothing. (It was a real 13th century castle, the same one in North Wales used for Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers.)
• A few men riding, dwarfed by an endless and forbidding landscape.

The atmosphere is dreary, creepy, violent, bleak, pervaded with evil vibes.

(1) The actors tried to speak their lines more naturally than was the custom of the time, as if they were real characters rather than reciters of poetry. This may not have been ideal for the nuances of iambic pentameter, but it turned the film into kind of a fresh populist interpretation, which was quite appropriate in the post-Woodstock pre-Watergate world from which it sprang, in which stuffy conventions were being challenged in all media.

(2) The movie was directed by the infamous Roman Polanski, genius auteur, director of Chinatown, lover of very young women, and husband of the slain Sharon Tate. A pregnant Sharon was slain by the Manson family only two years before this film was made, and that event contributed to the nihilistic weltanschauung on display in this interpretation.

(3) There was quite a bit of nudity. The pagan witches were naked, and Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene was performed stark naked. Many people claimed that these were authentic period details. I don't know about that, but I know that the naked Lady Macbeth in question was the stunning dancer/actress Francesca Annis, who would later come to some fame on both sides of the Atlantic as the Masterpiece Theater version of Lillie Langtry and Madame Bovary. Today, at 58, she is still a fox, and is romantically involved with Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes is 18 years younger than Francesca, and one of the world's most eligible bachelors, so the fact that he is with her tells you far more than I could say with thousands of additional words.

(4) The violence was portrayed explicitly, as if it were a splatter film. Because of the explicit violence and nudity, the film was originally rated X (equivalent to today's NC-17). It is the spiritual ancestor to the recent Anthony Hopkins version of Titus Andronicus.

If you are a purist, you may be scared off by the IMDB's list of writing credits for this film - Roman Polanski, Kenneth Tynan, "click here for more". When you click to see the additional writers, it lists some guy named Shakespeare. Don't take that literally. This is Shakespeare's play, with Shakespeare's words. The additional writing is in the composition of a screenplay - choosing whether to show a severed head, deciding how to compose the scenes, choosing which scenes to contract, that sort of thing.