Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970)

In April 1970, when Blood on Satan’s Claw was still in production under the title The Devil’s Touch, reporter Rod Cooper from British trade journal Kine Weekly filed a short report on the film under the headline Folk horror study from Hemdale and Chilton. So far as can be told it’s the earliest use of the term in relation to film. Quite who coined it isn’t clear – by the time of a 2003 Fangoria interview with MJ Simpson, director Piers Haggard was happily referring to the film as “folk horror” though whether he coined it and Cooper borrowed it, or Cooper came up with it and Haggard – who like most film professionals in the UK at the time would have seen Kine Weekly regularly – liked it and co-opted it will probably never be known. Possibly it was dreamt up by some ahead-of-their-time and never-to-be-credited publicity agent, who knows? The term’s current popularity certainly dates from the television documentary A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss when the host and his consultant Jonathan Rigby helped introduce it a wider audience.

No matter where it came from, Blood on Satan’s Claw seems to be ground zero so far as folk horror goes. The term has become increasingly fluid in recent years and has been retro-actively attached to films like Witchfinder General (1968) and Night of the Demon (1957) – with some justification – but this is where it really all began. It started life as a three part anthology film written for producers Tigon by Robert Wynne-Simmons but transformed into a single narrative at the suggestion of director Haggard.

In a small, isolated English village in the late 17th century, the children fall under the spell of a demonic presence – possibly even the Devil himself – that lurks in the nearby woods, slowly reassembling its body using hideous patches of skin growing on the bodies of the out-of-control youngsters. Led by Angel Blake (Linda Hayden, sporting increasingly monstrous eyebrows as the film progresses), the children and teenagers are opposed by the increasingly exasperated older generation, represented by an upright city judge (Patrick Wymark) who seeks to restore the natural order and banish the demon.

Beautifully shot in the Chiltern’s valley village of Bix Bottom by Dick Bush (Twins of Evil (1971), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)), Blood on Satan’s Claw is as ravishing to look at as any film made in Britain in the early 1970s. Haggard shoots a lot of the film hand-held and at ominous low angles, as though the camera itself is part of the very countryside that has birthed the horrors that befall the blighted rural community. It gives an already unique film (“There aren’t many films set in the reign of William and Mary in which the Devil rebuilds his body by harvesting the skin of children…” noted Gatiss in A History of Horror) a very particular look quite unlike any of its contemporaries. The landscape – a vital component in any folk horror film – is as disquieting here as it is beautiful, a haunted backdrop where the presence of a skin-obsessed Devil seems altogether very plausible.

And it’s that plausibility that lends the film it’s more disturbing qualities. There may be something supernatural lurking beneath a cowl in the haunted countryside around the village but the real horrors of Blood on Satan’s Claw aren’t supernatural at all – this is after all a tale of child abduction and abuse, of the terrifying consequences of mass hysteria, blind superstition and sheer ignorance. The very human horrors are sharply contrasted with the beautifully photographed landscapes as the charismatic Blake exploits her relationship with the hooded demon to urge her naive followers into increasingly shocking crimes. The film plays on the British nostalgia for the countryside, a longing to return to what is often perceived as a gentler, slower pace of life. In Blood on Satan’s Claw the bucolic surroundings so desired by many, particularly city dwellers, turns out to be just as full of horror and suffering as anywhere else.

Blood on Satan’s Claw was made at a time when the battle lines between the young and old were at their most sharply drawn. The youth movements of the late 1960s, born in optimism and an idealistic desire to forge real change in society, had died in bloodshed and violence at Altamont and 10050 Cielo Drive. British viewers would still have been reeling from the crimes of Mary Bell, the angelic-faced 11-year-old who had strangled two younger children to death in 1968, one with the help of her 13-year-old friend Norma Bell (no relation). The older generation, already deeply suspicious of their long-haired, apparently sexually promiscuous and drug-addled offspring, were now perhaps understandably dismayed and horrified by what they seemed to have become. This schism between the generations had been touched on in earlier British horror films – for example Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), which also featured Hayden – but Blood on Satan’s Claw would see it at it’s widest. The authority of the older generation is challenged by the sexually liberated Angel Blake and her followers (predominantly young with a smattering of senile elders among them, some of them sporting flowers in their hair, that most stereotypical image of the hippie movement) and often seems unable to think of a proper response to their supernaturally-driven rampages.

From the creepy opening discovery of a mouldy head in the furrows of a freshly ploughed field to the cathartic final confrontation between the judge and the Devil, Blood on Satan’s Claw maintains a steadily mounting sense of dread that never gives up. The early episode with Simon Williams as the young man whose fiance (Tamara Usinov) is driven insane by something that manifests in her bedroom late one night, later revealed to be the demonic claw of the title, sits uncomfortably with the rest of the narrative, betraying the film’s roots as an anthology film. But that barely matters. Convincingly acted by a first rate cast, beautifully shot and boasting a memorably creepy score by Australian composer Marc Wilkinson, Blood on Satan’s Claw remains on the finest and most disturbing of all British horror films.

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