Norman J. Warren had been in the lower orders of the British film industry since 1960, toiling away as a runner, assistant director and editor, before he eventually made his first feature film, Her Private Hell in 1968 (an earlier short film, Incident, had begun in 1959 but had been abandoned, finally being completed and released in 2007), joining the completed but little-seen Fragment (1965). A long-time fan of horror, he made his genre debut with this, his second feature.
Catherine Yorke (Candace Glendenning) and her parents drive into the country to stay at her Uncle Alexander’s (Michael Gough) large estate. Her parents are seemingly killed in in a car crash along the way but she survives unscathed and is taken in by Alexander and his psychotic son Stephen (Martin Potter) and secretary Frances (Barbara Kellerman) but it soon becomes clear that she’s been targeted by the family who are involved in all manner of Satanic practices. As her 20th birthday approaches, Catherine is being prepared as a sacrificial victim in order to resurrect her ancestor, the evil Camilla.
Often regarded as one of Warren’s most polished films, Satan’s Slave certainly looks lovely, thanks in no small part to the gorgeous widescreen photography (the work of no fewer than five credited directors of photography Les Young, John Metcalfe, John Simmons, Steve Haskett and Denis Balkin) and the excellent use that Warren and his regular art director, Hayden Pearce, make of their location, the same manor house in Pirbright, Surrey that had been used in the altogether more salacious Virgin Witch (1971). But while it looks good, there’s a sometimes leering and unpleasant tone to the film. The torment by scissors at the start of the film (“You’re like an animal – you’re insane!”) is particularly grim. But more crucially, though it is by turns brutal and atmospheric, it’s a rather ponderous film, much prone to talk when a bit more incident wouldn’t have gone amiss.
If the gore scenes and more explicit nudity often feel a little detached from the rest of the film, it’s because many of them were shot later and sometimes feel crudely inserted into a film that strives more for atmosphere than in your face nastiness. A brutal cut still was allegedly prepared for the Japanese market and the British Board of Film Censors took their scissors to it with as much gusto as Stephen takes his sharpened implements to his victims.
To his credit, Warren gets some fine performances from an interesting cast. Michael Gough drips menace even when he’s at his most urbane and charming, Potter is great fun as the intense and thoroughly deranged (he gets his just desserts with a particularly nasty nail file to the eyeball), Glendenning makes for an appealing heroine and Kellerman is icily ambiguous, seemingly switching sides at a whim, though she’s burdened with some terrible dialogue (“I want you here, damn you!”)
Elsewhere, in one of the scenes shot later – they’re all notably cheaper-looking than the footage shot during the main production block – the film’s writer David McGillivray – previously best known for his work with that other maverick British horror director of the 1970s, Pete Walker – turns up as a puritanical 18th century priest (cannily, he also plays the priest in the modern day scenes, presumably a descendant) overseeing the flogging a naked witch in the forest, the German model Monika Ringwald – the eponymous alien visitor in Derek Ford’s The Sexplorer (1975) is sacrificed on the altar by the coven and former Doctor Who (1963-1989) companion Michael Craze pops up as Catherine’s doomed boyfriend.
McGillivray had inherited the writing gig from one Tony Craze (it’s not known if he was related to Michael) who had written it under the title The Naked Eye, a script that Warren had hopes Vincent Price would be attracted to. They were lofty ambitions that probably never had a chance of ever being realised and the film was instead pieced together in fits and starts over many years, McGillivray completely rewriting the script when Warren abandoned The Naked Eye but wanted something similar.
The result is a film not without its charms but the plot is sluggish and the more exploitative elements do feel at odds with the rest of the film. As noted, they look cheaper too. The Satanic ceremony seen in Catherine’s nightmare appears to have been shot without sound on a tiny, under-lit set. But the performances are engaging, John Scott’s score is modestly effective and Warren and his team do well to stretch their meagre budget as far as they do.
McGillivray and Warren worked together again on Terror (1978), inspired by Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) – and possibly, in part, by a scene in Curtis Harrington’s Ruby (1977), which did the rounds on a double bill with Satan’s Slave in the UK, both it and Terror featuring a scene in which someone is killed by reels of film come to life. Warren continued to explore low budge horror with the likes of Prey (1977), Inseminoid (1981) and Bloody New Year (1987) and gave the ignoble British sex comedy an science fiction spin in Outer Touch (1979). For many years he tried to get a remake of Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face (1958) off the ground without success.
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