The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)

Doctor, witchcraft is dead and discredited. Are you bent on reviving forgotten horrors?

God, it’s The Driver’s Seat all over again. Just trust me. We got the right movie.

When Britain stopped swinging at the end of the 1960s, the encroaching decade became less of a dawn than a twilight. The progressive promises of the Wilson administration were curdling, the optimism and opportunity that had fueled the country’s creativity in the previous decade was gone, and “as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.” Popular culture was looking for meaning, and so it retreated into the past, prompting a folk music revival - spearheaded by Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd, popularised by Fairport Convention - and a renewed interest in the ancient religions, particularly rural paganism.¹

There was meat in these freshly unearthed belief systems, a sense of shared history, of working-class struggle, not to mention blood and teeth and matted hair. And it would inspire a subgenre that was both utterly new and as old as the hills: folk horror. Arguably kickstarted by Witchfinder General (1968) in the cinema and Jonathan Miller’s MR James adaptation Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968) on television,² folk horror spread beyond the subgenre into the mainstream, infecting children’s television – most obviously The Owl Service (1969), in which three teenagers find themselves unwittingly reenacting a Welsh legend – and the otherwise prestigious Play for Today series in John Griffith Bowen’s “Robin Redbreast”, in which a BBC script editor moves to the country, only to become embroiled in pagan shenanigans. Folk horror also represented a move away from the now somewhat fusty scares provided by that stalwart of the British film industry, Hammer, then in swift decline after the resignation of Tony Hinds.³

Enter Tony Tenser, founder of Tigon British Film Productions. If Hammer was the father of modern British horror cinema and Amicus its cool drunken uncle, then Tigon was the nose-picking delinquent cousin: Tenser had been involved with everything from nudist films like the wonderfully titled My Bare Lady (1961) to the early English-language work of Roman Polanski. He had also been the producer of Michael Reeves’s second and third pictures before the director’s untimely death. Anthology horrors were still reasonably box office thanks to Amicus, so writer Robert Wynne-Simmons was told to come up with three stories in record time to meet a proposed release date.⁴ Digging through old ideas, he pulled together a trio of stories in various states of development: a ghost story about a man who inadvertently hacks off his own hand, another about a young woman’s mistreatment by her aunt, and a grim little tale about a group of children unearthing the corpse of a monster.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw aka Blood on Satan’s Claw aka Satan’s Skin aka The Devil’s Touch aka (for about five seconds) The Ghouls Are Among Us⁵ disposes of the original Victorian-era setting, replaces it with a more interesting (and grimmer) mid-to-late 18^th century rural environment,⁶ and mashes the trio of stories into one (not always successful) whole, with the narrative dominated by the final story of the village youth succumbing to the unholy power of a slowly resurrecting demon. When farmhand Ralph (Barry Andrews) ploughs up what looks like a strange skull, he rushes to the local Judge (Patrick Wymark) to report his concern – “it was more like some fiend!” – but The Judge is sceptical and when the remains disappear he thinks no more of it. Alas, the evil has already been unearthed and unleashed, working as a virus that runs through the young people in the village,⁷ causing them to grow strange patches of hairy skin on their bodies and transforming local firecracker Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) into a murderous cult leader. This demon demands corporeal form and is slowly farming the children for their skin, while menacing the other inhabitants of the village, including strapping young Peter Edmonton (Simon Williams), who is plagued with attacks by a hairy-handed beast, and whose bride-to-be suffers a terrible night in the attic courtesy of the beast and Peter’s snobby aunt. After a spate of murders and one horrific rape, The Judge returns to the village, bringing his own “undreamed of measures” (a muckle great sword and a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers) to eradicate the evil for good.

Unlike Michael Reeves, who had already immersed himself in the genre by the time he made his first feature The She Beast (1966), Piers Haggard had spent his early career as a theatre director at the Royal Court, Dundee Rep, Glasgow Citizens, and the National Theatre, with occasional work in television. “I had barely seen a horror film. I was frightfully serious … I didn’t want to breach the genre but I didn’t want to follow it under any sort of enslavement. I guess I was trying to make the thing seriously, as if it was real.” As such, he approached the material with an eye for verisimilitude, eschewing the grand Gothic (and studio-bound) style of Hammer for location shooting and historical accuracy. He found a like-minded artist in Director of Photography Dick Bush,⁸ whose emphasis on natural lighting and smooth hand-held camerawork allowed The Blood on Satan’s Claw to feel both contemporary and firmly rooted in its period. The film is also helped by a florid script by Robert Wynne-Simmons, which manages period-appropriate dialogue without the usual camp and an outstanding score by Marc Wilkinson, former musical director of the National Theatre, who had previously composed the strange and wonderful score to Lindsay Anderson’s If …. (1968).

The prestigious backgrounds of the primary crew end up making The Blood on Satan’s Claw much more than its lurid title would suggest. The film may struggle tying together the three stories – in particular the character of the aunt, who disappears and never returns, and the sudden introduction of Margaret (Michele Dotrice) in the later part of the movie – but there is an undeniably strong undercurrent of Lewtonesque dread throughout. The demon is glimpsed only in hairy, feathery, shambling parts, and its final reveal is difficult to parse, thanks to its unholy, bat-like face. Scarier still is the effect the monster has on the children, a kind of demonic puberty that gives their games an unsettling edge (even when they don’t degenerate into rape and murder) and these otherwise innocent youths a violently lustful mien. Nature is an isolating force, one red in tooth and claw and horny as anything, and while the devout Christians in the village such as the Restoration comedy-named Reverend Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley) may be resilient to the lure of the beast, the young – oppressed by both religion and social status – embrace it with open arms. While Wynne-Simmons cited the Manson Family and the eleven-year-old murderer Mary Bell as inspirations for the story, the theme is clearly more contemporary: after the broken promises of the ‘60s, what could be left for the youth except a regression to darker urges?

What makes The Blood on Satan’s Claw even more disturbing to modern-day audiences, and especially those who grew up in the 1980s (as I did – hello, fellow old people) is the cast. There is something spectacularly disconcerting about British horror movies of the 1970s, because the casts invariably feature an actor who made their name on television.⁹ The Blood on Satan’s Claw is a particularly unsettling example of this. While Linda Hayden – then seventeen – was already well experienced in exploitation and horror, having appeared as the (ick) “new Lolita” in Baby Love (1968) and the more demure (at least at first) Alice Hargood in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), she would go on to a rich career in television including appearances in sitcoms like Robin’s Nest and Just Good Friends. Michele Dotrice would be best known as the eternally patient Betty Spencer in the long-running, stunt-heavy sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Anthony Ainley would be a Doctor Who regular, playing The Master through three generations of Doctor. Even James Hayter, playing the buffoonish Squire, would pop up in Are You Being Served? and provide the “exceedingly good” voiceover for the Mr Kipling adverts. But perhaps the biggest dissonance occurs with Wendy Padbury, who had already been a regular on TV soap Crossroads and was probably most known for playing Zoe Heriot, the Second Doctor’s companion, on Doctor Who. Padbury’s affecting performance as the unfortunate Cathy Vespers is not only notable because of her talent, but also because her character is the focus of The Blood on Satan’s Claw’s most notorious scene.

Haggard would repeatedly express regrets about the scene in which Cathy is lured to the ruined church where she is raped and murdered, citing a lack of experience and ignorance of how strong the scene would ultimately appear. And make no mistake, it is a deeply upsetting scene, not because it’s particularly graphic or long (though it feels protracted) but because Padbury’s Cathy is so clearly frightened to death, and her violation provides so much stimulus to the rest of the children (and an old couple who turn up for some reason). This is a horror moment that takes place in broad daylight, surrounded by blossoming trees, and is all the more effective for it. In fact, it’s too effective – I’ve seen the film a number of times now and still find myself looking away¹⁰ – and it derails the rest of the film by providing the most horrific moment before the film’s denouement. While The Blood on Satan’s Claw attempts to go all out with the ending, in which The Judge returns with a mob to destroy the final ritual, an emotional line has been crossed with Cathy’s rape and murder and there’s no going back. Even with the cult destroyed, poor Mrs Vespers still has to deal with the murders of her son (unceremoniously dumped under a pile of wood) and her daughter, both of whom were the most sympathetic characters in the film outside of poor Ralph. And it doesn’t help that the final battle is a little murky, saddled with some unfortunate slow-motion and an all-too-swift death for the villainous Angel Blake.

This less effective final third of the film is primarily the reason why The Blood on Satan’s Claw is seen as the lesser of the Unholy Trinity (a phrase coined by Mark Gatiss in his sterling History of Horror), but it’s more of a flaw than a dealbreaker. The Blood on Satan’s Claw is no wonkier in plot than Witchfinder General (which also has some awful day-for-night photography) and is certainly less overtly cynical; it is also arguably more serious in intent than The Wicker Man (which can feel like a great black comedy more than a horror movie). It’s the only one of the three to actively embrace the supernatural (or even preternatural) as opposed to collective insanity, and its creature is that rare thing in horror: a genuinely new and terrifying monster.

Like many horror movies from the 1970s, I saw this one on television way too young; unlike many others, this one stuck to the ribs. Just as The Blood on Satan’s Claw is more than its title, it’s more than its most horrific moments. The shock value of Cathy’s fate is still there, but the overwhelming sense of gnawing dread is what lingers, and I still steer clear of freshly ploughed fields, just in case there are relics of some unholy terror in plain sight. Other folk horrors may have their big “Oh God, oh Jesus Christ!” moments, but The Blood on Satan’s Claw is as insidious as its demon: once it gets under your skin, it stays there.

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Next Up: “It’s curtains for his critics!”

1. The whole movement is too complex to get into detail here, but I thoroughly recommend Rob Young’s books The Magic Box and Electric Eden, which delve into ‘70s/’80s television and film and British folk music respectively, as well as Adam Scovell’s book on folk horror Hours Dreadful and Things Strange and the exhaustive and quite brilliant three-hour documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.

2. Otherwise known as the “Michael Hordern won’t stop eating until he gets menaced by some beach rags” story. While Whistle is often thought of as one of the BBC’s exemplary Ghost Stories for Christmas, it was actually a one-off episode of the arts programme Omnibus. And it is an absolute “rumpled” classic of its type.

3. Anthony Hinds was the driving force behind Hammer’s pivot from B-grade thrillers to science fiction and horror, with the big-screen adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories and, of course, the Gothic horrors. He also wrote many of Hammer’s output under the pseudonym of John Elder, including Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966).

4. Piers Haggard later suggested that there might have been tax reasons for producing three shorts instead of one feature; I can only assume he was referring to the Eady Levy, which allowed tax subsidies for British-made films. Would three short films therefore get three subsidies? If anyone knew how to diddle the tax man, it would’ve been Tony Tenser.

5. Tony Tenser’s title. Not a gifted writer. The eventual title The Blood on Satan’s Claw was the suggestion of Sam Arkoff, who knew a thing or two about selling movies.

6. The Judge’s ironic toast to “His Catholic Majesty King Charles III” refers to Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was firmly in exile after 1745, but it does have a nice ring to it today, and I’m not going to pretend it didn’t spring immediately to mind during the most recent coronation. I’ve met him, you know. Smaller than you’d think. Uncomfortably puffy hands.

7. It never ceases to amuse me that it’s the local blood-letting, melancholic doctor who immediately confirms it’s a demon with his wee book of drawings.

8. Settle down, Beavis.

9. Further examples include Simon Williams in Upstairs, Downstairs (in which Ainley also appeared), and a couple of actors in teeny parts: Roberta Tovey, who appeared as the granddaughter to Peter Cushing’s Doctor in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks’ Invasion Earth (1966) and Geoffrey Hughes, most known for Onslow in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. If you keep your eyes open, there’s even a brief appearance by a young Derrick O’Connor, probably best known as lead henchman in Lethal Weapon 2 or his turn as the Frank Carson-like wannabe stand-up in Comedians (1979).

10. I consider myself a longtime horror fan, and while I can enjoy any number of gory moments or well-timed jump scares, I am incredibly squeamish about rape scenes. That said, the scene in The Blood on Satan’s Claw is effective because it is so horrible; lesser horror movies have a more nihilistic approach.