Kern Robinson
From its earthy opening to the calling-forth of a dreaded horned god, few films exemplify folk horror artistry so completely as Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). However, in its depiction of this horned deity, Satan’s Claw demonstrates a conflict with the counter-cultural ideology that is often read into folk horror.
This article intends to trace a potted history of the horned god figure as a counter-cultural icon. I will then present a close reading of the demon in Satan’s Claw with reference to this history in an effort to present a counter argument to the assumed concomitance of Haggard’s film and the cultural experiments of 1960s and 1970s Britain.
Behemoth – Satan’s Claw‘s horned god
The film depicts a commune of villagers who are, at first, suggestive of a “peace and love” hippy idyll, but as Haggard’s film continues, the representation of these young people becomes nebulous and contradictory. Led by the enchanting Angel Blake (Linda Hayden), they adorn themselves in flower crowns and flowing white gowns, reject material possessions, and live amidst nature. They play music and dance nude in the woods. However, at Angel’s behest, they also falsely accuse a reverend of rape, summon the demon Behemoth, and commit atrocious acts of sexual violence in its name. Herein lies the contradiction: these (now) cultists are simultaneously childlike in their games, objects of sexual fantasy, and sadistic murderers.
Adam Scovell describes counter-culture as “referring to the evolution of social popular culture that arose dramatically during the 1960s in the west … more specific[ally] looking at the influx of drug culture, sexual revolution, [and] avant-garde ideologies” (13). Adam Richards further contextualizes counter-culture as a politically active transformation of Beat Generation philosophy: “By 1960, the transformation was complete. In the place of the Beat Generation arose a counterculture that held the same ideals but promoted vibrant coloured clothing, long hair, folk music and the participation in politics – all while being known as hippies.”
Another important characteristic of 1960s Britain was the prevalence of the occult and the satanic:
Aleister Crowley appeared on Peter Blake’s album artwork for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Rolling Stones were singing about Satan in “Sympathy for the Devil”… Jimmy Page would even open an occult bookshop… Occultism of various forms seems to be ubiquitous in the period’s pop culture and this extends heavily to cinema and TV. (Scovell 126)
While the counter-culture of the 1960s was by no means a Satanic movement (i.e. not connected to the religion of Satanism or the motivations of the established Satanic church), the horned god of the underworld, along with his many demonic servants, were important cultural touchstones.
Sixties Britain wasn’t the first time in history that horned figures would be linked to political radicalism in Western culture. In his book, Witchcraft and Homosexuality: A Radical View of History and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy (1978), Arthur Evans outlines a history of horned god worship that stretches back to Stone Age Europe. For Evans, cave paintings such as one found in Valcamonica, Italy, and another named “The Sorcerer” in Ariége, France (38), demonstrate a deeply ancient worship of horned gods, one that was utilized by Celtic druids to resist Roman imperialism: “they organized rebellions and prophesied that Roman power would be overthrown” (39). Evans quotes Nora K. Chadwick’s book The Druids which asserts that “[w]e may probably regard the druids as the most formidable nationalist and anti-Roman force with which the Romans had to contend” (72).
Evans then describes how witchcraft often presents a central horned god figure sometimes called Pan, Oak King, or Cernunnos. Philosopher Silvia Federici further explores the connections between the worship of these ancient horned gods and radical political action by calling the witch “the communist and terrorist of her time” (33), describing how the European witch hunts were a “massive defeat of Europe’s ‘lower classes’, who needed to learn about the power of the state to desist from any form of resistance to its rule” (33).
Jump forward to 1700s Britain, the setting for Haggard’s Satan’s Claw, when the privatisation of land across England saw the rise of protest groups called “The Blacks.” The Blacks, so called because they smudged their face with charcoal to avoid detection, trespassed onto the grounds of local landowners, often to kill the game that grazed there in an effort to render the land unsuitable for hunting. The Blacks were inspired by the legend of Herne the Hunter, a humanoid ghost who wore the antlers of a stag and stalked Windsor forest. In The Book of Trespass, Nick Hayes describes how “all around Highclere, Enfield Chase, Waltham Chase, Caversham Park, Bagshot Heath, groups of working-class men and women swore oaths of allegiance upon the stag horns of the chimney of the local pubs” (211).
Understanding this canon of horned political radicalism, and given the contexts of 1960s and 70s British counter-culture, a potential viewer of Satan’s Claw could be forgiven for assuming that Haggard’s horned god would be a formidable force of anti-establishment power. But instead, Satan’s Claw presents its viewers with an altogether different kind of demon.
While the title of the film overtly names Satan as the antagonist, given the demon’s form, this is doubtful. In an article on Satan’s Claw’s creature, Johnny Restall points out that “[j]udging by its small, capering, animalistic form…it seems a minor demon at best rather than Lucifer itself.” And, certainly, when we first see the demon made flesh, it lacks the terrible grandiosity the viewer would expect from the lord of the underworld.
However, the film answers this debate for us. The demon is not Satan but is named in the summoning ritual as Behemoth. The cult reads: “Hail Behemoth, spirit of the dark. Take thou of my blood, my flesh, my spirit, and walk.”
Biblically, Behemoth is gargantuan and vaguely animalistic in form, described as “feed[ing] like an ox” (Job. 40, Holy Bible). It is also described as like a crocodile, an elephant, or a hippopotamus depending on the translation (Van der Toorn 166). Haggard instead chooses to present the demon as humanoid, with bat-like features and small bone-coloured horns protruding from the top of its head that are, more often than not, hidden beneath a hood.
In the first shot of Behemoth, it is standing in a dark corner of the derelict church from which the cultists operate; the demon is barely lit and enshrouded in a thick, black hood so that only a glimpse of twisted skin, fur, and a gleaming eye are visible. The cult, plus a local girl named Cathy (Wendy Padbury), are gathered in the church. The music is building to a discordant crescendo as the aforementioned prayer is read aloud. A shot-reverse-shot between the demon and Angel Blake suggests communication of some sort as it performs a calm, slow gesture, tapping its left shoulder with its right claw, as if clumsily crossing itself. This is all we see of Behemoth until the final scene, whereupon the creature is promptly slain with a single stroke of the hero’s blade.
Behemoth in flames
The incantation is abruptly cut short as Cathy cries out in pain, holding her side. Then the demon speaks. In a low, rasping voice over a mid-shot of Cathy’s horrified expressions it says: “She has my skin.” Her dress is torn, revealing a patch of matted fur. Angel Blake throws Cathy to the ground, where she is ritualistically raped and murdered. Noteworthy here is that Behemoth itself is not the physical perpetrator of this violence; the blame falls solely on the cult members themselves, as the camera cuts back and forth between the assault and their grinning faces.
When we next see Behemoth in the concluding scene of the film, Angel’s cult has grown in size, and a local landowner and judge has decided that enough is enough. The Judge (Patrick Wymark) gathers a group of men and, after capturing and interrogating a female cult-member, decides to attack Angel and slay the demon commanding her, thus saving the village and the day. The cult is found in their derelict church, playing drums and flutes, and pacing round a fire. Angel Blake is not partaking in the apparent ritual but is instead standing separate from the group, held against the hooded Behemoth. As the Judge attacks with a large cross-shaped sword, the music again builds to a discordant crescendo. Angel flees in terror, impaling herself on a pitchfork and dying. Behemoth cowers before the Judge’s holy blade, and as it paces from side to side, its hood falls, revealing its bat-like face in the firelight. Slowly, the Judge pierces Behemoth’s chest and throws the demon onto the fire where it sends a jet of smoke into the air. The music shifts to a major key as the cultists are shown to be no longer under the influence of the demon. The final shot of the film is a freeze-frame of the Judge’s face, a mask of grim determination, behind the fires of Behemoth’s corpse.
Ultimately Behemoth’s existence is ineffectual, bordering on impotent. As the Judge bears down on the demon, it cowers, pacing from side to side. It does not attack the Judge or his posse, and its death is noteworthy only for its speed and its lack of ceremony or drama. It is not the horned god painted on the ancient cave walls of Europe, or even the one sung of by The Rolling Stones. It is weak and cowardly, slain in the single stroke of a landlord’s blade.
Theorists such as Adam Scovell, Marcus K. Harmes, and Aaron Jolly have argued for the concomitance of folk horror film and the counter-culture of 1960s and 70s Britain. For Scovell in particular, the two are synonymous, as folk horror was not only “summoned into existence during what can be called the British counter-culture movement [but also acts as a] ‘tidal high-point’” (13) for counter-culture art. And at first glance, there’s no denying the connection between Angel Blake’s cult in Satan’s Claw and the new-age hippies of the counter-culture. Haggard himself draws this parallel in an interview with Mark Gatiss for the docuseries A History of Horror: “We were all a bit interested in witchcraft. We were all a bit interested in free love.” Similarly, in a reading of one of Satan’s Claw’s contemporaries, Witchfinder General, Aaron Jolly argues that “the initial seeds for representing the bourgeois as morally bankrupt were planted early in the Folk Horror genre” (275).
But when Haggard’s Behemoth is read in the context of a history of horned god worship and its connection to political radicalism, the supposed counter-culture ideologies of Satan’s Claw are drawn into question. While Scovell, Jolly, and others are right to connect the rise of counter-cultural ideologies in the West to British folk horror film, it is crucial to recognize that not every folk horror production can be conflated with such ideals. Satan’s Claw is from the counter-culture, but it is not of the counter-culture.
If we accept Jolly’s identification of folk horror film as a counter-culture ideology, it can therefore be concluded that Satan’s Claw is denying not only the radical power of the horned god figure, but also of the genre as a whole. Alternatively, we could accept Harmes’ reading of the gendered power dynamics of Satan’s Claw, which argues that the film contests patriarchal authority but concludes with “the ultimate reassertion of epistemic control of women by men” (65). Harmes thus suggests a reorientation of Satan’s Claw and folk horror, suggesting that it is precisely because of its lack of concomitance with the counter-culture movement that its identification with the genre is problematic. This reading therefore also accepts the conflation of folk horror and radical politics. By attempting to connect the ultimately ineffectual Behemoth of Haggard’s film to the ages-old counter-cultural legacy of the horned god, this paper demonstrates that Blood on Satan’s Claw, a defining film of the folk horror genre, cannot be aligned with counter-cultural philosophies. While folk horror film is obviously informed by the trappings of counter-culturalism, the ideological conflation of the two must be reconsidered.
Works Cited
The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon British Film Productions, 1971.
Chadwick, Nora K. The Druids. University of Wales Press, 2000.
Evans, Arthur. Witchcraft and Homosexuality: A Radical View of History and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy. Fag Rag Books, 1979.
Federici, Silvia. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. PM Press, 2018.
Harmes, Marcus K. “The Seventeenth Century on Film: Patriarchy, Magistracy, and Witchcraft in British Horror Films, 1968-1971.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2013, pp. 64-80.
Hayes, Nick. The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us. Bloomsbury, 2020.
A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, ep. 2, “Home Counties Horror.” Directed by John Das, BBC, 18 October 2010.
Holy Bible, New International Version. Hodder & Stoughton, 2011.
Jolly, Aaron. “Kill Lists: The Occult, Paganism and Sacrifice in Cinema as an Analogy for Political Upheaval in the 1970s and the 2010s.” Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, edited by Andy Paciorek. Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015, pp. 270-82.
Restall, Johnny. “Giving the Devil his Due: The Demonic in British Horror Cinema.” Horrified, 5 November 2020.
Richards, Adam. “Hippies and the Counterculture: Origins, Beliefs and Legacy.” Study.com, 30 August 2013.
Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.
Van der Toorn, Karel, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst. Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. 2nd ed. Brill, 1999.
Witchfinder General. Directed by Michael Reeves, Tigon Films, 1968.
