David Annwn Jones
In the years following 1968, the British public, including journalists, politicians and psychologists, tried to come to terms with a seismic national trauma by searching for answers about what had led Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl, to murder two small boys. Such crimes and the trial that followed appeared to reveal the insufficiency of the state, torn between the need to punish a killer and reform a victim. As Justice Cusack stated, “In all the resources of the country it appears there is no hospital available which is suitable for the accommodation of this girl” (Sereny 120).
In creating his formative stories for Blood on Satan’s Claw, writer Robert Wynne-Simmons drew upon horrific real-life narratives about how children mistreated each other, particularly newspaper headlines about the Bell case. It seemed to this young writer that Britain had been forced to confront both the evil of children and the overt sexuality of evil. He comments:
It was fairly soon after the Mary Bell murders–and that concept of the child who might kill and then go and have a chat with the parents of the person that she’d killed, and that strange mixture of apparent innocence with this totally out-of-control dark side, was very strong in my mind – the possibility of children being murderers.
[Mary Bell] would go up to the mothers of the children she’d murdered and virtually boast of it. She seemed to want to get herself caught and that horrifying idea of childhood innocence being totally evil was also a central theme of the movie. (Extras, “Touching the Devil”)
Thirty-four years after the film’s first appearance, Jonathan Southcott notes that “This is the Mary Bell bit” about the scene in which one of the followers of Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) tells Ellen (Charlotte Mitchell) of the location of Mark Vespers’ (Robin Davies) dead body. This comment reveals his failure to notice how thoroughly the Bell murders permeate the film (Extras, “Commentary”). During the moments before the rape and murder of Cathy Vespers (Wendy Padbury), Dick Bush (that “master of framing” as Piers Haggard dubbed him), aligns the faces of Cathy, Angel and Margaret (Michele Dotrice) in powerful perspective (Extras, “Touching the Devil”). Bush holds the shot on three successive occasions for eight, five, and twenty seconds respectively. It is a graphic and sustained clue to the sources of the depredation to come.
From left to right: Margaret, Angel, Cathy
Angel’s behaviours—her precocity and baiting of authority, absenteeism from classes, transference of blame for her actions onto others, pleasure and excitement in murder, and gloating at Mark’s funeral—all identify her with the figure of Mary Bell. Bell had been subject to sadomasochistic sexual exploitation by her mother, as well as abused and threatened with death. Cathy’s unconsciously paradoxical statement–“She’s a devil that Angel”–recalls when, asked by Bell whether she herself had been incestuously inseminated by her own father, her mother replied “You are the devil’s spawn” (Hari). Angel’s strangling of Mark evokes Bell’s behaviour in murdering two young boys, and the use of shears in relation to Cathy is reminiscent of Bell’s mutilation of Brian Howe with scissors. Indeed, although critics have ascribed a wealth of motives for the growth in the film of hairy “devil’s skin,” Bell’s cutting off a piece of Brian’s hair might well have influenced this motif. The extreme repeated close-ups of Angel’s light blue eyes, particularly during the funeral scene, not only present a fascinating counterpoint to the single eyes which frame the film, but also recall many accounts of the quality of Mary Bell’s Svengali-like hypnotic blue eyes.
I want to go beyond these connections, though, to argue that Angel, Cathy, and Margaret are structured within a closely-linked triad, each revealing a facet of Bell as presented in the British media. As Justice Cusack summed-up, Mary was both a murderer and a helpless victim, internalising and acting out the depth of her pain. He argued simultaneously that the public must be protected from such a dangerous offender and yet also referred to the lack of a suitable hospital for her treatment (Sereny 119-20).
In spite of Cathy’s confiding her alienation from Angel (“She’s no friend of mine”), she mostly acquiesces to being lured, like a small infant lost in a trance, to the ruined church. The young men lead her with a rope tied around her midriff, as if she is connected umbilically now to Angel’s rite. She is the only one wearing a crown of hawthorn to be killed in the sacrificial rite, and her passivity (she is the first to kneel of her own accord to the demon and, noticeably during her rape and murder, is not restrained or held down) links her to a distorted version of the “Lamb of God,” her name meaning “pure.” She is also is linked to the iconography of the instrument of her murder: the sheep shears that, after their bloody use, are the focus of Angel’s fetishized fondling. The symbolism of this specific farm implement is all the more conspicuous due to the complete lack of any sheep in the film (which otherwise abounds with cattle, horses, geese and poultry).
As Cathy is shown as Angel’s companion in early scenes, so Margaret proves to be the primary female presence who emerges after Cathy’s death (indeed, at her death) and, after her rescue by Ralph, we see Margaret ardently seeking reunion with Angel. If Angel recalls Bell portrayed as the callous murderer and Cathy the victim aspects of Bell’s persona, Margaret is the rational, self-confessed “Devil’s child,” yet one who also repeatedly denies killing anyone (even though she is clearly an accessory to murder). She is the go-between, the conscious link between subconsciously-motivated killer and victim.
Margaret also acts as an interchangeable surrogate for the other two young women, as if they are all facets or refractions of one presence. She offers herself sexually to Ralph, telling him he can have Angel as well. She reminds Ralph’s mother of Cathy and, when she sees Margaret, Cathy’s mother, Ellen, tells Ralph: “I thought t’were my Cathy you brought back to me,” going on to ask him to fetch Cathy’s bed for the rescued girl. These strong associations might lead an audience to question why, unlike the previously deceased Mark, Cathy hasn’t been resurrected at this stage in the plot. Yet it is obvious that, in terms of the imaginative world of the film, Cathy’s murder is ritually and psychologically final. Margaret is meant to take over where Cathy leaves off.
Just as Cathy, as sacrifice, is umbilically linked to Angel’s murderous nature, so Margaret, once out of Ralph’s hearing and confronted by Angel in the quarry, forgets her lip-service to her “Master” Behemoth and devotes herself to Angel, saying: “I come back to you Angel. Save me Angel. The dogs are after me. I’m afeard Angel!”
The idea of characters displaying different psychological facets of one person has a rich cinematic context. Nunally Johnson’s The Three Faces of Eve (1957) features Eve White (Joanne Woodward), a woman with dissociative multiple personalities: White is the victim of Eve Black who is shown strangling White’s daughter. Finally, a third personality, Jane, emerges. Nearer to home, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), which strongly influenced Wynne-Simmons’ stories, reveals the transformation of the protagonist (Catherine Deneuve) into a vengeful murderer due, the final scene suggests, to child abuse. In terms of folk horror, Barry Forshaw writes that it is possible to read the characters of Mathew Hopkins and his assistant Stearne in Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) in Freudian terms as, respectively, controlling superego and rampant id (98).
Satan’s Claw’s triad, on the other hand, resembles an inverted Christian Trinity: Angel features as a murderous mother-figure, Cathy as the sacrificial daughter, and Margaret as an unholy go-between or Spirit, each a refraction of aspects of Bell as presented in the popular press. The writer’s and director’s strong interest in triadic arrangement can be recognised elsewhere in the film in the symmetrical grouping of Mark with the two girls and Cathy with the two male youths who fetch them to Angel’s rites. Visually emphasising her three-fold associations, Angel finally receives three fatal and bloody wounds by running onto the tines of a pitchfork.
Margaret is linked explicitly to language, speech, and the spreading of the cult’s creed. She reads the book of Behemoth, speaks readily about her “Master” to Ralph, urging him to join the sect, tells the Judge (Patrick Wymark) of Angel’s whereabouts, and is addressed by Angel as “Thou tell-tale bitch,” a strange conflation of the proselytising Spirit with an unwilling Judas. Mary Bell, too, was linked to intelligent, evasive and devious speech, spinning stories, making counter-accusations and denying murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe for eighteen years, her words revealing a radical psychological disassociation. Bell recalls that, at her trial, “Somebody- called me a ‘monstrosity of nature’. I thought these were really funny words, nothing to do with me, it was as if I wasn’t there, you know, but standing outside looking in” (Sereny 45).
Yet, as in Margaret’s case, Bell’s language (her knowledge of the broken scissors) was used by the police and legal professionals to trap and subsequently confine her. In an antithetical parody of God’s Holy Spirit “which bloweth where it listeth” (John 3:8), Margaret is constrained everywhere–chased, harried, ducked in water, tied up to have her “devil’s skin” removed, caught in a mantrap, chased again with dogs, and then bound and threatened with a sword-stick and snarling dogs. The only other sound as D. C. Kerr originally questioned Bell was the barking of a ferocious-looking Alsatian (Sereny 50).
The last time we see Margaret in the film, she embodies a disturbing image of confinement—still lashed to a wooden fence in a barn as the Judge departs to confront the cult. This shot of her despair is held lingeringly for twenty seconds, and we never see her released. Just as Margaret has been interrogated and constricted by representatives of the law, so Bell was questioned, interviewed, analysed by psychologists and confined to a closed unit and prison for twelve years.
Given this configuration, the remains of Behemoth in the field can be read as the mystery of what happened to Bell between the ages of one and ten, the externalisation of horrific violence to a personality which was rejected and torn apart. Bell was called a monstrosity in court: after all, what is more monstrous than that which is vilified and disowned? Behemoth represents not an archaic god but the form of Bell’s psychological rupture, the psychic trace of a girl fragmented by sadism. As Johann Hari writes: “It is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down and confined to cages. It dodges the colder truth: we all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves.” Wynne-Simmons has revealed this process in action. The gathering together of the fiend’s remains in Blood on Satan’s Claw entails such counter-violence, suppressed rage, and sadism that, instead of the kind of healing reconstitution we find in the myth of Isis and Osiris, more and more young people are sacrificed. As the monster grows, the villagers become diminished, cut down and deprived of their limbs. Acts taken to re-assemble that fragmented entity and bring it into the light of day involve intense bodily trauma and, as in some acts of self-harm and sadomasochism, each act taken to reify or reconstitute that which has been damaged only serves to cause more harm. Young victims of violence act that violence out. This is no simple tale of light versus dark or male versus female agency.
The fictional village is also revealed, at a deep level, to be a scarred psychological territory. Mistress Banham’s (Avice Landon) house is a domicile steeped in transgressive and repressed sexual desire. (We remember Wynne-Simmons’ studies of William Blake at university).[i] Ralph and Cathy desire each other. Peter Edmonton (Simon William) has eloped with Rosalind Barton (Tamara Ustinov), and his aunt thinks Barton is pregnant. Peter promises to visit Rosalind later on the night before their wedding. Rosalind is placed to sleep in the attic, Banham’s deceased husband’s room, surrounded by his eerie residual presence in the draped clothes. Despite the Judge’s emphasis on the proprieties of sleeping arrangements, he confesses to having once been an admirer of Banham as he settles down in the parlour with a proprietary air. As in dreaming, we watch as repressed resentments surface with bestial ferocity. Behind the generational mistrust and competition of the card-game lurks the violence that attacks and maddens Rosalind in the attic and then claws back vengefully at the mistress of the house. Peter starts to cut off his own hand in a nightmare, and oneiric qualities dominate the film—early posters linking it to living nightmares. When Cathy recalls Rosalind’s screams, Angel says that she “dreamed ‘em.” The film surges to its final shot in hallucinogenic slow-motion.
At the end, caught between earth and fire, between the focus on the demon’s worm-browed eye and the final vision of the Judge’s eye fringed by cleansing flames, the audience is left to piece together, literally to re-member, the sources of evil. The Judge’s horrified expression as he stares into the fire and the final close-up of his eye offer us no way out. Marcus K. Harmes writes: “Male authority is contested but ultimately restored […] The application of male power is central to the resolution” (77-8).
The final shot: the Judge is “still staring at you”
While this reading has some merit, it cannot encapsulate the complexities of the final scene. Even accounting for Haggard’s shrinking budget and the jettisoning of a scene showing militia opening fire on the sect’s members, there is no ultimate restoration of male authority in the Judge’s freeze-frame look of horror. In fact, there is no resolution to the plot at all in any meaningful sense, for none is possible. The film itself is an anatomy of the kind of evil which persists because it is not understood. Haggard has commented that, in the final freeze-frame: ‘“It’ hasn’t stopped. He’s still staring at you” (Extras, “Commentary”). In seeking for answers to the film’s bewilderingly open end, we might find ourselves running in circles like the blind-folded figure of Mark. We are caught between the Reverend Fallowfield’s (Anthony Ainley) motto, “Ubique opera domine” (Everywhere the works of God, a near quotation from the Benedicite canticle), and the cultists’ final chant of “Sanctum Fundamentum Salve” (Hail Fundamental Sanctuary).
Far from offering a vision of meaningful female agency cut back by male authority, beneath the imagery of blossom, delusive frolicking, and the cynically-orchestrated front of youthful games, Angel’s creed is as restrictive and more murderous than that of the Judge. The bared bodies of young women, apparently so indispensable to the early 1970s box-office, are exhibited in the plot either as a bid for ruthless domination or as an incitement for self-harm. From the outset, sexuality and favours are, for Angel, all about the paying of forfeits and exacting of bodily trauma (a viable enough code for prostitution and sadomasochism). Despite its air of rural sensuality, the only consummated act of sex in the film is one based on a fusion of taboos, of incest, necrophilia and murder, which hints at the destructive incest in Bell’s family—hardly a template for viable female agency.
In the Britain of the late 1960s, in deprived neighbourhoods but also behind the frontages of so-called respectable middle- and upper-class homes, child abuse, incest and sadism flourished. The abuse was sometimes conducted in plain view. The Britain of Mary Bell’s horrific childhood experiences was the same Britain as that of trusted confidante of royalty and prime ministers—Jimmy Savile, who raped thousands of children. Westminster too, the seat of government, has also been implicated in sex abuse scandals in the 1960s. Where was any fundamental site of sanctuary for the victims? Haggard wrote of a national culture “chest-deep in blood,” adding, “I think our society is about to shatter” (Sweet 271).
The final conflagration
There is no easy way out of Blood on Satan’s Claw. The film’s triadic vision of Angel, Cathy, and Margaret, mirroring the ways in which the media refracted the figure of Mary Bell, resists closure. If the Judge’s disquieting gaze inside the fire’s nimbus should remind us of anything, it should take us back through the narrative to the only other moment when the camera zooms in to extreme close-focus on flames in the hearth of Banham’s house, an image which fills the screen.
The shot then zooms in further and blurs, moving completely out of focus, so that the screen becomes a mass of dancing, chaotic filaments. A few moments earlier, Peter, whose gaze we follow into the fire in the property which he will soon inherit, whispers despairingly: “There’s evil in this house.”
Notes
[i] In William Blake’s writings, for example “Ah! Sunflower” (1790) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-3), the repression of sexual expression is seen to cause stagnation, pestilence and death.
Works Cited
The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon British Film Productions, 1971.
Extras. “Commentary with Piers Haggard, Robert Wynne-Simons and Linda Hayden.” Blood on Satan’s Claw. The Tigon DVD Collection, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2005
—. “Film Notes.”
—. “Touching the Devil—The Making of Blood on Satan’s Claw.”
Forshaw, Barry. British Gothic Cinema. Palgrave and Macmillan, 2013.
Hari, Johann. “The Child Who Kills Is the Child Who Never Had a Chance.” The Independent, 19 January 2014.
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): 64-80.
Sereny, Gitta. Cries Unheard, The Story of Mary Bell. Macmillan, 1998.
Sweet, Matthew. Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema. Faber, 2005.
