The Ruined Church in The Blood on Satan’s Claw: Fertility and Population Decline in Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Much folk horror takes place amidst ruins. The ruined or abandoned church features centrally, for instance, in The Witches (Cyril Frankel, 1966), The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), Final Prayer (aka The Borderlands, Elliot Goldner, 2013), and The Third Day (Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly, 2020). And the ruined church is absolutely central to Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).  After the production team found Bix Bottom, a small valley in the Chiltern Hills, which they decided was a perfect location for the film, they scouted the surrounding area and found the ruined church of St James. As Haggard recounts in an interview with David Taylor, he immediately “realised they had found the ideal place for the children to practice their rituals.” Haggard continues, “‘When I saw the old chapel—I don’t think the script said that they were in a ruined chapel or anything like that, they were just in the forest—I thought ‘Wow!’’” (Taylor 91). Indeed, the central scene of ritual sacrifice in Satan’s Claw—the rape and murder of Cathy Vespers (Wendy Padbury)—as well as the culminating death of Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) both take place in this church.

Folk Horror’s Demographic Anxiety

Perhaps most obviously, ruined churches represent Christianity under siege, whether it be from a decline in devotion or a competing belief system. Tanya Krzywinska has argued, for instance, that the “abandoned Christian churches” of folk horror signal “moral decay” (79-80). But that’s not all they signal. All of these ruined churches, I argue, mark the movement of people; they mark migration. In their novelization of The Wicker Man, for instance, Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer explicitly tie the deserted islands with their ruined churches, which Neil Howie sees beneath him as he flies to Summerisle, to the Scottish Clearances. In the Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both people and agriculture were forced off the islands and highlands of Scotland to make way for sheep farming. Howie “could see the ruined churches, the abandoned monasteries, and other evidence of the great migrations that had long since taken most of the original population to far-off Nova Scotia in Canada”—all because of the “Highland Clearances” (30-31). The ruined churches of folk horror invoke, then, not only migration broadly but, specifically, decline and loss—the abandonment of places by people.

As monuments to migration, the ruined churches of folk horror represent what I argue is a crucially important driver of folk horror’s first wave—dramatically declining birth rates and the movement of people from rural to urban areas.

Indeed, what has gone unmentioned in criticism on folk horror is that the first wave of cultural production in the late 1960s and early 1970s occurred simultaneously with a dramatic fall in birthrates. After hitting a post-war high in 1964, birthrates in Britain dropped sharply for over a decade, charting a steep drop from 1,014,672 births each year to only 686,952 in 1978.^[i] By 1975, the annual growth rate of the population “was negative,” and the UK population actually “declined in size between 1975 and 1978” (Champion and Falkingham 2).

Critics have certainly written about how folk horror in general, and Satan’s Claw in particular, responded to its contemporary moment, but they have focused on how the film articulates, as Paul Newland puts it, “contemporary counter-cultural concerns,” documenting in particular “the slow and painful death of the initial optimism of this youth-led movement” (168).[ii] But that is by no means the only contemporary concern to which first-wave folk horror, and Satan’s Claw specifically, responded. Folk horror from 1968 on, I argue, marked falling birth rates by depicting rural communities that were rooted in British ethnic traditions and organized around fertility (as in, for instance, 1970s Robin Redbreast and The Wicker Man). Riven by anxiety about population decline, folk horror also, though, repeatedly depicted the absence of, and the threat to, the young; they also, in short, depicted reproduction’s end.

Ruined churches necessarily invoke absence. Susan Stewart has written that, “What we can learn of ruins necessarily comes from the legible and visible record of the past, but we might remember that ruins often are both steeped in and surrounded by absence” (20; emphasis mine). In the palpable absences they evoke, ruined churches certainly contribute to the eeriness of folk horror. Mark Fisher has argued that one way in which the eerie is produced is when there is “a failure of presence”—when, as he says, “there is nothing present where there should be something” (61). And folk horror is replete with eerie landscapes, with ruins, abandoned villages, and stone circles, that are, as Fisher puts it, “emptied of the human”—eerie because they suggest a now absent presence (11-12).

Folk horror engages the absence inevitably suggested by ruins to testify specifically to the anxiety about fertility and its failure, to the encroachment of sterility, to the loss and death of young people. Rituals in churches in folk horror sometimes testify to this absence by imagining the presence of fertility—for instance, the iconic moment in The Wicker Man when Neil Howie comes across a woman in Summerisle’s ruined church nursing a baby and holding an egg.

Conversely, however, rituals in folk horror often involve the death or sacrifice of children as symbolic of a declining population, as evocative of anxieties about the death of communities, about extinction.

Satan’s Claw is no exception. The destructive energies of Behemoth are notably directed toward the young and the potentially reproductive, a fact that marks the presence of that anxiety about the starkly declining birth rates in the UK. Indeed, after the well-known opening scene in which the demon’s skull is unearthed by a plough, the film turns to a potentially reproductive union that is violently foreclosed. Peter Edmonton (Simon Williams) arrives at his aunt’s house with his wife-to-be, Rosalind Barton (Tamara Ustinov), a woman whom his aunt, Mistress Isobel Banham (Avice Landone), believes to be entirely unacceptable due to her lowly class status. Banished to the attic room, Rosalind is the first victim of the demon, along with the unborn child Peter’s aunt is convinced she’s carrying. Rosalind, and her reproductive potential, is thereafter consigned to an institution for the insane. After this opening salvo by the devil, he attacks one young person after another—Peter, Mark Vespers (Robin Davies), and, most notably Cathy Vespers, who is raped and then killed by Angel Blake’s cult in the ruins of the church. At the end of the film, Angel herself is killed in the ruins by the Judge. The sexual, or potentially sexual, characters are killed. The elderly—the non-reproductive—remain.

The Church at Bix Brand

The most sensational deaths—those of Cathy and Angel—take place in the ruins of the church in the woods surrounding the village. While numerous writers have argued that the landscape is integral to folk horror, as indeed it is, most discussions are framed in rather general terms.[iii] It is crucially important, though, to explore the specific landscapes of folk horror. St James Church is, obviously, a crucial part of the landscape of Satan’s Claw. And, as it turns out, the old St James Church and the parish of Bix Brand in Bix Bottom serve as perfect vehicles to encapsulate the anxieties over population decline that drove folk horror generally in the early 1970s. Newland notes that “the ruined old church of St James forms an important picturesque site for the grim action in Blood on Satan’s Claw” (170), but I would argue that the church is more than merely a “picturesque site.” It is a distinct building in a distinct location with a history of its own—a history that matters and that especially matters to the meaning of Satan’s Claw. Folk horror as a subgenre, I argue, demands the kind of reading that unearths the specific histories of its locations.

The old St James Church of what was once the parish of Bix Brand (just north of Bix Village) indeed has its own particular history, one that happens to amplify the centrality of population migration and decline. There is evidence in Bix Brand, for instance, of both Iron Age and Roman settlements, both abandoned at some point. The church of the parish of Bix Brand, St James Church, was established by the late Anglo-Saxon or Norman lord of the local estate and “dates probably from the early twelfth century” (“Rural”).[iv] The status of the church fluctuated until it was officially abandoned after the new St James Church was built in the 1870s on the edge of Bix Common in Bix Village, to the south, where much of the local population had already shifted.

The congregation of St James Church had fluctuated throughout its history, and the church experienced periodic small abandonments before it was finally replaced. In the late eleventh century, for example, Bix Brand was flourishing, with “dispersed settlements” across the region of Bix Bottom and “probably a greater concentration of population in Bix Bottom than in subsequent periods.” This is why, no doubt, the church of Bix Brand was built in the early twelfth century. There is then evidence from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that “Bix experienced the population growth which occurred in the Chilterns as in the rest of England.” This growth seems, though, “to have stalled before the 1340s, by which time a substantial amount of land had gone out of cultivation in Bix Brand.” And then the Black Death struck, and, as a consequence, the population in Bix Brand sunk back to about what it had been in the late eleventh century. The population was not only slow to recover; it may have fallen still further in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. There was some modest growth by the later seventeenth century, but at this point the population was shifting to the south, to Bix Village—a shift that began in the later Middle Ages and kept the population of Bix Brand, and the congregation of its church, perennially precarious. By the seventeenth or eighteenth century, the settlement in Bix Brand that centered around the old St James Church was “largely abandoned” and the church was “probably isolated” by the shifting population.

The fate of Bix Brand and its old medieval church was reflected in the roads that led to it. One of the principal roads through Bix Bottom ran right by the medieval church and was, in fact, a “royal highway” in 1392 and 1480. The significance of this road as a “through route towards Oxford was apparently declining by the later Middle Ages when vegetation encroached on the stretch beyond, both reflecting and reinforcing shifts in settlement.” Entire stretches of the road north of Bix Bottom was obstructed “by trees and undergrowth in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.”

“Rewilding”

Finally abandoned by humans entirely, St James Church—like the parish it once anchored and the road that ran by it—experienced a kind of “rewilding.” In her recent book, Cal Flyn has argued that, because of falling birth rates across the developed world and intensive farming practices (which use “less land to produce more”), we are “in the midst of a huge, self-directed experiment in rewilding. Because abandonment is rewilding,” she continues, “in a very pure sense, as humans draw back and nature claims what was once hers” (6-7). Rewilding has been a continuous process, though, predicated on ever-shifting migration and demographic patterns—as is clear from the history of Bix Brand and its church. “Rewilding” has at times literally engulfed the church. For at least one moment, in 1954, vegetation entirely covered St James Church, an encroachment of the “wild” that is far more dramatic than that captured in an earlier photograph taken in 1936 (Kirk, 121, 125). Stewart says of ruins that “they are fused, almost always destructively, with their immediate natural environments” (2). Ruins are often “on their way to formlessness by becoming vegetation” (7). St James Church at Bix Brand has indeed fluctuated, throughout its history, between stages of form and formlessness.

In the film itself, we see this “rewilding,” this encroachment of nature in the scenes set in the ruined church: vegetation encroaches not just on the building but on the humans, who wear crowns of hawthorn. And then there is the “fur” that creeps over the bodies of the cult members, not unlike the way that vegetation creeps over the stone of the church. Moreover, the cult’s pagan rituals of creation (of the devil) and sacrificial destruction (of the human) also represent a formless challenge to the rigid order of life in the village, whether it be the enclosed fields, the village hierarchy, or the laws of the Church (as David Evans-Powell describes in his essay in this issue and in his book on the film). And, in the end, the fluctuating fate of St James Church suggests that “rewilding” in any of its forms (and formlessness) is not linear but recursive; it ebbs and flows. And the anxieties about population decline that it perennially marks are, likewise, reiterative—generated by all kinds of human and nonhuman forces including climate, the nature of the land itself and the way humans carve it up and use it (or don’t), war, epidemics, and fertility patterns. To the extent that it encodes anxieties about fertility and its decline, about the ebbs and flows of human demographics, about an encroaching rewilding and human resistance to wildness, folk horror will no doubt remain an important cultural genre.

Behemoth: Fertility and Extinction

I want to end with the film’s invocation of “Behemoth” as the demonic entity uncovered in the field at the beginning of the film. Critics of the film have yet to discuss the significance of the naming of the film’s deity as “Behemoth” (although see Kern Robinson’s essay in this issue). I want to suggest here that this naming is actually supportive of my argument that Satan’s Claw—and folk horror generally—is about anxiety surrounding fertility and extinction.

It is Behemoth whom Margaret invokes as she reads from the book during the sacrifice of Cathy: “Hail Behemoth, spirit of the dark, take thou my blood, my flesh, my skin, and walk. Holy Behemoth, father of my life, speak now, come now, rise now from the forest, from the furrows, from the fields, and live.”[v] Behemoth is clearly connected here to nature and, indeed, in the Biblical passages that invoke Behemoth, he is likewise very much connected to nature.

Behemoth appears in the Book of Job, as God talks to Job and tells him, “Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee” (Job 40:15). God is speaking “out of the whirlwind” (Job 40:6), and the passage in which he describes Behemoth (and later Leviathan) is, according to Biblical scholar Nicholas Ansell, “often seen as exemplifying God’s sovereign freedom in a way that functions to undermine human hubris” (99). Like nature, like encroaching vegetation, like the dissolving of form by formlessness, God in this speech, coming “from the whirlwind,” suggests the perpetual tenuousness of human order and imposed structure—the perpetual threat of wildness.

Scholars have also directly tied Behemoth to fertility, as the creature, whom some have argued appears to be a hippopotamus, is infused with phallic associations and is connected to a “fertility religion” (Ansell 106-7). Behemoth brings us back, then, to fertility—at the heart of folk horror. But Behemoth also brings us back to population decline and extinction. Some scholars have pointed out that the description in Job does not depict any creature now living. And at least one scholar has claimed that Behemoth could be a dinosaur. Simon Turpin argues that it seems clear that Behemoth is meant to be a real creature, but its description simply doesn’t fit a hippopotamus. Thus, Turpin argues, “Behemoth was a real creature that is now extinct . . . possibly a sauropod dinosaur.” Behemoth evokes, then, both fertility and extinction—anxieties that, as I have argued, get acted out both in and through the ruined St James Church in The Blood on Satan’s Claw.

Notes

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom#Vital_statistics_(1900%E2%80%932018)

[ii] Tanya Krzywinska also identifies the counter-culture as context for Satan’s Claw, writing that the film has a “transgressive appeal that would not be lost on the well-developed counter-culture” that was opposed to a “conservative middle-England” that tended to demonise “youth culture” (81). See also Hunt 92-4 and Hutchings 35-6.

[iii] See Newland (166-71), and Evans-Powell (27-51) for discussions of landscape in Satan’s Claw.

[iv] All this information about the medieval St James Church and the parish of Bix Brand is from “Rural Parishes: Bix.” For a detailed description of the church, see also Lamborn.

[v] Wynne-Simmons states that the mythology of the film was “not based on any existing folk tales or occult beliefs.” He says he was, generally, interested in “the ways that old religions has [sic] been supplanted and wiped out” (Taylor 88).

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Works Cited

Ansell, Nicholas. “‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find The(ir Wisdo)m’: Behemoth ad Leviathan in the Book of Job.” Playing with Leviathan: Interpretation and Reception of Monsters from the Biblical World, edited by Koert van Bekkum et al. Brill, 2017, pp. 90-114.

The Bible. Authorized King James Version. Oxford University Press, 1997.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon British Film Productions, 1971.

Champion, Tony, and Jane Falkingham, editors. Population Change in the United Kingdom. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

Evans-Powell, David. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Devil’s Advocates. Auteur, 2021.

Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2016.

Flyn, Cal. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape. William Collins, 2021.

Hardy, Robin, and Anthony Shaffer. The Wicker Man: A Novel. Three Rivers Press, 1978.

Hunt, Leon. “Necromancy in the UK: Witchcraft and the Occult in British Horror.” British Horror Cinema, edited by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley. Routledge, 2002, pp. 82-98.

Hutchings, Peter. “Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television.” Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 5, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 27-40.

Kirk, Joan R. “The Church of St. James, Bix Brand.” Oxoniensia, vol. 19 (1954): 121, 125.

Krzywinska, Tanya. “Lurking Beneath the Skin: British Pagan Landscapes in Popular Cinema.” Cinematic Countrysides, edited by Robert Fish. Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 75-90.

Lamborn, E. A. Greening. “The Churches of Bix.” Oxoniensia, vol. 1 (1936): 129-39.

Newland, Paul. “Folk Horror and the Contemporary Cult of British Rural Landscape: The Case of Blood on Satan’s Claw.” British Rural Landscapes on Film, edited by Paul Newland. Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 162-79.

“Rural Parishes: Bix.” A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 16, edited by Simon Townley. Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2011, pp. 196-230. British History Online. 

Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard, UK, Auteur, 2017.

Stewart, Susan. The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Taylor, David. “Don’t Overact with Your Fingers! The Making of Blood on Satan’s Claw.” Shock! The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema, edited by Stefan Jarworzyn. Titan Books, 1996, pp. 85-95.

Turpin, Simon. “Scholars and the Mystery of Behemoth.” Answers in Genesis, March 17, 2020.