Dawn Keetley
Released on April 16, 1971, Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw has become a cult classic, not least because of its absolutely central role in the emergence of British folk horror in the late 1960s and 1970s. As I note in “Defining Folk Horror,” a landmark in the history of naming folk horror is Mark Gatiss’s influential three-part BBC documentary, A History of Horror, broadcast in 2010. Haggard and his 1971 film form the basis of Gatiss’s articulation of a new kind of horror that emerged in the wake of Hammer’s Gothic productions of the 1960s. Near the end of part two, “Home Counties Horrors,” Gatiss shifts from discussing the dominant Hammer films of the 1960s to describing a “new” kind of horror film that avoids what he calls “the gothic clichés.” “Amongst these,” he claims, “are a loose collection of films that we might call folk horror.” Gatiss interviews Piers Haggard about Satan’s Claw, and Haggard says, “I suppose I was trying to make a folk horror film” (History 2010). You can see the interview here, at around 50:22.
This moment in 2010 is often cited as the origin of the term “folk horror,” although it is not. Even as we move decades earlier to discover that origin, however, Haggard and Satan’s Claw remain foundational. Indeed, Haggard himself had called his film a “folk horror” in an interview seven years before his interview with Gatiss (Simpson 2003).[i] But the term “folk horror,” with its seemingly indelible connection to Satan’s Claw, appeared still earlier than the 2003 interview. A 1970 piece in the British trade publication Kine Weekly, about the making of Satan’s Claw (then called The Devil’s Touch), dubbed Haggard’s film a “study in folk horror” (“Folk Horror Study” 12).[ii] The self-conscious use of the term to refer to a subgenre of film, then, goes back almost fifty years.
You can check out the short 1970 article in Kine Weekly here: Folk Horror Study from Hemdale, Kine Weekly, 1970.
Blood on Satan’s Claw has generally been read in terms of the repressed, youthful energies it unleashes: the devil emerges from the ground, and the young people embrace him, fleeing from the village and its dour leaders—the Judge, the doctor, the reverend—to enact pagan rituals in a ruined church in the forest. Satan’s Claw is structured by binaries—Christian/pagan, elders/youth, authority/transgression, repression/sexuality, and village/forest. Through these binaries the cultural crises of late 1960s and early 1970s Britain are mapped onto the early eighteenth century, suggesting the iterative nature of the conflicts the film portrays.
One of the first critics to write about the film, Leon Hunt argued in 2002 that the plot of Satan’s Claw and other folk horror films consists of pitting a “puritanical male authority figure” against a “Dionysian cult” (93). Hunt points out that Satan’s Claw channels the energies of the late 1960s—“the emergence of youth and ‘counter’ cultures, permissiveness, the possibility of revolution—and the backlash of the 1970s represented, in particular, by the ‘law and order’ agenda of the new [Edward] Heath government” (Hunt 92-3). Tanya Krzywinska, similarly, has identified the “transgressive appeal” of the film, “that would not be lost on the well-developed counter-culture” of the early 1970s (81).[iii] The youth cult, led by Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) may well have carried a certain “transgressive appeal,” but it was also, as Hunt notes, “ecstatically nihilistic rather than directly engaged in generational struggle” (94).
Angel Blake’s cult in the ruined church
In truth, the cult of young people in Satan’s Claw are nothing if not ambivalent—and while they may figure the “appeal” of the (dying) counter-cultural energies of the 1960s, critic David Taylor has noted that the film delves into the taboo subject of “the inherent evil of children” (86). Taylor includes extensive excerpts of his interview with writer Robert Wynne-Simmons, who told Taylor that the characters of both Margaret (Michele Dotrice) and Angel Blake had “something to do with the really weird devotion that [Charles] Manson’s followers had to him.” He was also, Wynne-Simmons said, influenced by the case of child murderer Mary Bell, a case, he added, that was “‘dealing with the dark corners of the mind’” (Taylor 88).
In our first essay, “Refractions of Mary Bell in The Blood on Satan’s Claw: Angel, Cathy, and Margaret,” David Annwn Jones pursues Wynne-Simmons’ reference to Mary Bell and reads the film through the lens of the late 1960s and early 1970s fascination with this child killer who was herself abused, made a killer. He argues that the three principal female characters of the film—Angel, Cathy, and Margaret—represent refracted parts of the public perception of Mary Bell, different facets of one person. As Jones puts it: “Angel, Cathy, and Margaret are structured within a closely-linked triad, each revealing a facet of Bell as presented in the British media.” Behemoth and the land and the village from which he comes, and which he roams, represent violence and trauma, “scarred psychological territory.” And as the film pits violence against violence, there is no resolution, just the persistence of evil.
In “The Judge with No Name and Rebels Without A Cause? Uncanny Evil in The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” Matthias Hurst also takes up the film in its sociological context of generational conflict—referencing Mary Bell but moving to the broader struggle of the young against the authority and order of their parents. Hurst also makes it clear that the impulses of revolt that structure the film are not only sociological but also operate at a psychoanalytic level, as the transgressive desires that are repressed create gaps and incoherences in the narrative of the film.
Jessica Parant of the Spinsters of Horror, in “‘Save me, Angel’: The Division of Women in The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” interrogates the distinctly gendered nature of the sociological and psychological terrain of Satan’s Claw, turning her attention to the oppressive patriarchal system that organizes the film. Like David Annwn Jones, Parant explores the three central women of Satan’s Claw—Angel, Cathy (Wendy Padbury), and Margaret—along with Mistress Isobel Banham (Avice Landone) and Mistress Ellen (Charlotte Mitchell). Parant makes the case that the film dichotomizes women into “good” and “evil,” each group defined by whether or not it submits to the dictates of the patriarchal social structure. This dichotomizing of women, moreover, inevitably turns women against each other, Parant argues, breeding suspicion and betrayal. And, indeed, most of the women in Satan’s Claw do not fare well—and often fare badly specifically at the hands of each other.
Kern Robinson picks up on the conservative elements of Blood on Satan’s Claw explored by Parant. In “‘Are you bent on reviving forgotten horrors?’: The Horned God as a Counter-Culture Figure in The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” Robinson questions the alignment of Haggard’s film and folk horror more generally with the counter-culture. Robinson reads the film’s central beast, Behemoth, in the tradition of the horned god—a figure that has historically been associated with radicalism. Satan’s Claw’s Behemoth, though, is” ineffectual, bordering on impotent,” Robinson writes. Straying from the radicalism of the horned god tradition, Behemoth likewise leads Satan’s Claw away from any easy alignment with a radical counter-culture.
In “Witchcraft and the Enlightenment in The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” Michael Cerliano explores Haggard’s film as a folk horror text, but one that pits Enlightenment reason not Christianity against witchcraft, paganism, and folk belief. The film, Cerliano argues, “identifies witchcraft as not so much a threat to the Christian order as to modernity and its philosophies and institutions.” And yet, as much as Satan’s Claw depicts Enlightenment rationalism as apparently victorious, Cerliano argues that such rationalism never can be victorious. Disenchantment always contains its opposite, evokes its opposite—the continual return of enchantment.
Paul A. J. Lewis continues the exploration of witchcraft in Satan’s Claw (which both Parant and Cerliano address), grounding his discussion in the witch hunts of a politically and religiously turbulent era in England (and with a focus on the relation of Satan’s Claw to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General).[iv] In “‘I shall use undreamed-of measures’: Authority and the Figure of the Witch-hunter in The Blood on Satan’s Claw; or, How the Judge Stamps out Radicalisation,” Lewis argues that the Judge (Patrick Wymark) is pre-eminently an “authoritarian” figure in his conviction that he knows what is best for the superstitious villagers: he knows how to judge the “innocent.” The ending of the film seems to suggest “an act of religious cleansing that is ritualistic in its fervour: a final blow against the Old Religion but also a metaphor, perhaps, of the end of the Stuart line of Catholic monarchs and the establishment of a passive constitutional monarchy, as the country moved out of a century of religious and political turmoil.” The film’s conclusion thus suggests the shift from an authoritarian society to a “new era of de-fanged authority.” But Satan’s Claw also suggests the costs of the Judge’s claiming of absolute authority: not least, in his violence, he gets aligned with the fiend itself.
In “The Building of a Hero: The Apollonian and Dionysian synthesis of ‘The Judge’ in The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” Michael Jacob takes a quite different approach to the Judge, reading him neither as an embodiment of Enlightenment rationalism nor as an authoritarian (although Jacob argues that he partakes of both, at the beginning of the film at least). Jacob argues that Satan’s Claw, and folk horror in general, is propelled by a central conflict between “Apollonian civility and Dionysian collectivism,” depicting the cost to societies that “fail to balance these archetypal energies.” The Judge, Jacob argues, begins as an Apollonian figure, but, as he learns to balance his Apollonian tendencies with his Dionysian “urge to be a part of something bigger than himself,” he manages to save both himself and become the “hero” of the village.
Satan’s Claw has become notable as a folk horror text, then, and for channeling both the counter-culture energies of the 1960s and 1970s and the turbulent religious and political conflict of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has also been discussed for its brilliant representation of the landscape. As Paul Newland puts it, “The rural landscape—shot on location—is a key aspect of Blood on Satan’s Claw” (11). In his essay, “Diabolical Demarcations: Landscape and ‘Anti-landscape’ in The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” David Evans-Powell reads Haggard’s film in the context of the changing landscape of eighteenth-century England, especially the spread of enclosure, which turned common land into privately-owned lots. Enclosure was part of a general trajectory toward what Evans-Powell calls the “classically constructed and managed landscape”—and this notion of landscape is under threat from the very beginning of the film. The fiend, Evans-Powell argues, not only emerges from the land but disrupts the fundamental distinction between managed land and wilderness, landscape and anti-landscape, disrupting in the process the ways in which such distinctions are also mapped onto bodies. (You can read more about Evans-Powell’s argument about landscape in Satan’s Claw in his 2021 book on the film.)
In “The Ruined Church in The Blood on Satan’s Claw: Fertility and Population Decline in Folk Horror,” Dawn Keetley takes up a very specific part of the landscape of Haggard’s film: the ruined church at Bix Bottom. Keetley argues that Satan’s Claw, and first-wave folk horror generally, is driven by an anxiety about demographics, about the drastically falling birth rates from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. The genre’s rituals of fertility strive to redress this anxiety, but at the same time, Keetley argues, folk horror remains riven by anxiety about population decline and “repeatedly depicted the absence of, and the threat to, the young.” Folk horror, in short, depicts “reproduction’s end.” The specific history of St James Church of Bix Brand amplifies this anxiety about migration and decline—about fertility, human extinction, and “rewilding.”
In the final essay, Lyndsay Townsend reads the materiality, the texture, of Blood on Satan’s Claw. In “Feeling the Devil’s Skin: The Sensory Affect of Fur in The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” Townsend offers a phenomenological or “sensory” approach to the film, “particularly the ways in which images onscreen can have a corporeal impact on the viewer.” Exploring texture in the film, Townsend tracks the meanings of the fur that appears from the ploughed earth and then spreads to human bodies. The presence of fur on human bodies when it should be, as Townsend puts it, “on decaying environments and on animals,” contributes to the profoundly unsettling feel of Satan’s Claw.
We hope that all fans of Blood on Satan’s Claw find something interesting–something provocative–in this special issue. Like the field in its opening scene, Piers Haggard’s film has proved fertile ground for fifty years now, and one senses there is still much more to be unburied.
[i] Jonathan Rigby also used the term “folk horror” earlier than Mark Gatiss—in his 2007 book American Gothic, to refer to the (now lost) 1923 American film Puritan Passions (37). Rigby was a consultant for Gatiss on A History of Horror.
[ii] I discovered this early reference in Kine Weekly in two short articles in the online The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television, “Folk Horror” and “Satan’s Skin.” The Encyclopedia attributes the piece to Rod Cooper, although he does not have a byline on the article itself.
[iii] On the film’s relation to late 1960s and early 1970s counter-culture, see also Taylor, who quotes writer Robert Wynne-Simmons at some length on the importance of the Manson murders and the Mary Bell case to his conception of the film (88) and Newland (168).
[iv] For an important discussion of Satan’s Claw in relation to patriarchy and witchcraft in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Harmes.
Works Cited
The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon British Film Productions, 1971.
Evans-Powell, David. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Devil’s Advocates. Auteur, 2021.
“Folk Horror.” The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television, [n.d.].
“Folk Horror Study from Hemdale and Chilton,” Kine Weekly, vol. 633, no. 3262 (1970): 12.
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 (Fall 2013): 64-80.
A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, ep. 2, “Home Counties Horror.” Directed by John Das, BBC, 18 October 2010.
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.
Keetley, Dawn. “Defining Folk Horror.” Introduction to special issue of Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, “Folk Horror,” 5 (March 2020), 1-32.
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.
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.
Rigby, Jonathan, American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema, Reynolds & Hearn, 2007.
“Satan’s Skin (1970).” The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television, [n.d.].
Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.
Simpson, M. J. “Interview: Piers Haggard,” Cult Films and the People Who Make Them, [2003] 21 November 2013.
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.
