Michael Cerliano
Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) is a quintessential folk horror film, often grouped with Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) as part of an “unholy trinity.” Adam Scovell identifies a number of key features shared by these three films in particular, and by folk horror more generally: a focus on landscape and isolation, a depiction of a “skewed belief system or morality,” and a summoning or other supernatural event (17-18). Haggard’s film contains all these elements, depicting the literal upturning of buried evil when local ploughman Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews) uncovers the physical remains of Satan while working in a field. This unearthing leads to an eruption of witchcraft and demonic possession in the community, as local schoolgirl-turned-coven-leader Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) and her followers resurrect the devil piece by piece, cutting apart selected victims who have been marked with the growth of Satan’s skin (and fur, claws, and hooves, in some cases) upon their bodies. This cult is ultimately foiled by a London judge (Patrick Wymark), who assembles a massive cross/sword hybrid to impale Satan before casting him onto a fire.
Despite hitting the high points of folk horror, however, The Blood on Satan’s Claw is distinct from other examples of the subgenre in the manner in which it frames its central conflict. Throughout the film, the struggle depicted is not one of Christianity against witchcraft or folk religion but rather of Enlightenment rationalism and modernity against witchcraft and, to a somewhat lesser extent, against Christianity. The film’s depiction of witchcraft is complicated throughout, portraying it as both unnatural and in tune with nature, destructive and liberatory, repulsive and alluring. At the same time, the film avoids emphasizing a conflict between witchcraft and Christianity and instead foregrounds the Judge, whose ambivalence about witchcraft is joined with a disdain for what he sees as the general backwardness of country life, whether it be Pagan or Christian. In effect, the film identifies witchcraft as not so much a threat to the Christian order as to modernity and its philosophies and institutions, demonstrating the complexities of disenchantment and re-enchantment within a changing society.
Consider the film’s setting: rural England in the early eighteenth century, roughly the time of the first Jacobite uprising. The Judge toasts to “his Catholic Majesty King James III,” expressing his wish that “God bless him and keep him in exile” before punctuating (and puncturing) his statement with an ironic tossing of his glass over his shoulder. This is not the more familiar world of Hammer horror, with its Victorian gothic milieu of occult revivalism, but rather the era of peak disenchantment, where old beliefs, like old regimes, are worth little more than a brief ceremonial acknowledgement before being chucked aside. Indeed, as Michael Hunter writes in The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment, the Judge’s attitude is fully in keeping with mainstream eighteenth-century thinking. According to Hunter, although the eighteenth century is a relatively pluralistic era regarding beliefs about magick, witchcraft, and the supernatural, there were increasingly prominent skeptics even within traditions that historically believed in the reality of unseen forces, including medicine, the church, and the state.
The Reverend Fallowfield finds and categorizes a snake
The Judge’s interactions with the villagers reinforce his status as the embodiment of the educated opinion of his time. Throughout his early encounters with the locals, the Judge cannot conceal his dislike of their rural ways. When we first see him, dabbing his mouth after a hearty meal and barely concealing a smirk while Ralph tells him of the discovery in the fields, he tells the young man to report his finding to the authorities, his voice dripping with condescension. “You see, my dear Isobel,” he says to his host, “the way these old superstitions die hard,” as if Ralph were not standing right in front of him while the Judge shares a chuckle with his audience. When he first meets the dryly intellectual Reverend Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley), the Judge can only muster a sarcastic “Aha,” while witnessing the curate’s excitement on collecting a snake specimen. Upon the possession of Rosalind (Tamara Ustinov), the fiancée of local squire Peter (Simon Williams), the Judge eschews contacting religious authorities and instead announces that she will be institutionalized. Evil itself is a “fancy” according to him. And he scoffs at the very idea of witchcraft, telling the local doctor and demonologist that “witchcraft is dead and discredited.” Again and again, the Judge does two things when witnessing something strange or encountering a problem: he invokes the intervention of increasingly professionalized civil authorities as a solution or he takes a moment to mock beliefs and practices he views as superstitious, whether Christian or Pagan.
Despite the Judge’s stance, the film doesn’t ultimately take the side of pure rationalism, even as the Judge is ostensibly the film’s hero. Indeed, it is not until he opens himself up to the reality of these “superstitions” that the Judge is able to confront and defeat them. A turning point in the film is when the Judge heeds the doctor’s (Howard Goorney) earlier words that he has to understand the “ways of the country,” and he departs for London with a text on magick and demons, taking the beliefs and practices of rural England to the metropole. This ultimately proves to be the way forward for the judge, who returns and uses his new knowledge in his fight against the outbreak of witchcraft, even as he continues to express skepticism toward the existence of devils or supernatural forces. Though rationalism and modernity win out, they are shown to have limitations that cannot be overcome without an openness to those practices and ideas deemed “superstitious,” and they cannot win without absorbing some of what they fight against. Again, this hearkens back to Hunter’s conclusions about Enlightenment-era pluralism. The issue of magick’s existence and efficacy was contested, but not an entirely settled issue.
Consequently, the film’s depiction of witchcraft is also complicated: on the one hand, the film never shies away from depicting the cruel and evil actions carried out by the coven, including the rape and murder of sacrificial victims from outside the community. At the same time, the film avoids presenting the coven as made up entirely of fundamentally evil people and instead offers some implicit explanation for why so many members of the community–particularly young people–find the movement so appealing.
Some of the appeal can be traced back to the decline of spiritual institutions under modernity. For instance, during Reverend Fallowfield’s Sunday school classes, the students fidget in their seats, gripped alternately by boredom and by a fascination with a demonic claw concealed in a pouch. The sermon is dry and bloodless, even when the subject concerns sex, and the church building itself is plain and grim, with dull gray walls. It looks more like a holding cell than a place meant to excite religious fervor. By contrast, the coven’s meetings are vibrant, with chanting, singing, and ritual, and are quite literally the opposite of bloodless. Moreover, they take place in an abandoned and ruined church that has been overtaken by foliage, an image in keeping with the film’s mise-en-scène, which sees soil and plant life associated with witchcraft, most notably in the flower garlands adorning Angel in her role as head of the coven (probably the most iconic image from the film). In both cases, spiritual matters are handled within a country church, but the “official” church appears desolate and appears to mostly function as a civil institution; by contrast, the ruined church where the coven meets is full of the strange beauty, terror, and religious ecstasy missing from the young people’s lives.
Angel in the church in the forest, surrounded by nature
But we must remember that, despite these apparent contrasts, the film does not make much of an effort to pit Paganism and Christianity against each other. If anything, it’s never shown to be much of a fight: once witchcraft begins to spread in the community, it quickly overtakes the local youth without much resistance. Instead, the spread of pagan belief can be seen as the reaction of the young people to the erasure of traditional ways of life by modernity. Fallowfield’s interest in amateur naturalism may not itself be the direct cause of a witchcraft epidemic, but his clinical approach to life appears to color his interactions with others, including his handling of spiritual matters. Despite Angel’s role as the leader of the coven, we do not get the impression that she adopts this role out of some character flaw; in fact, when we see her prior to her possession, she seems popular and well-regarded by her peers in the community. Given the sexism expressed by the Judge, who frequently warns against “the wiles of women,” one surmises that witchcraft offers her something different than the path otherwise laid out for her. Angel also shares with the Judge a complex relationship to that which she opposes, as seen when she calls the reverend an “old pagan” after he rejects her sexual and spiritual advances. If we take this use to be in the sense of “rustic” or “country dweller,” it seems that Angel has inherited an Enlightenment-style disdain for outmoded ideas and practices, a fact which invites us to see the adoption of witchcraft by the community as a consequence of the rationalism that has leveled traditional institutions. It also invites us to see the coven as a movement defined by the era from which it emerges; in effect, it is a new religious movement, both a product of the Enlightenment and a set of ideas and practices in opposition to it.
The film also challenges us to consider where our sympathies lie, and how we as viewers respond to this dialectic. One such instance can be found in the scene where a coven member, Margaret (Michele Dotrice), is pursued and tossed into a lake by a local mob, only to be rescued by Ralph. We know that Margaret is a witch, and that she has been party to some of the coven’s worst actions. Yet, we don’t cheer what happens to her, and the film doesn’t expect us to. The mob are typical local yokels, and the film’s visual and sonic elements invite us to feel empathy for her and disgust for her attackers. Repeatedly, Satan’s Claw complicates readings of the characters as heroes or villains, and instead invites us to witness the struggle of the Enlightenment and its discontents.
Although the film ultimately stands against the coven, it does well in subtly depicting the contradictions of an era of supposedly triumphant rationalism. Neither the Judge nor Angel–rationalism nor Paganism–can meaningfully exist without each other. The process of disenchantment is ultimately a failure, because it always carries within itself the possibility of re-enchantment, and in particular a re-enchantment in explicit opposition to the very forces of which it is a product. The Blood on Satan’s Claw, itself a product of the occult-obsessed milieu of the 1970s, cannot truly depict the triumph of rationalism over magick because there is no such triumph.
In the final scene, Haggard makes use of techniques not used earlier in the film, such as slow motion and freeze-frame, which have an unsettling effect on the narrative. Like so much else in the film, this final scene complicates the supposed resolution of the narrative, and we are left not with a feeling of triumph, but of uncertainty. Angel is dead, accidentally impaled while trying to flee, and the coven members look on in grief as their master is consigned to the flames. In the final shot of the film, we see a close-up of the Judge’s face as he watches the Devil burn, impaled and tossed into a fire. He has no dialogue, but his facial expression changes from determination and range to a kind of wonder as the flames rise higher. The credits roll on another freeze-frame of his left eye peeking through the flames, as if he is also on fire. Even in its apparently dying moments, magick possesses the power to unsettle, subvert, and through its persistence in a supposedly comfortably rationalist age, a kind of victory in the ashes of defeat.
Works Cited
The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon British Film Productions, 1971.
Hunter, Michael. The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment. Yale University Press, 2020.
Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.
