A Fiend in the Furrows: ‘The Blood on Satan’s Claw’
By Luke Beale
Films most strongly associated with the sub-genre known as ‘folk horror’ are probably The Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man. 1971’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw is sometimes mentioned alongside those two but is perhaps still the lesser seen of the three. It’s a grimier, muddier film, and one of my favourites of the genre.
The Blood on Satan’s Claw is set in the rural countryside of 1680’s England, and centres on the slow corruption of a community by an ancient beast, who plans to rebuild his body by harvesting the skin of children. It was originally conceived as a portmanteau of three separate stories linked together by the unearthing of devilish skeletal remains. However, the director Piers Haggard eventually forged these three together into one film. Through an analytical lens, you can still see the joins where some characters drift in and out of the plot, including the central character played by Patrick Wymark, for whom this was his last film. But through an emotional lens, the strange pacing benefits the film by heightening the uncomfortable and eerie atmosphere.
Unlike The Wicker Man or The Witchfinder General, witchcraft and devilry are very real in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Witchcraft is not presented as mere paranoia but as a real threat to society buried not so deep under English soil. What is interesting about this film — and folk horror more broadly — is how the fear of ordinary folk and the fear of the countryside are entangled. In the film, it’s children who are first corrupted by the beast, who they refer to as Behemoth. The film’s most controversial scene, where a young girl is raped and murdered by young people in service of Behemoth, could be viewed as a dark reflection of the 1960s sexual liberation, as seen through the older generations’ fear of those changes. But the film’s themes are not so simple as a clash of values between young and old. The Blood on Satan’s Claw also presents this evil beast as something ancient, fundamentally linked to the countryside and to the earth itself. This is a country where evil spirits lurk at the edges of rotting woodland, the soil is ripe with decay, and both old and young are subject to corruption.
Speaking of corruption…Patrick Wymark plays The Judge, who is as close to a protagonist as this film gets despite being absent from the middle section of the film. At first, he is sceptical as to the re-emergence of witchcraft, long thought defeated, but on realising Behemoth may be real, he abandons the village for London. His plan is to allow this ‘fiend’ to fully emerge before returning and destroying it, knowing full well that this could involve the deaths of multiple children. Even the least corruptible character Ralph, played by Barry Andrews, eventually develops the ‘devil’s skin’: patches of bloody fur on his body with which Behemoth plans to re-forge his unholy body. Ralph is the moral centre of the film as he attempts to save various people both from the influence of witchcraft and from the local villagers’ attacks on those accused of being witches. In the film’s climax, Ralph almost succumbs to Behemoths’ murderous influence, only to be saved at the last minute by the returning Judge. If this is victory, however, it is one born from murder, deliberate neglect, and flames. The final shot is of the Judge’s eyes peering through the fire which has consumed the beast.
The muddy morals of the film are cleverly echoed and enhanced by how it was filmed. Many of the shots are from incredibly low angles, for which they had to dig holes in the ground to place the cameras. This helps us feel as if we are half buried among the dirt and worms of the furrows, seeing the world from the eyes of whatever is buried there. As in giallo or slasher films, when the camera is used from the villain’s perspective, we as the audience feel almost complicit in their crimes. As voyeurs, we can feel disturbed and powerful at the same time seeing through the eyes of a villain. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, it is not clear whether we are seeing the world directly through the eyes of Behemoth. But an early low camera shot peering up at Ralph is directly followed by his discovery of a hideous skull half buried in the ground, complete with a close-up of its still-intact eye staring back at us. This gives a similar effect to a direct point-of-view shot, dragging us down into the mud and soil of the evil concealed beneath the field.
The late 1960s and early 70s in England were characterised by racist pushback against immigration, attacks by the government on labour unions, rising unemployment, bloody violence in Northern Ireland, strikes by women’s liberation groups, anti-Vietnam protests, and fears of environmental collapse. It wasn’t all this gloomy, but it’s often considered a dark decade in England. Out of this came some fairly bleak films like this one, A Clockwork Orange, The Devils, Don’t Look Now, and The Wicker Man, to name but a few. Films like these perhaps reflected the mood of the country at the time. The Blood on Satan’s Claw’s eerie atmosphere, muddy morals, low camera angles, and the English setting combine to reflect that dark period. More than that though, these films seem to imply that there is something rotten at the heart of England.
“How is our glorious country ploughed? Not by iron ploughs. How is our glorious country ploughed? Not by iron ploughs. Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet, feet marching” — PJ Harvey, ‘This Glorious Land’
Post-WWII Britain saw a large rise in immigration. One main reason for this was to help rebuild the country after the war. People from the Caribbean, Poland, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, East Africa, and many more made a huge contribution to helping Britain recover. However, there was a backlash to this rise in immigration, perhaps most famously captured by the racism of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968. Although he was immediately fired, his sentiments were echoed by many white English people. The racism that many immigrants faced (and continue to face) is no doubt tied up with England’s history of colonialism and slavery. England’s past is a bloody one and difficult to reckon with today, but whether or not it is faced directly, it continues to affect the present. It’s in the woodlands, it’s on the moors, and it’s planted in the soil. This history is what I think of when I watch The Blood on Satan’s Claw, arriving as it did in 1971.
It would surprise me if the filmmakers were intentionally linking the evil lurking beneath the soil with England’s colonialism. But like many folk horror films, The Blood on Satan’s Claw deals with some hidden or forgotten violence — a fiend beneath the furrows. This evil in folk horror is often implied to be ancient or linked to the land itself. The term ‘folk horror’ has mostly been used retrospectively to group films like this together and started to gain prevalence after a Fangoria interview with Piers Haggard in 2004. “As this was a story about people subject to superstitions about living in the woods, the dark poetry of that appealed to me… I was trying to make a folk-horror film, I suppose.” Although The Witchfinder General and Wicker Man are more famous, The Blood on Satan’s Claw gained more of a following after being highlighted by Mark Gatiss in his 2010 series A History of Horror. The disturbing rape-murder scene may be one reason that it doesn’t quite have the following of the others, but it is now often included as part of an ‘unholy trinity.’
This film really captures the essence of folk horror. And as an Englishman, it reminds me how England often tills her fields through blood, colonialism, and war. There is no escape from what we have buried, and its half-decayed face will be forever staring back up at us. The beautiful ideal of the English countryside with neat hedgerows and happy farmers is in many ways a fantasy. Everyone in England either benefits from or is haunted by this bloody history, whether they like to admit it or not. It can be uncomfortable sitting through the darkest scenes in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, but perhaps there is value in not always sitting comfortably. If there is an evil lurking in England’s soil, we all have dirt under our fingernails. 🩸
