The Blood on Satan's Claw
Piers Haggard
Initial release:
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| images c/o Filmgrab |
Horror cinema from the 60s to the early 70s seems to be largely schlock. We can certainly point to Hammer and American International Pictures (especially Roger Corman’s work for the latter) for their contributions to that. But sometimes you find something that stands out… or tries to, anyway. Coming from the same studio as Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General, and in fact reusing a few elements of it, Piers Haggard's The Blood on Satan’s Claw certainly has a Hammer horror vibe to the title (despite being a Tigon production), but it strives somewhat unsuccessfully to be a more cerebral horror film.
A simple groundskeeper in a tiny English village stumbles upon a fearsome, inhuman corpse while plowing a field. After fetching a skeptical judge, he returns to find the corpse missing. Later, some of the local kids find unaccounted-for bones and play with them; the adults soon notice the children beginning to act strange. Evoking the 1960 classic Village of the Damned, the local kids, just a few at first but growing in number, begin to confound the adults, especially the local reverend during his scripture classes. The ringleader seems to be a young blonde named Angel — naturally. Eventually the kids start getting up to ever more sinister games, pulling a few of the adults into it and committing gruesome sacrifices. In addition, several of them have begun exhibiting strange patches of fur and diseased skin, revealed to be the skin of Satan himself.
Once Satan is complete, supposedly, he’ll be unstoppable — but he needs that
skin, which is mostly unconvincing dog fur glued to the actors, pretty
much. In the meantime, the kids do even worse stuff, such as trying to
seduce the reverend and performing a little bit of ritual rape. Gross! Ultimately, the judge is finally convinced that something evil is going
down, and comes back and slays Satan at the last moment, with a sword
that looked more like aluminum than steel. With that, the movie ends.
It’s… a bit of a mess.
In between subplots that go nowhere (an early sequence involves the early male lead’s girlfriend going insane, and then his aunt disappears without a trace and is never found — neither character matters) and gleefully exploitative scenes of the kind 1970s horror worldwide reveled in is a film that falls well short of the mark of seriousness. If there’s a high point to the film, it’s the soundtrack, which ventures far from the traditionalism of Witchfinder General to something more mysterious and unusual, befitting the rural horror vibe the film exudes. Unlike the rest of the film, it stands out.
Ultimately
I can’t really recommend the film. While it's an interesting waypoint on the long track of folk horror from its origins in folklore through genre pioneers like 1957's Night of the Demon to culminate in the modern revival that gave us Robert Eggers' The VVitch, Satan's Claw is overall too aggressively
exploitative and derivative, even if the kids are menacing (especially
Angel) and the camera work is better than you’d expect. Stick with Witchfinder General. or Village of the Damned, even.
-june❤