MIND DE-CODER AND THE BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW

Spoiler alert!

“Witchcraft is dead and discredited. Are you bent on reviving forgotten horrors”? 

THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW is a classic cult British horror movie, released in the cinema in 1971. I would probably have seen it for the first time on television when I was 8 or 9 and it would have no doubt scared me rigid; when I watched a restored print released on DVD recently, considerably less so. Which is not to say that it is without its pleasures… 

The film is set in a remote rural community following the unrest of the English civil war, when witch hunts and the persecution of people believed to be in the service of the devil was at its height – as such, the film is considered one of three movies steeped in history, folklore and long-buried beliefs that constitute what writer Mark Gatiss referred to as the ‘folk-horror genre’ (the other two being the earlier Witch-Finder General (1968) and the later Wicker Man (1973), and to which I would now arguably add last year’s A Field in England). In it, the principles of rationalism and enlightenment are set against the innate paganism of the countryside and, as usual, are found wanting; or as the local doctor points out to the Judge, 'You come from the city; you cannot know the ways of the country.' 

Directed by Piers Haggard, the film opening tracks the gouging of a ploughman’s blade through rich farmland soil when out of the earth emerges a gruesome hairy skull. It promptly disappears as Ralph, the brawny ploughman rushes off to summon help, but its malevolent influence is soon felt throughout the village - people act strangely, mysterious fur patches begin growing on limbs, hysteria spreads, children retreat to the woodland deeps to conduct what are repeatedly described as “their games” – sexual violence and sacrifice (and, it must be said, bunking off school) – and it soon becomes apparent that the devil (or at least a demonic creature called Behemoth) has been resurrected and needs fresh blood to return to its full strength. The creature soon gathers a following under the leadership of Angel Blake, played by the fantastically sexy Linda Hayden, who’d last been seen playing Alice Hargood in the Hammer Horror Taste the Blood of Dracula. Patrick Wymark plays the Judge, a dour figure who represents the modern enlightened viewpoint; his cynicism is gradually replaced with a growing awareness that something monstrous has returned which he vows to fight with all the power at his disposal, which amounts to an approach not entirely dissimilar to the ethnic cleansing of the community's wayward teenagers (he’s not a character you ever actually cheer for). As the film progresses a palpable darkness envelopes the small village - something scary in an attic sends a local girl, played by the lovely Tamara Ustinov, mad and drives her fiancé to self-mutilation; the evil spreads to the local youngsters as they begin to worship something nasty in the ruins of an old church, there is a terrible rape scene, a clawed hand erupts from a wooden floor, the village priest resists an outrageously sexy seduction attempt, children begin to wander off and disappear in the woods and the innocent are reduced to madness until finally the demon is defeated and consigned to what amounts to the flames of hell, or possibly a good bonfire – either way, the forces of evil are defeated not through reason, but the traditional way, villagers armed with pitchforks and burning torches.

Sadly, however, and like so many British horror films of this era (and, yes, I’m pointing a finger at you, Dracula AD 1972), it sounds better than it actually is. Much of this is to do with the budget. The film was originally envisioned as three separate stories linked by one common theme which, having been re-written to contain just one continuous narrative, was never able to reconcile some gaping plot holes - of which there are plenty; for example, how the lovely Angel Blake changes from playful innocent to diabolic clan leader, and grows some outrageously hairy eyebrows (a sure sign she’s gone over to the dark side) without anyone noticing – but the biggest disappointment must be the film’s finale when the Judge confronts the children in the midst of their final satanic ritual to give life to the demon, and the demon is finally revealed. I think it was at this point that the film finally ran out of money – what should have been a climactic scene of mass hysteria, panic and horror played out in a disused church illuminated by flickering flames casting a confusion of shadows and snatched frozen images over the intended carnage can only be described, with the best will in the world, as lame. I understand that Haggard envisioned something entirely apocalyptic with militiamen gunning down the children and throwing their bodies into mass graves, thus underlying the theme of the Judge’s uncompromising modernist rigidity with something approaching a tyrant’s organized plan for the ethnic cleansing of heathen paganism. What you actually get is a bit of shuffling about with no one looking as if they quite know what they're doing; demonic acolyte Angel conveniently walks onto a sword that’s vaguely in her way; and the demon is more or less prodded into the awaiting flames with a stick. And, ah, yes, of course, this brings us to the big reveal – the demon itself, around which all the unspeakable going’s on revolve - a papier mâché mask with all the malefic presence of something your child made at school for Halloween, justly hidden beneath the folds of an encompassing cowl, bizarrely hopping around on one foot giving it all the ghastly authority of what one critic memorably called a carpet with legs. A truly terrible disappointment, but one which Haggard was simply unable to fix.

It must be said (that is to say – by me) that what particularly lets the film down is that no one responds properly to the events unfolding around them. When the young groom-to-be is alone in the spooky dark attic where just the night before his fiancé was driven mad by some unknown horror, and a clawed hand bursts from beneath the floor boards and grapples with his leg, he doesn’t flee from the room so fast that he actually leaves his shadow behind (as, for example, and I don’t think I’m wrong in supposing that I wouldn’t be entirely alone in this, I would), he merely responds with what can only be called mild consternation, pulls a trunk over the spot and, satisfied that he’s dealt with incident, promptly blows his candle out and climbs into bed! What happens next, otherwise known as the chopping-his-own-hand-off scene, serves him right, in my opinion. Likewise, in one of the film’s more eye-popping scenes, designed to make even the most hardened audience wince, a young girl is held down while a hairy patch of skin is removed from her thigh with a razor blade; but rather than scream so loud that owners of the bowling alley down the road would feel compelled to ring up and politely ask them all to keep the noise down, she responds with the merest of whimpers, as if the protagonists are, I don’t know, combing out some particularly troublesome dread-locks; and don’t even get me started on the mother who, walking through the woods is waylaid by a child who laughingly informs her that her son has been killed – you’d think, by her reaction, he was telling her that the kitten had gotten out the house again. Like the film’s dénouement, nobody reacts the way they ought. I spend half the film wanting to scream: “Why don’t you respond properly!? Where’s your grief, your anger, your fear? You’re not making sense!” (Maybe it’s just a 70’s acting style - having just recently watched Charlie Brooker’s terrific zombie-fest Dead Set, I’m pleased to note that actors have rather got the hang of responding properly these days).

None of this is to suggest that there isn’t much to admire about the film. The cinematography, for example, is gorgeous. The majority of the film was shot on location in a valley in the Chiltern Hills, a chalk escarpment in Southeast England, beautifully captured on camera by cinematographer Dick Bush, grounding the film in a believable bucolic setting where the local’s deep connection to the land is never in doubt. Likewise, the film comes with a suitably unsettling score by Marc Wilkinson, who based his music on other orchestral works which depicted the Devil in musical form and used a thirteen note descending pattern in the score (the soundtrack is available from the fairly wonderful Trunk Records - in the sleeve notes it mentions that Wilkinson subsequently gave crucial advice to Paul Giovanni who had been commissioned to score The Wicker Man). And despite the considerations listed above, the Blood on Satan’s Claw has a handful of scenes that stick in the mind long after the film has finished. No one who’s seen the film will be able to forget Angel Blake’s attempted seduction of village priest, the Reverend Fallowfield – it’s one of the most erotic sequences ever filmed in a British horror movie – made all the more sensational given Hayden was only 17 at the time (it certainly produced unfamiliar if not entirely unpleasant stirrings in this 9 year old viewer). Equally memorable is the scene in which that insane bride-to-be I mentioned earlier is led downstairs from the spooky attic, horrified speechless but with a deliriously unsettling grin fixed to her face that must have given Reece Shearsmith an idea or two following his own subjection to some unspeakable horror in Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (more on that another day).  But the film’s truly harrowing scene is the rape of a young girl by what appears to be her dead brother while the entire cult (plus two aged pensioners who appear to have wandered into the wrong film but nevertheless seem to be enjoying themselves enormously) look upon her genuinely fearful face with pitiless relish, chanting some hellish liturgy before Angel stabs her to death with some shearing scissors. Even today this is not a scene that’s easy to watch, though in fairness to the whole incest/necrophilia thing, the scene was shifted at the censor’s suggestion to give the rape a contextual focus. 

The film also enjoys a certain hauntological sensibility; with key cast members taking up many of my childhood memories. The young teenage rape victim was played by Wendy Padbury, a former Doctor Who assistant who went on to reprise her role of the second Doctor’s assistant, Zoe Herriot, in the 1983 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors. In fact, actor Anthony Ainley, who played hapless clergyman, Reverend Fallowfield, went on to play The Master in the same series in 1981 (one of the proper bearded ones with the gleefully satanic beards). Padbury’s mother was played by Michele Dotrice was soon to become a sitcom legend as Betty in Some Mothers Do Ave ‘Em, and her brother, played by Robin Davies, would later go on to appear in cult children’s classic Catweazle, and alongside Wendy Craig in …And Mother Makes Four, and, indeed …Five; and I’m pretty certain the future Eddie Yates of Coronation Street fame was caught on camera wielding a burning torch – like I say, they’re all over my childhood television watching.

So what you get is a flawed classic; a peculiarly unsettling folk horror tale that taps into the darkness of local legends in the rural English countryside and the forces of enlightenment that struggle to suppress them. It is, by turns, erotically charged, plain silly and shockingly remorseless in its depiction of violence and rape (in this it draws inspiration from the true-life crimes of the Charles Manson family and Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old murderess who earned front page headlines in England in 1968). It lacks any kind of conventional hero; Ralph the ploughman is too underdeveloped and so the Judge, with his rigid beliefs and dour manner, becomes the villagers' saviour by default, but it’s very hard to side with him – in some ways the demon/god Behemoth (or the essence of what he represents, not the rubbish primary school papier mâché project he was presented as) exists as a vital distillation of the folklore and long-buried beliefs that make up the English rural psyche, and in doing so seems more alive than the Judge’s  worldview.  In many ways it’s the perfect cult movie, rarely seen but one which nevertheless bears repeated viewing, late at night, when you’re a little bit high, and looking for something superbly atmospheric to lose yourself in.