I’ve already had the pleasure of writing at length about one of my all-time favourite films for this website’s anniversary retrospective series, when in 2012 I wrote about The Last House on the Left’s 40th anniversary. Time goes on and now I’m very excited to have the pleasure of commemorating 45 years of another of my set-in-stone favourites: Blood on Satan’s Claw. 45 years on from its release, it still stands proudly as one of the finest examples of the British ‘folk horror’ cycle alongside its infamous stablemate Witchfinder General and the one everyone’s seen, The Wicker Man.
There’s a history in Britain for committing great, incomprehensible violence toward individuals who were believed to associate with the devil, and this history has been mined in its horror cinema. In the ‘folk horror’ tradition, there’s broadly two sorts of film in which the recollection of this past appears. While films like The Wicker Man or Satan’s Slave use the invocation of this past Britain in a contemporary setting, often resulting in the triumph of archaic ritual in a contemporary setting, others are explicitly period-set, like Blood on Satan’s Claw, a past Britain providing a safe space to explore the nastier implications of devil worship, and often ending with the devil defeated, at least arbitrarily. Blood on Satan’s Claw is one of the finest examples of these films, in my opinion, primarily due to its wonderful atmosphere of creeping evil. The Judge aside, the film is primarily interested in the way the evil spreads in the village, rather than the quest to stamp it out – those villagers who begin in fear are discredited at almost every turn – or end up dead...
There’s a history in Britain for committing great, incomprehensible violence toward individuals who were believed to associate with the devil, and this history has been mined in its horror cinema. In the ‘folk horror’ tradition, there’s broadly two sorts of film in which the recollection of this past appears. While films like The Wicker Man or Satan’s Slave use the invocation of this past Britain in a contemporary setting, often resulting in the triumph of archaic ritual in a contemporary setting, others are explicitly period-set, like Blood on Satan’s Claw, a past Britain providing a safe space to explore the nastier implications of devil worship, and often ending with the devil defeated, at least arbitrarily. Blood on Satan’s Claw is one of the finest examples of these films, in my opinion, primarily due to its wonderful atmosphere of creeping evil. The Judge aside, the film is primarily interested in the way the evil spreads in the village, rather than the quest to stamp it out – those villagers who begin in fear are discredited at almost every turn – or end up dead...
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