By Nia Edwards-Behi
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.
In rural 18th Century England, a farm worker, Ralph (Barry Andrews), uncovers a strange skull while ploughing a field. Soon, villagers begin to act strangely, starting with Rosalind (Tamara Ustinov), fiancée of the farm’s young master, Peter (Simon Williams). The discovery of the skull primarily seems to affect the village’s children, led by Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) – though some, such as Cathy Vespers (Wendy Padbury) remain good. Ralph insists that the local judge (Patrick Wymark) investigate the evil that seems to be taking over, but he remains sceptical until people begin dying. Once Peter convinces the Judge of the truth of the matter, he must return to the village to do battle with evil itself.
It almost goes without saying that Linda Hayden is an enormously important part of Blood on Satan’s Claw’s enduring appeal. While I’m about to embark on a verbose, over-wrought account of just how clever and interesting the film is, it’s really quite important to point out that Angel Blake is simply one of the best villains in British horror cinema, and that reflects on the film as a whole. Leon Hunt has described the character as ‘Lolita from Hell’, which sums her up perfectly. We barely glimpse Angel before she comes into contact with the claw which seemingly turns her evil, but there is enough suggestion that she’s always been a bit wayward – from her toying with Mark when we first meet her, and the Reverend’s assertion that her behaviour has seemed odd for quite some time. The sort of power Angel soon asserts over the other children – and indeed some of the adults – could easily have been rendered unconvincing, to the complete detriment of the film, if not for Hayden’s masterful performance. Although she is no doubt hugely exploited for her sex appeal and her burgeoning star persona, Hayden brings much more than seduction to the role of Angel, even if that is her main draw. Indeed, there are certain shots in the film – close-up on Angel’s face, as she seems to will wrong-doing to others – that seem to explicitly recall the most famous photo of the then very recent child-murderer Mary Bell. While I don’t want to claim that this must have been intentional, I’m certainly not the first to draw a line from Blood on Satan’s Claw to much more contemporary concerns.
As much as I adore the film, it’s fair to say that its somewhat troubled production shows in the finished product. Written by Robert Wynne-Simmons and directed by Piers Haggard for Tony Tenser’s Tigon Productions, Blood on Satan’s Claw was originally intended to be an anthology film. This is most evident when Rosalind and Peter’s plotline is seemingly forgotten about early on in the film, until Peter plays messenger near the film’s climax. It’s also evident that the production ran out of money – as seen in the film’s climactic showdown stretched out with slow-motion and then abruptly ending. Wynne-Simmons’ original script supposedly ended with an outright massacre, with the Judge forced to kill many villagers, including children, but the budgetary constraints result in a somewhat less spectacular climax to the film. Even so, the film manages to be extremely interesting, even in the face of creative and financial complications.
If there is to be an attempt at wiping out evil, the quest to do so naturally needs a figurehead. A lot of British horror films during the 50s and 60s would feature an obvious hero to save the day against some supernatural evil, even if the hero figure wasn’t always the most interesting part of the film. However, as with the horror genre as a whole, things were changing throughout the 1960s and indeed by the 1970s there were plentiful examples of heroes not always emerging triumphant. A prime example would be Witchfinder General, which, having positioned the witchfinder himself as evil rather than the so-called witches, finds its hero in noble soldier Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy). But, though heroic in his ostensible defeat of Hopkins, he pays dearly with his own sanity, and likely that of his traumatised fiancée too. It’s not clear who the hero might be in Blood on Satan’s Claw, in part due to the aforementioned changes in script during production. Many characters seem set-up to be the ‘hero’ of the film – there’s Ralph, the nice young man who loses the girl he loves to the demon and resists its influence to the end, or Peter, a man returning home to introduce his fiancée to his family. Arguably the film’s clearest hero-figure is sceptical authority figure The Judge, as he seems to destroy the demon at the film’s climax. However, the finality of his apparent success is very subtly undermined thanks to some crafty filmmaking. While the opening scene presents us with an uncanny close-up of an eye still in the socket of the strange skull unearthed by Ralph, so the film ends with a close-up of The Judge’s eye, surrounded by the flames of the fire that we assume is consuming the demon.
To further underline the film’s concluding ambiguity, we only need turn an ear to the soundtrack. Marc Wilkinson’s score is one of my absolute favourite things about the film, and it really manages to amp-up the impact of everything that happens on screen. There are two distinct leitmotifs that occur again and again in the film: the gentle pastoral melody that sounds like a folk song – but isn’t, according to its composer – and the chromatic scale that plays over it. When the film ends, on the still image of The Judge’s eye, that chromatic scale, which sounds a lot to me like a laugh, is still chuckling away, and indeed once the credits have finished rolling – and with the eye still on-screen – that scale is all that remains on the soundtrack. Wynne-Simmons has himself noted that he considered the demonic character to be more ‘alive’ than The Judge, who essentially represents an archaic sense of authority. For the sense of evil to transfer or persist to The Judge at the film’s close isn’t, I don’t think, too much of a leap.
There’s another scene in the film in which the music plays a very key role, and it’s perhaps the film’s most effective, memorable and troubling scene: the rape and murder of Cathy Vespers. Cathy, played by Wendy Padbury, is the film’s ‘good girl’ – she’s religious, cares for her family and is giddy about the burgeoning romance between her and Ralph. She is sweetness embodied, but her sweetness does not save her. While in the American horror tradition that would emerge later in the decade the virginal Cathy would undoubtedly be the survivor of the film, in Blood on Satan’s Claw her downfall is a troubling conflation of sex and violence. Horror, by now, is perhaps one of the most obvious arenas which sees sex and violence frequently combined, but what stands out in Blood on Satan’s Claw is the sheer joyfulness of a scene of a most heinous act. Unlike the earlier murder of Cathy’s brother Mark, Cathy’s death is ritualistic and painfully drawn out – we sense she’s in real danger much earlier than she does, and even when she does she’s truly helpless. What makes the sequence really effective is the children’s glee in the act, and the complicity it invites in the viewer. The music in the scene turns triumphant and celebratory, and plays a great role in inviting viewer complicity with the mood. I’m not trying to suggest that the scene invites the viewer to replicate the feelings of enjoyment of the girl’s rape and murder; rather, the scene is precisely all the more disturbing because of its depiction of the act as a happy one for the children – it’s the moment their ecstatic nihilism (to borrow from Leon Hunt) is at its most profound. The scene best brings together all of the more serious aspects of the film, which is perhaps put best and most concisely by Wynne-Simmons himself, when he describes the film as being about “the inherent evil of children and the overt sexuality of evil”.
For me, it’s impossible to consider the depiction of sex or violence in a film like this without considering the representation of gender. Although Linda Hayden’s sex appeal is exploited as much as her acting talents, Angel Blake is arguably a strong female character, in that she is at least an incredibly memorable villain (and only slightly undermined by the fact that the arguably ‘male’ devil is using her as a vessel for destruction). The representations of women might not have been wholly progressive, but films such as Blood on Satan’s Claw do offer a degree of subversion. The sheer number of significant female characters important – in addition to Angel and Cathy, Margaret (Michelle Dotrice) is a vital part of the picture, and Rosalind is at least as memorable as several of the male characters, even if her appearance is brief.
It would be unfair to simply think of the representation of women in these films: as I’ve touched upon, the heroic male should normally save the day, but the representation of masculinity is much more nuanced. When considering Blood on Satan’s Claw alongside its stablemates, it’s worth noting a certain degree of impotency in would-be heroes of many of these films. Specifically, though, consider Ralph: he is unable to save Cathy, searching fruitlessly for her as she’s attacked and killed, and he then fails in his attempt at saving Margaret as some sort of recompense. He then finds himself afflicted with the devil’s skin, attempts to avoid his fate by cowering in the seemingly doomed attic, and would surely have fallen foul of Angel’s merry band of devils had The Judge not intervened. Similarly, Peter is rendered mostly useless in the film, right from the very beginning, emasculated by his aunt and The Judge, losing his fiancée, chopping off his own hand in a fit of bedevilment and from then on reduced to more or less standing around for the rest of the film. Indeed, The Judge is the only powerful male character in the film – other figures of authority throughout the film either undermined or light relief – and even his victory is rendered somewhat futile through the implication of his own evil. Even if Ralph and the surviving children are freed from the devil’s control in that moment, what awaits them at the hands of The Judge?
Like many of its genre-mates of the period, there is an element of generational conflict apparent in Blood on Satan’s Claw. Seemingly reflecting the social changes of the era, these films frequently represent an over-bearing older generation forcing a rebellion from children. Peter Hutchings has written about the youth of the filmmakers at this time – most famously, of course, the tragic Michael Reeves, only 24 when he made Witchfinder General, and indeed younger when he made The Sorcerers, a film much more overtly about generational conflict. Piers Haggard was only 31 when he directed Blood on Satan’s Claw, while writer Wynne-Simmons had only just left university. For Hutchings, these films were evidence of dissatisfaction amongst young filmmakers with traditional forms of horror, which he also associates with the changes that occurred in American horror around the same time. He identifies a particular sense of patriarchy within the British horror tradition, which makes this rebellion, of sorts, all the more marked in Britain. While the most obvious evidence of this sense of generational conflict in Blood on Satan’s Claw is in the children, early on there is quite a distinctly overbearing sense of tradition established quite apart from any satanic influence.
When Peter brings Rosalind home to his aunt and The Judge, they out-right reject their union. Rosalind is horribly treated by them, and when her screaming starts their immediate response to simply lock her up – she is only a farmer’s daughter, after all – rather than try and help her. This assault from an older generation on the young is clear here – as Aunt Banham tries to slap some sense into Rosalind, so too The Judge physically restrains and strikes Peter, who just wants to help his fiancée. What’s curious in Blood on Satan’s Claw is that it’s actually not only children and young people who are being swayed by the devil – there are some very elderly people in Angel’s cohort too. Perhaps there’s a suggestion then that once we reach a certain age, those in the prime of their lives start treating us as juvenile and impressionable once again.
But, ultimately, is all of this giving Blood on Satan’s Claw more credit than it deserves? I don’t think it is, even if the finished film is a bit of a narrative mess. I can only imagine what an effective film it could have been given the right budget and the right time and space to develop it as initially envisioned by both Wynne-Simmons and Haggard. What the film might lack in story-telling though it more than makes up for in sheer atmosphere. Even with the wonky special effects and all the ‘that it be’ dialogue, the film still manages to be effectively creepy. After 45 years it’s a film that still retains its power to disturb and with it comes a pleasing sense of devilish anarchy.
Further Reading:
Peter Hutchings, 2004: ‘Modern Horror and the 1970s’ in The Horror Film
Leon Hunt, 2002: ‘Necromancy in the UK: witchcraft and the occult in British Horror’ in British Horror Cinema, Steve Chibnall & Julian Petley eds.
David Taylor, 1996: ‘“Don’t over-act with your fingers!” The making of Blood on Satan’s Claw’ in Shock: The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema, Steven Jaworzyn ed.
The film feels incredibly British from the outset as, when the ritual is ended, Mottram (Jack Palance) has a cigarette and does a spot of tidying up. It’s important to keep up appearances, see, as by day he’s a somewhat dodgy antiques seller, aided and abetted by a younger assistant, Ronnie (Martin Potter). The arrival of an irate ex-Priestess, demanding to take the idol of Chiku away with her, barely makes an impression on Mottram and after a struggle she is soon dispatched – for good – on the prongs of Chiku’s weapon. This, to Mottram, is the reason for a sudden change in his fortunes. The following day, as he begins to empty an antique desk ready for sale, he uncovers a hidden drawer which is full of gold coins, thus ending his money worries – problems we are led to gather have been going on for some time. He reasons that this must be because of the sacrifice which fate saw him make to Chiku; by the same logic, then, he decides he has to continue worshipping Chiku in this same grisly manner.
I don’t pretend that this feature will be a rundown of all the main Nazi lead roles played by women, but as a number of Nazisploitation films approach or pass their fortieth birthdays, I can’t help but compare a couple of films made at very nearly the same time. Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS was made in 1974; the far less-known Elsa: Fraulein SS (also known as Fraulein Devil, Captive Women 4, Fraulein SS and – confusingly as hell – Fraulein Kitty) followed quickly in its footsteps, appearing in 1977. Now, whilst the righteously notorious Salon Kitty (1976) bears close analysis all of its own, and many of the films which followed in Ilsa’s exceptional wake follow a very similar format to Ilsa (with the lead actress of Elsa, Malisa Longo, even appearing in a bit-part in Salon Kitty, just to show how much cross-pollination was going on), Ilsa and Elsa are interesting representatives of the features of the genre overall. This is both because Elsa shows just how far Ilsa had an impact within the remits of that genre, and also because the director of the later film, Frenchman Patrice Rhomm, re-framed some key ideas for his own spin on the story. Elsa feels like the end point in a continuum, encompassing elements of both Ilsa and Kitty.
In any case, there are lots of points of comparison. Both Ilsa and Elsa are high-ranking military, selected by their superiors for various special operations. The war effort needs them: each film is set at around the time when Hitler’s glorious ‘Thousand Year Reich’ looks to be on its uppers, and desperate times require desperate measures, with each woman taking on top-secret roles. For Ilsa (the incomparable Dyanne Thorne) this means overseeing a medical facility where various crude experimentation is intended to find solutions to help the Reich; prisoners-of-war are brought to her for the purpose. She has her own pet project, though, and that is to see whether her own hypothesis – that women can withstand pain better than men – is true. If it is, Ilsa intends to use this evidence to show that women could be used for the front line. Which is vaguely egalitarian, I suppose. As for Elsa, she also works with enemies of the Reich: however, she selects her number from Nazi party members, whose families have in some way betrayed the cause. Her nubile young women have something else to prove, although the perils of the front line are also important.
That said, both Don Edmonds and Patrice Rhomm found it difficult to simply wipe out their anti-heroines in one fell swoop. Their deaths are left fairly ambiguous; Ilsa even popped up again and again in different roles and parts of the world – though I’m not suggesting that this happened in a coherent narrative across all of the films, of course. As for Elsa, did she even die? The jury’s out, though I’d say her demise was just as ambiguous as Ilsa’s. It’s as if we have to see the good guys win, sure, but an interesting female character in good boots with entertaining sexual proclivities is just too precious to get rid of entirely.
An economical little film, End of the Road uses its time to throw in some neat visual clues to relevant folklore and stories (the red hoodie, the sheepskin coat) whilst doing enough, even in its short time frame, to conjure up some noteworthily overblown characters to accompany the leads. This is a very colourful film throughout, and overall it looks good. But one of its key strengths is that it has the good sense not to commit the cardinal sin of so many lycanthropy movies – showing too much of the creature. In fact, what we do see here is bloody horrifying, because we only get a mere hint of the warped physicality of the beast in question (and credit to the sound design here: part-way between animal and demon, the noises emanating from our ‘little visitor’ complement the visual smarts very well.)
Anguish certainly wastes no time in setting things up – we open on an argument between a mother and daughter in a car about whether or not the daughter is allowed to go on a camping trip with her schoolfriends. The mother isn’t so sure, and so the daughter gets out to angrily stomp home – unfortunately not noticing the truck coming in the other direction…flash forward an unspecified amount of time and teenage Tess (Ryan Simpkins)and her mother (Annika Marks) have moved to the area. Tess’s father is a soldier and has been away from home a long time (he keeps in touch by Skype) and Tess has been a troubled child since an early age, suffering from depression, anxiety, hallucinations and other mental disorders. Tess spends her time sitting out under the stars or skateboarding by herself, and one day stumbles across a roadside memorial to Lucy, the girl who was killed in the opening scene. And something happens – Tess is knocked backwards by some kind of mysterious force, and then starts to experience numerous strange occurrences – seeing dozens of hands on her bedroom window, mysterious figures trying to get into her house, and other strange apparitions. Her mother naturally believes that Tess’s mental disorders are getting on top of her, but the doctors seem unable to help. However, after a local priest gets involved, things get a little bit more complicated.
As for the role of the witch in general in these communities, we have discussed already how Puritan society – this brave new world – had yet taken with it age-old beliefs about magic which it fell back on in its frequent times of difficulty and despair. In many respects, what communities saw as malign interference was blamed for equally age-old phenomena: blighted crops, ailing livestock, curdled milk, spoiled beer, poor weather; these are all things which could harm the progress of an agrarian society such as the Puritans had established but constituted natural, yet deeply frustrating events which could still be pinned on outsider influences. Witches were frequently blamed for such calamities, and hundreds of women (and men, and children, but primarily women) were tried and often executed for their ‘crimes’. Witches could also, we are told, cause animals to behave in uncharacteristic ways, such as being “taken with strange fits” or “behaving in a strange or affrighting manner” (Witchcraft Papers 1:94). All of these things could spell doom for farms which were meant to be completely self-sufficient.
With regards to the prevalence of witches in New England, there are still further reasons why the ideas of enemies-within began to take hold there. One interpretation is that witchcraft accusations became prevalent where a widow, wife or daughter stood to inherit large amounts of land and property. Whether the intentions were overt or not, naming a woman as a witch made for an easy way to grab and distribute material wealth from ‘unorthodox’ families which had subverted the preferred order of things, in a society where means were still limited. Whilst not a direct factor in The Witch, true, it’s yet more evidence of the precarious, often ruthless society in which their real-life contemporaries existed. Add sex, sexuality and sexual jealousy to this kind of mix, and it isn’t difficult to see how and why women often lived particularly risky lives in 17th Century America; in danger of plausible accusations by well-respected members of communities, in danger when ostensibly in a position of financial gain, in danger of sexual attention, life was hardly straightforward for many. By the same token, for those who really believed they had sealed a covenant with Satan (and I believe many did think this) then who can blame them for wanting it? The promise of ease and fulfillment away from their mundane world of toil and threat must have seemed a welcome proposal for many, whatever the cause.
Today, most of us would see this in rational terms, as a body and mind worn down with mistreatment and stifling social roles finding an hysterical outlet which would have seemed, to witnesses, something completely unnatural. Add hearsay to fright and voila, you have something recordable, transmittable and imitable, but no doubt exaggerated, hence so many possession yarns which fit the same bill down through the centuries which can still be used in a 21st Century setting to scare modern audiences.
Ultimately, however, it’s Thomasin who is the prize. Everything which befalls her family leads up to her final temptation, whilst also leading to the film’s striking final scenes. Contemporary figures for Thomasin in the 1630s are rather fewer than you might expect however, and this was generally the case. The main demographic group for accusations of witchcraft was women of maturer years, around forty as a general rule of thumb, and possibly due to the factor mentioned above – inheritance issues. A reasonable number of younger women are on record, though there are not many of them. There was, however, a young girl called Elizabeth Knapp who could conceivably be a source of inspiration for the character of Thomasin…
We shouldn’t underestimate how important something like the Malleus Maleficarum was; it set the bar for the treatment of witches for all of the subsequent ‘witch crazes’ which followed, and its words on what witches did (and why they did it) can certainly be seen in 17th Century New England. For instance, the book relates the words of an alleged witch and child murderer, who told her accuser “with our spells we kill them in their cradles or even when they are sleeping by their parents’ side…then we secretly take them from their graves, and cook them in a cauldron, until the whole flesh comes away from the bones to make a soup which may easily be drunk. Of the more solid matter we make an unguent which is of virtue to help us in our arts and pleasures and our transportations.” This unguent, then, was applied to the broomsticks of legend (the same witch also mentions enchanting chairs in the same way) and used for flight. It’s an idea about witchcraft which has lasted over five hundred years so far, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it makes sense within the remit of Puritan society too, and is referenced shortly after the baby disappears in our film. The Devil and his followers couldn’t create matter (only God had that power) but he could certainly help his practitioners to break the rules of the natural world, and – in keeping with a subtext of witchcraft belief that witches abhorred conventional gender roles, including motherhood and child-rearing – dispatching an infant would have been little concern to them, but monstrous to mainstream society.
Likewise, witches were believed to have the ability to shape-shift, taking on animal form; they were also frequently linked with ‘familiars’, animals which usually lived with the witches and worked on their behalf for the fee of suckling from them (and there’s that monstrous spin on motherhood again, folks). In The Witch, the family first hunt a hare which seems to have some sort of supernatural significance; they fail to catch it, and it lures father and son deeper into the unfamiliar woods near which they have settled, whilst also later re-appearing near the farmstead, inevitably a portent of far worse things to come. An association between witches and creatures such as rats, cats and hares (as well as alleged hybrid species, unrecognisable to witnesses) has been of longer duration, and the Malleus Maleficarum describes “a workman [who] was one day chopping some wood to burn in his house. A large cat suddenly appeared and began to attack him, and when he was driving it off, another even larger one came and attacked him with the first more fiercely. And when he again tried to drive them away, behold, three of them together attacked him, jumping up at his face, and biting and scratching his legs. In great fright and, as he said, more panic-stricken than he had ever been, he crossed himself and, leaving his work, fell upon the cats, which were swarming over the wood and again leaping at his face and throat, and with difficulty drove them away by beating one on the head, another on the legs, and another on the back. After the space of an hour, while he was again engaged upon his task, two servants of the town magistrates came and took him as a malefactor and led him into the presence of the bailiff or judge…the judge broke into these words: ‘You most wicked of men, how can you not acknowledge your crime? At such a time on such a day you beat three respected matrons of this town, so that they lie in their beds unable to rise or to move!'” Eventually, the hapless man is able to prove that the ‘respected matrons’ and the animals are one and the same. Ideas about animal familiars certainly persist into the Hopkins days in England, and cross the Atlantic too (as late as the 19th Century, the infamous story of the Bell Witch hauntings tell of a strange, large hare on his property which farmer John Bell initially attempted to shoot. This creature seemed to herald a widespread array of supernatural phenomena at the Bell family home, much of which later centred upon alleged visitations by a malign witch, often called ‘Kate’.)
JLH: Totally. I didn’t want to go full ‘Bill & Ted’ metalbro. Instead I wanted to show that, despite the clothes and tastes in extreme music, metalheads are just normal people. I was definitely coming from a fan’s point of view. It’s weird, I keep finding subconscious metal references in the film, not things I intended. After Lemmy passed, someone said ‘Great you had that Motörhead joke in the film’. I didn’t know what they were talking about – then they pointed out that a character dies after getting an engine dropped on his skull. I had no idea.