The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) – P. Haggard

Part of the so-called “Unholy Trilogy” of folk horror films that also includes The Wicker Man (1973) and The Witchfinder General (1968) by other directors.  The genre also could be stretched to include Curse of the Demon (1957) or The Devil Rides Out (1968) and newer films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Witch (2015).  It is a genre I like very much, full of uncanny creepiness in natural surroundings and an older paganistic (Satanistic/left-hand-path) challenge to reality as we know it.  The films ask you to accept that evil is real and terrifying supernatural forces are at work in our world, sometimes brought to bear on our lives by those humans who learn the magick needed.  In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, it is a group of teenagers who discover an evil creature that can be fed by unspeakable evil acts -- murder and rape – presented unblinkingly here in all their horror, enacted by little more than children.  So, with its nudity and violence, the film is also an exploitation flick, borne of its time, and ready and willing to shock the midnight movie crowd.  But if you can put the awfulness of the acts aside, the atmosphere created by director Piers Haggard and his team, depicting life in a rural English village in the 17^th century is spellbinding.  It is a time when witches were believed to be real and among us and witch-hunters sought them out.  The true history of these events is horrible and sad but the film shows us a world where black magic is real, violent, scary, and anarchic.  You really never know what can happen next.