Matthias Hurst
In 1973 the world was shocked to watch a teenage girl in the film The Exorcist who suffered from mood swings, lazed about in bed, cursed, and masturbated. Since this happened in the USA, in “God’s own country,” the explanation for such erratic behaviour could only be one: demonic possession. And the only solution: the Catholic ritual of exorcism to expel the evil spirit, to cleanse the body of the girl and to save her soul.
In a film released two years earlier one could witness a similar case of foul behaviour, only this time in the English countryside of the early eighteenth century. It was not just a single girl, moreover, but a whole cult of young people involved in wicked games, sexual frenzy, and sacrificial rituals. The Blood On Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971) is a prime example of the subgenre of British folk horror, the intersection of the occult, (neo-)paganism, and the evocative and uncanny representation of the British countryside; indeed, it is one of the foundational “cinematic unholy trinity” (Scovell 13) that helped to define the concept of folk horror, along with Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973).
The Blood on Satan’s Claw depicts an ancient evil that spreads like a virus and infects mainly the young people of a rural village, leading to a deadly confrontation of religious and ideological beliefs—a confrontation between an old and partially forgotten creed and the practice of depraved paganism on the one hand and Christian faith or modern rationality on the other hand. This conflict seems to be typical for folk horror in its many incarnations, “the conflict between ‘old’ and ‘new’ religions” (Hunt 85) in which “old gods become new devils” (Krzywinska) or the battle between superstition and reason that constitutes one of the main driving forces of the Enlightenment. The outcome of such conflicts, however, remains open and might differ from film to film with no guarantee of a “happy ending” or socially desirable conclusion.
A Sociological Interpretation: Generational Conflict
While the cause for the unleashed evil in Satan’s Claw is explained diegetically with the influence of the devil on the Puritan community, an influence that begins when good-natured Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews) unintentionally unearths the fragmented skull of a fiendish creature while ploughing up the fields, other explanations could be found in sociological and psychoanalytical readings of the horror film as a reflection of the generational conflict and cultural turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s and as the return of repressed desires and anxieties in terms of the Freudian concept of the uncanny, respectively. Moreover, both readings can be linked in a meaningful way.
It is not difficult to see a reflection of contemporary counterculture and its various manifestations in the attitude and the actions of the cult in Satan’s Claw. Protest against the political and cultural establishment and the conservative, patriarchal order, New Age ideas, drugs and free love, transgressive behaviour and the growing interest in pre-Christian belief systems, pagan rituals and the occult as alternatives to the restrictive and quite often hypocritical morals of the western societies in the 1960s all take shape—more or less symbolically—in the outrageous activities of the Satanist cult.[i] Explaining the attraction of translating topical forms of social and political unrest into horror fiction, Leon Hunt emphasizes the fascination of a potentially new permissive culture and its link to the exploration/exploitation of the forbidden: “By the late 1960s, one thing was clear: the occult = sex” (83).
The leader of the youth, Angel Blake (Linda Hayden)
Since it is predominantly the youth that stands up and engages in attacking everything that represents traditional values, they become the protagonists of transgression; student protesters, the flower children, and hippies all team up metaphorically to rebel against the parental generation and their reactionary world view. Although we spot an old couple amidst the pagan cult of devil worshippers in Satan’s Claw, the film can be seen as part of “generation gap horror” that challenges the structures and representatives of authoritarian society in order to unmask their oppressive nature (Towlson 81). But the depiction of the young rebels and their atrocious deeds in Satan’s Claw shows little sympathy with the devil or his disciples. Taking inspiration from the dark and disturbing elements of counterculture like the brutal ritual murders committed by the Manson family (August 1969) and the lethal violence at the Altamont concert (December 1969) as well as from the case of eleven-year-old Mary Bell who killed two boys (May and July 1968), screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons portrayed the cultists as dangerous and rather despicable.[ii] Under the leadership of young Angel Blake (Linda Hayden), they seduce, deceive, rape, and kill, and their aggression is not directed only against the older generation, but against young people as well. The strangulation of Mark Vespers (Robin Davies) and the rape and stabbing of his sister Cathy (Wendy Padbury) in the ruins of an old church are disturbing scenes that cannot be excused with a somehow righteous rebellion against the regime of their Puritan parents.
The Judge (Patrick Wymark), the authority of the social order
The character of the Judge (Patrick Wymark) represents the authority of the social order, and his victory over the Satanist cult eventually signifies the suppression of the transgressive youth and the restoration of traditional norms and values. Defeating the ancient evil and its cult of teenage followers proves his rightfulness as agent of modernity, reason, and maturity and his male superiority over Angel’s female depravity. The Judge has no name, he is only known by his profession, which suggests the perfect identification of the individual with his social function. Like the “Man with No Name,” the tough and relentless gunslinger hero created by Clint Eastwood in the seminal western “Dollar trilogy” by Sergio Leone,[iii] the Judge with No Name acts deliberately and effectively, taking no prisoners, as it were, but cleaning up the town forcefully.
The Judge: “I shall use undreamed-of measures”
“It is more than witchcraft,” he explains to Peter Edmonton (Simon Williams) as if referring to the implied social revolt of the young people. “I am ready to return – But understand I shall use undreamed-of measures.” The close-up of the Judge, speaking this warning and looking quite twentieth-century modern and serious with his scholarly spectacles and his short grey hair usually hidden under his long black wig, is followed immediately by a hard cut to a close-up of a tree trunk hit and cut by an axe, thus symbolizing the drastic action the judge is about to take (one of the film’s many images of symbolic castration). More than once, his remarks reveal his rigorous convictions and stern attitude (“Leave me to judge who is innocent”), and what seems to be an innocent comment on a game of cards, as he is playing with Mistress Banham (Avice Landon), Peter and his fiancée Rosalind (Tamara Ustinov), gains in hindsight a new meaning: “So, young people, your elders triumph.”
But while Satan’s Claw clearly shows us the pagan cult as evil, it does not unambiguously celebrate its destruction. In the audio commentary on the film DVD, Wynne-Simmons refers to the devil as “the name given to any rival to Christianity” (which, I guess, does not only imply negative things) and explains that the original ending of his script included the military moving in and slaughtering all members of the cult without mercy, thus showing extreme violence on both sides and creating more ambivalence in regard to our sympathies for the ideological opponents and the duality between good and evil. [iv] The scene in which angry villagers hunt Margaret (Michele Dotrice) pitilessly through the woods and throw her into the river to see if she’s a witch (ordeal by water) arouses compassion with the victim. The last shot of the film features the Judge framed by and staring through the fire in which the devil’s incarnation burns; his piercing eyes are directed at the camera (i.e. at the spectator), and it is this fierce, menacing look that might give rise to doubts whether we should totally side with the Judge and what he represents.[v]
The final shot: the Judge looks
Wymark’s Judge is a brother-in-arms to Peter Cushing’s Gustav Weil in Twins of Evil (John Hough, 1971), the fanatic leader of the “Brotherhood” of Puritan evil seekers, out to hunt down and exterminate vampires, devil worshippers and other nonconformist creatures. “The young must be chastised!” says Weil, unapologetically taking up a position in the intensified generation conflict. The Judge might not appear as fanatical and unlikeable as this Puritan witchfinder and vampire hunter, but he fights for the same cause with no less determination. In this context the remarkable lack of an individual name for the Judge (while minor characters in the film do have names) could also indicate a deficient, denaturalized existence, the absence of individuality, emotions and humanity as the man is absolutely consumed by his function as defender of the social order and the regime of rationality.
But then again, names could be misleading: the antagonist of the Judge with No Name is Angel, and certainly she is no angel. Her behaviour and actions stand in sharp contrast to her name—and if she reminds of an angel at all, then it is the Fallen Angel.
In the end, there is no hope for Angel. The Puritan community must act aggressively against permissiveness and transgression. While the Catholic sacrament of confession can save the soul of the sinner, and the ritual of exorcism can heal the possessed, there are fewer options of condonation and salvation in the Puritan mentality; instead the idea of predestination is strong and has a bearing on social norms and moral law.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation: Repression and Uncanny Return
At this point a psychoanalytical interpretation of Satan’s Claw becomes relevant. Like the Puritan, the Freudian super-ego does not negotiate, but represses and punishes sin and immoral thoughts and behaviour. The psychoanalytical reading recognizes the Judge with No Name as personification of the super-ego—letting the evil grow and then coming back with a vengeance—as well as the concept of the uncanny at work in this story of the unwanted return of an old evil buried in the soil. According to Freud, “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (340). Counterintuitively, the uncanny does not represent something strange and unfamiliar, something alien to human nature, but it is based on any “affect belonging to an emotional impulse” that is “transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety” (363). Indeed, the uncanny represents very familiar ideas and feelings, experiences and desires of the individual that need to be silenced and repressed for their traumatic potential or uncontrollable and disruptive power. It is “something […] old-established in the mind […] which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression,” “something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light” (363-64). Becoming visible or conscious again, the repressed stimulates fear and rejection.
The effect of the uncanny works in Satan’s Claw on three layers: the level of plot, the level of the sociological reading, and the level of structure (or generic construction).
First of all, the plot itself highlights the return of the repressed that infects the young and haunts the whole community, as manifestations of the unconscious and knowledge of ancient rituals erupt. Masked as satanic evil, repressed desires of rebellion, liberation and transgression, sexual and aggressive impulses, the urges of the id—previously hidden underground—now take over and cause terror. From a Freudian point of view, it is inevitable that the repressive Puritan society gives birth to “evil” children.
The return of the repressed
On another level the film’s reflection of familiar topical issues—the politicized generation conflict and countercultural movements—as a fictional, historicized account of occult dimensions brings forth dreaded social phenomena in a mildly disguised way. By showing “the present in the past”[vi] and the Puritan backlash against transgressive youth culture Satan’s Claw represents the return of the repressed and precedes horror films like Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984), The Sect (Michele Soavi, 1991), and Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018) that comment on the barbarous excesses of countercultural leanings in contemporary settings.
Finally, the uncanny effect also surfaces in the conglomeration of many familiar elements, concepts, and tropes of horror fiction: possession, witch-hunts (traces of Witchfinder General), body transformation, pagan rituals, human sacrifice, oppressive authority figures, phallic weapons, castration symbolism etc. All these generic elements are recognizable (especially for connoisseurs of horror films), but they are slightly unhinged and not linked or integrated in perfectly understandable ways. There is a bit of confusion and incoherence in terms of structure and causality in the film, based on the fact that the original plan of the producers was to make three short films and Wynne-Simmons delivered three scripts accordingly, which were then combined by Haggard and Wynne-Simmons into one film; there are, however, “gaps,” “things we didn’t quite manage to solve.”[vii]
The Judge and Mistress Banham–before she disappears
The mysterious disappearance of Mistress Banham is notoriously one of those seemingly incoherent gaps. It is worth adding, however, that her unexplained vanishing could be explained in the context of the psychoanalytical interpretation: the Judge tells Peter confidentially that he has been an “admirer” of hers in the past. In order for him to fulfil his super-ego task as guardian of law and order and as agent of repression, however, the woman who was his love interest and object of desire needs to be taken out of the equation, as it were; the emotions related to her need to be repressed and denied. Hence her disappearance without a trace.
In general, there’s an unusual shift of focus between different characters throughout the film, including Ralph, the Judge, Peter, Mistress Banham, Margaret, and the Reverend Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley). There is no clear elucidation of the occult happenings: Who is attacked by the fiend and why? Are only victims of the cult infested with the devil’s furry skin or also members of the cult? How exactly does the reconstruction of the evil spirit’s body function? But what could be assessed as a narrative flaw does nonetheless lend the film a specific quality and impact as an enigmatic and unsettling tale of folk horror. The vagueness, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the logic and causal relations of the elements of horror enforce the uncanny effect; the uncanny in turn supports the ambivalence regarding our perception of the familiar and the strange, the desirable and the dreadful. Ideas and emotions that challenge our concepts of good and evil might be repressed and symbolically buried in the ground, but they could be unearthed any time to become uncanny evil—illicit desires, impulses of transgression, and the memories of every generation’s rebellion against the morals and the politics of their parents.
Notes
[i] See Harmes 71; Hunt 83-4; Krzywinska; Newland 2013, 136; Newland 2016, 168.
[ii] See Hunt 93-4; Krzywinska; Harmes 71-2.
[iii] A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966). The analogy to Italian western films might not be so far-fetched as it seems. Reeves’ Witchfinder General has famously been compared to western films as well (Scovell 31-3)
[iv] Haggard and Wynne-Simmons, 0.17.09 – 0.17.12 and 1.10.09 – 1.10.25.
[v] The ending of the film with the freeze-frame of the Judge’s close-up resembles the likewise abrupt ending of Witchfinder General (in which Wymark played Oliver Cromwell) and its use of freeze-frame to capture the devastating conclusion of the protagonists gone mad in the face of inhuman violence.
[vi] Newland 2013, 135. By contrast, the film The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004) depicts the process of repression in which the parental generation, traumatized by the violence of modern urban culture, creates for their children the sanctuary of a fake nineteenth-century rural village as safe, isolated environment, i.e. recreating “the past in the present.”
[vii] Haggard and Wynne-Simmons, 0.08.10 – 0.08.55.
Works Cited
The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard, Tigon British Film Productions, 1971.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1919). The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14: Art and Literature, edited by Albert Dickson. Penguin, 1990, pp. 335-376.
Haggard, Piers, and Robert Wynne-Simmons. Audio Commentary on film DVD Blood on Satan’s Claw. NSM Records, 2017.
Harmes, Marcus K. “The Seventeenth Century on Film: Patriarchy, Magistracy, and Witchcraft in British Horror Films, 1968-1971.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2013, pp. 64-80.
Hunt, Leon. “Necromancy in the UK: Witchcraft and the Occult in British Horror.” British Horror Cinema, edited by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley. Routledge, 2002, pp. 82-98.
Krzywinska, Tanya. “Lurking beneath the Skin: British Pagan Landscapes in Popular Cinema.” Cinematic Countrysides, edited by Robert Fish. Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 75-90. https://tanyakrzywinska.com/2017/01/31/lurking-beneath-the-skin-british-pagan-landscapes-in-popular-cinema/.
Newland, Paul. British Films of the 1970s. Manchester University Press, 2013.
—. “Folk Horror and the Contemporary Cult of British Rural Landscape: The Case of Blood on Satan’s Claw.” British Rural Landscapes on Film, edited by Paul Newland. Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 162-179.
Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.
Towlson, Jon. Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present. McFarland, 2014.
