David Evans-Powell Director Piers Haggard’s upbringing on a farm profoundly influenced the look and feel of the landscape in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. In contrast to the heightened, impressionistic settings of Hammer’s films, Satan’s Claw presents a landscape that is much more “a world we are living in” than “a scene we are looking […]
Lyndsay Townsend It’s a misty morning and, to the soundscape of crying crows, young ploughman Ralph (Barry Andrews) is hard at work. As his horse trudges through the thick mud, layers of trampled grass build up on the wheels of the plough, and Ralph’s feet sink further into the earth as he struggles to stride […]
Michael Jacob From Mark Gattiss’s astute observation that folk horror shares a “common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore, and superstitions” (History of Horror) to Adam Scovell’s “folk horror chain” (17-18), central characteristics and analytical frameworks for this horror subgenre have recently been emerging. Despite these illuminating contributions, what is still lacking is an […]
Forty years ago, Detroit’s Redford Theatre hosted the premiere of The Book of the Dead, a new film by Sami Raimi. A fan of the extravagant premiers popularised by William Castle, Raimi put on a show—custom-made ticket stubs promised the “Ultimate Experience in Gruelling Terror” and two ambulances were ceremoniously parked outside. If that were […]
Paul A. J. Lewis “Well, there’s a howdy-do.” These are the first words spoken by the Judge (Patrick Wymark) in Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw. They are the words that open the film “proper,” following the pre-credits sequence, in which ploughman Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews) discovers the fiend’s partially-skeletonised skull in the ploughed […]
Michael Cerliano Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) is a quintessential folk horror film, often grouped with Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) as part of an “unholy trinity.” Adam Scovell identifies a number of key features shared by these three films in particular, and by folk […]
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 […]
Jessica Parant, Spinsters of Horror The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) offers examples of the various roles allotted to women by a highly religious and patriarchal society. The women are rarely kind to one another and even seek to harm each other. In the characters of Mistress Ellen (Charlotte Mitchell), Mistress Isobel Banham (Avice Landone), […]
David Annwn Jones In the years following 1968, the British public, including journalists, politicians and psychologists, tried to come to terms with a seismic national trauma by searching for answers about what had led Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl, to murder two small boys. Such crimes and the trial that followed appeared to reveal the […]