Among other things, Piers Haggard’s 1971 The Blood on Satan’s Claw was crucial in shaping the folk horror tradition. Near the end of part two, “Home Counties Horrors,” of his influential 2010 BBC documentary, Mark Gatiss shifts from discussing the dominant Hammer films of the 1960s to articulating a “new” kind of horror film that […]
Dawn Keetley Released on April 16, 1971, Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw has become a cult classic, not least because of its absolutely central role in the emergence of British folk horror in the late 1960s and 1970s. As I note in “Defining Folk Horror,” a landmark in the history of naming folk […]
Kern Robinson From its earthy opening to the calling-forth of a dreaded horned god, few films exemplify folk horror artistry so completely as Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). However, in its depiction of this horned deity, Satan’s Claw demonstrates a conflict with the counter-cultural ideology that is often read into folk horror. […]
Dawn Keetley Much folk horror takes place amidst ruins. The ruined or abandoned church features centrally, for instance, in The Witches (Cyril Frankel, 1966), The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), Final Prayer (aka The Borderlands, Elliot Goldner, 2013), and The Third Day (Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly, 2020). And the ruined church is absolutely central […]
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 […]