The Blood on Satan's Claw: Folk Horror's Nastiest Field

A ploughboy turns over a furrow in an English field and finds a skull with one clouded eye still in it and fur growing on the bone. He fetches the landowner. By the time they get back, the hole is empty.

That is the first four minutes of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and it is the most efficient statement of intent in British horror. There is no castle, no fog, no continental accent. There is topsoil, in daylight, in a country that had spent two decades exporting gothic to the Carpathians and had somehow failed to notice what was under its own fields. Piers Haggard’s film is the moment the genre came home and found the ground unpleasant.

The film that was three films

Robert Wynne-Simmons wrote it as a portmanteau — three separate stories, in the Amicus manner that Milton Subotsky had made a going concern, and which we survey in Amicus and the art of the portmanteau horror. Tigon’s Tony Tenser then decided he wanted a single narrative, and Haggard, brought in to direct, restructured the material into one continuous story set in one village.

The seam never fully closed, and the failure is the film’s greatest asset. The Blood on Satan’s Claw does not have a protagonist. It has a rotation. Ralph Gower ploughs the field and then largely disappears. Peter Edmonton brings his fiancée Rosalind to the house and the film follows her into an attic and then abandons them both. The Judge leaves in the first act and does not return for an hour. Angel Blake takes over the middle. Characters the audience has invested in are dropped, killed or forgotten, and the story keeps relocating to whoever the fiend is currently working on.

A conventional script doctor would call this broken. What it produces is the sensation that the film’s real subject is the parish rather than any person in it, and that the thing in the earth is choosing hosts the way a disease chooses hosts. You cannot identify with a protagonist because the film has decided protagonists are a resource being consumed. The most frightening structural fact about the picture is that nobody is safe by virtue of being interesting.

Daylight, and Dick Bush’s fields

Dick Bush shot it, and the decision that defines the film is how much of it happens in the open, in ordinary light. Haggard has said he wanted the landscape to carry the horror, and Bush photographs the Chiltern locations with a documentary plainness — flat skies, real mud, hedgerows in genuine weather. There is no expressionist lighting anywhere in the picture.

The mechanism is worth pulling apart, because it inverts everything Hammer had established. Gothic horror hides the monster in shadow and uses the frame’s darkness as a container for dread. Haggard has no darkness. So he puts the horror in the middle distance, in full sun, at the edge of a field, and lets the audience’s eye find it. A figure standing at a treeline in daylight is worse than the same figure in a corridor, because in the corridor the film has told you where to be afraid, and in the field you have to search.

Marc Wilkinson’s score is the film’s other great weapon and it is doing something almost nobody else was. He wrote for a small ensemble around an ondes Martenot and a cimbalom, and the result is a sound that reads as folk instrumentation gone slightly rancid — a rural music that has been in the ground too long. It scores the daylight scenes rather than the night ones, which is where the film’s unease actually lives.

Angel Blake and the children

Linda Hayden was around twenty when she played Angel Blake, and the performance is the reason the film has a reputation rather than merely a following. Angel is the first of the village’s young people to take to the fiend, and she becomes its recruiting officer, assembling a cult out of the parish’s children with the total organisational calm of a head girl.

Hayden plays her without a flicker of hysteria. That is the choice. A witch-cult leader who raves is a monster the audience can categorise; Angel conducts her seduction of Reverend Fallowfield, and her subsequent destruction of him, with the flat confidence of a person who has correctly assessed how adults respond to an accusation from a girl. She understands the machinery of a village better than the village does. The horror she generates is administrative.

The children’s cult is where the film earns its nastiness, and it does so by making the children entirely willing. They are not possessed in the theological sense and they show no sign of struggle. They have been offered something and they want it, and the film’s adults spend the running time refusing to believe that the young people of the parish have simply defected. The killer kids canon is full of films that make children into vessels. This one makes them into volunteers, and it is the difference between a possession film and something considerably harder to sit through.

The film’s violence peaks in a sequence involving Cathy Vespers that the BBFC cut and that remains, in its restored form, one of the least defensible things in British horror — a rape and killing staged in bright sunlight by a ring of laughing children. Haggard has been unrepentant about its necessity and I think he is roughly half right: the film needs the audience to stop finding Angel’s cult picturesque, and nothing milder would have done it. The scene is also longer and more lingering than that argument requires, and honest admiration for this picture has to hold both facts at once.

The word Haggard used

The term “folk horror” attached itself to this film retroactively. Piers Haggard used it in interviews long after the fact, describing what he had been trying to make, and Mark Gatiss’s 2010 BBC series A History of Horror picked it up, put The Blood on Satan’s Claw alongside Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, and christened the three of them an unholy trinity. The label is a piece of 21st-century curation applied to films that had no idea they were a movement, which is how most movements are assembled.

It has stuck because it identifies something real. All three films are about the English countryside as a place where an older arrangement is still in force and the institutions of the present — the law, the church, the educated visitor — are laughably underpowered against it. The full arc from here to the modern revival is set out in Folk horror’s long road from The Wicker Man to Midsommar.

The clearest heir is Robert Eggers. The Witch takes Haggard’s exact proposition — a devout rural family, a wood, a young woman who is offered a better deal than her parents can match — and plays it with period-accurate diction and a straight face. Eggers’s film is the more disciplined object. Haggard’s is the one with the field in it.

Where to watch: the uncut version, with Wilkinson’s score intact. Older television prints removed the Vespers sequence and several minutes besides, and a cut Satan’s Claw is a film about nothing.

Spoilers below

The thing in the field is named Behemoth by the Judge, and the film’s mechanic is genuinely original: it is reassembling itself from the bodies of the village’s children. The young people develop patches of coarse fur — “the devil’s skin” — and the cult’s function is to cut these patches off one another and deliver them, so the fiend grows back a limb at a time out of donated flesh. Angel Blake is running a harvest.

This is why the film’s structure keeps shedding characters. Each host is a component. Rosalind Barton, who finds the fur on herself in the attic, is written out into an asylum and the story simply proceeds without her, because she has already contributed what she was for.

Patrick Wymark’s Judge is the film’s most interesting adult and its bleakest joke. He leaves in the first act, having declined to take the reports seriously, and returns in the last with a sword and a body of armed men. When he is asked why he left it so long, his answer is that he needed the evil to grow to a size where it could be identified and destroyed — he let the parish’s children be consumed as a matter of strategy. He is completely correct, and he is monstrous, and the film gives him the victory. Wymark died shortly after filming and never saw the picture released, which lends his final scenes an accidental weight they do not need.

The Behemoth is destroyed in the field where it was found, by a magistrate with a blade, on grounds of expedience. There is no redemption for the children, no restoration of the village, and no scene in which the survivors are consoled. The film ends because the calculation came out.