Blood on Satan's Claw (1970)

It was through looking into this movie on the Internet that I learned there is a name to a sub-genera of horror that I like, 'Folk Horror'. Other examples of this canonically limited sub-genera include (of course) The Wicker Man, The Witchfinder General, and I would say the Devil Rides Out. More on what constitutes 'Folk Horror', and there is no single definition, can be found here and here. I'm also going to do something I rarely if ever do here, I'm going to post a link to a review of this film because it says a lot of what I want to say about it.

Like Chris Vs. Cinema I agree: "I like this idea of something ancient and innate, it sounds vaguely Lovecraftian in some respects, the notion of something so primal it defies our understanding and has a unique and incomprehensible power over us."

I certainly felt some of that with The Wicker Man, and that movie was a partial inspiration for my recent trip to Scotland. There is something haunting and fascinating about the ancient ruins and the land there, a sort of spiritual majesty that can feel rather dwarfing. I too am fascinated by that religious transition from Pagan to Christian, which I think was certainly a trade off, and The Wicker Man does a great job of communicating that too. The Blood on Satan's Claw takes a rather conservative, Christian view of this subject matter, or at least as conservative and Christian as your likely to find in an exploitation movie. Here the un-Christian, the pagan is explicatedly connected to Satan, and no doubt 'The Fiend' in this film is evil, but that is also exactly how you would expect the Christian to view the Pagan, the competitor for acolytes or souls, as evil, as the devil. Also the fact that this 'evil' does have an appeal, well that's disconcerting to the 'Christian' soul.

Putting aside the thematic and aesthetic aspects and socio-cultural subtexts that I find so fascinating in 'Folk Horror', the film its self is kind of hypnotic. The original ambitions for the film were greater then what eventually ended up on screen and you can see how the films three stories are somewhat clumsily weaved together, and an entire major character (the preacher) is dropped just at the moment of his vindication. Whether the film makers truly held these views or not the films story certainly comes from a conservative, classiest angle. It is the Protestant judge, who starts out the film kind of weaselly and flees just as things start getting bad, who comes back from London to restore order and the establishment from the rapidly degenerating plebeian youth. It can even be said that this movie is something of an allegory for the conservative establishment suspicion of the youth culture at the time the film was made, even as the film is obviously geared for a younger audience. Anyway this is kind of a fascinating film, but certainly too raw in a lot of ways to be for everybody. ***