The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971) – Review

When people discuss the roots of the freakishly unnerving sub-genre known as Rural Horror, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will undoubtedly yell out “‘The Wicker Man” at the kind of speed you’d usually get from the final, quick-fire round of a quiz show. It’s obviously a correct answer, but it’s also one that’s kind of low hanging fruit as there are other examples around that actually pre-date Robin Hardy’s absurdly impactful serving of a cross dressing Christopher Lee and an overcooked Edward Woodward.
Pre dating the antics of Summerisle by roughly two years was The Blood On Satan’s Claw, a slice of 70’s horror that took a its basic template from Hammer Studios (18th century setting, unnaturally horny nymphs), added a touch of H.P. Lovecraft (village slowly mutated by an unearthed, inhuman artifact) and delivered a creepy – if slightly dated – prototype to a brand of horror that’s currently thriving.

It’s the 18th century and while lowly farmer Ralph Gower ploughs a field, he manages to turn up a horribly deformed skull with one eye still lodged in its socket. Understandably perturbed, he approaches the local judge about his findings, but when they return to the site, they find the lumpy-ass cranium missing as Ralph is dismissed as a superstitious boob. In the judge’s defence, he has quite a bit on his mind as the nephew of the woman hes lodging with his bringing his new fiancee home and both vehemently disapprove of the union. However, they needn’t have bothered fixing disdainful expressions onto their faces as Peter’s wife to be has a massive screaming fit after being ordered to spend the night in the attic and after she’s pronounced insane by the judge, Peter notices that her arm has become a furry claw as she’s escorted to the nearest asylum with a faraway smile on her face.
This is only the beginning of some alarming changes all across the village as some local children find some claws in a field that presumably belonged to the monstrous skull during it’s better days. Peter, while examining the attic, is attacked by another furry claw, but after hacking it off finds that it’s his own hand; a local boy is found dead and partially mutilated and the claw-finding children become acolytes to some unspeakable evil who uses the nubile, blonde Angel as its mouthpiece.
While the judge buggers off to read up on the weirdness that’s occuring, Angel and her youthful cult bloodily harvest any poor soul who has started sprouting thick, coarse hair in strange places in order to piece together the demonic being who has managed to stage a remarkable recovery for a being that was only a freaking skull a couple of days ago. Can this surge of evil be halted, or will this godless creature manage to nurse itself back to health by perverting as much innocence as it possibly can?

To get the obvious comparisons out of the way early, The Blood On Satan’s Claw is in no way as intelligent and innovative as The Wicker Man, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t know when to break out the good when it needs to. While most examples of rural horror keep the supernatural or demonic aspects of their insidious plots firmly on the peripheral of the plot and have their influence be almost indistinguishable from human madness, Satan’s Claw dives right in by having it’s simple village-folk twisted and perverted by the discovery of a skull that looks like something you’d expect to find in an overly ornate desert. There’s no doubt whatsoever that it’s an outside force causing some of the local young folk to devolve into murderous sex fiends and others to sprout hair in weird places like some sort of attack of Satanic pubity. But while that sounds like it might dampen the intrigue of keeping the malevolence more of a suggested threat, it instead plays more like Lovecraft’s The Color Out Of Space as god fearing peasants start experiencing an alarming personality shift thanks to their proximity to the weird, inhuman remains.

The movie insists on keeping you off balance, cheekily denying us a solid recognizable lead character to guide us through this strange tale as the script red herrings us by putting numerous characters front and centre only to whisk them away. Bit wet husband to be, Peter, seems like a solid early choice, but he becomes nothing more than a bystander after losing his fiancee’s sanity and one of his hands in a matter of days and the impossibly innocent Cathy feels like she could take over after her brother turns up dead, but once again the movie fools us instead by rewarding her screen time by serving her up as a victim to a genuinely uncomfortable rape/sacrifice sequence that’s made all the more distasteful when you realise that actress, Wendy Padbury was once a Doctor Who companion back in the Patrick Troughton days. Even the subplot of the resident reverend being framed for assault by the demon’s main concubine, the intensely eyebrowed Angel, eventually goes nowhere and while in other movies, this could be decried as sloppy plotting, in a movie about rural-horror its positively a boon as it keeps matters genuinely unpredictable, unnerving cruek and nicely trippy as all movies that deal with intangible, countryside horrors should do.
However, as disquieting as The Bood On Satan’s Claw is, it’s routinely thwarted by some old fashioned effects work that unavoidably renders some of the bigger creeps and crawls goofy as hell. With the unfortunate sprouting of demonic hair looking like someone’s just stuck a piece of shag carpeting on the actor’s bodies being barely serviceable, the climactic demon reveal unravels a lot of the accumulated tension by looking like this creature from the bowels of the nether world has been created overnight like a deadbeat parent rushing against the clock to knock up a quick Halloween costume at the zero hour.

Still, even tagged with an ending that feels a little too neat for it’s own good considering all the deranged lunacy that’s gone before, the central concept and the crisp direction manages to be more than enough for the flick to be a memorably effective prototype for any movie who taps into that eerie vein of mysterious cults made up of cackling octogenarians and deranged teens who practice their creepy shit in the middle of the forrest. While admitttedly a bit too pulpy to hold a candle to the take-no-shit denizens of Summerisle and their impressive wicker erection (ooer), The Blood On Satan’s Claw still brings the weird as its deliberately unfolding premise and random body horror serves up a nicely unsettling meal of pre-Exorcist, 70’s horror that succeeds in clawing you in.

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