Seemingly
running a constant third to Hammer and Amicus in the British film
studio stakes of the 1960s and 1970s, Tigon British was a company that
nonetheless managed to produce at least a handful of exploitation films,
whose reputation has lasted the forty-odd years since their original
release, some for their brilliance, others for their ineptitude (see,
for example The Blood Beast Terror, which Peter Cushing considered his
worst film). Between 1967 and 1977 they were responsible for The Sorcerers (1967), Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), The Blood Beast Terror (1968), Witchfinder General (1968), Zeta One (1969), Virgin Witch (1972), Au Pair Girls (1972), The Creeping Flesh (1973) and the Mary Millington blockbuster Come Play With Me (1977), as well as Blood on Satan’s Claw , (AKA Satan’s Skin) in 1971, amongst many others.
Tigon,
owned by Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, emerged from a company named
Compton-Tekli that had produced Roman Polanski’s superb Repulsion,
after which Tenser left and formed Tony Tenser Films, later renamed
Tigon British Films. They employed the young Michael Reeves who directed
The Sorcerers and his superb last film, Witchfinder General.
Written by Robert Wynne-Simmons and directed by Piers Haggard, Blood On Satan’s Claw is certainly one of Tigon’s best films, and indeed, one of
the best films of the era. An eerie period gothic (or as Mark Gattis
would have it, “folk horror”), the film contains plenty of genuinely
creepy and disturbing moments along with the commercially essential sex
and gore.
Set towards the end of the 17th Century, Blood on Satan's Claw contrasts the rural beauty of the English countryside with witchcraft and bizarre rituals resulting in rape and murder.
Young
ploughman Ralph (Barry Andrews) unearths a mysterious fragment of
demonic skull, which he promptly reports it to a visiting London Judge
(Peter Wymark). Ralph persuades the Judge to return to the spot, but the
rotting remains have disappeared.
The Judge, intensly sceptical about witchcraft and reminded of the hysteria of the European with-hunts of the 16th
Century, considers it to be superstitious, peasant nonsense. At his
lodgings in the village, the inn-keepers nephew Peter (Simon Williams)
arrives with a girl he intends to marry, a farmer’s daughter, who is
scorned by his aunt and the Judge and ordered to stay in the attic room.
Sensing a malignant presence in her room, she seems to be driven insane
and having attacked Peter’s aunt, is dragged from her room. Gazing
psychotically at Peter, he notices her hand has been transformed into a
grotesque claw! The girl is removed to an asylum but a strange,
unspeakable horror now creeps throughout the isolated hamlet and
surrounding countryside, weirdness ensues, all of it involving a young
girl named Angel Blake (Linda Hayden). Soon, children are being found
dead and the villagers begin to suspect witchcraft. The Judge is given
an old grimoire by the local quack, which he takes back to London to
study, realising that what he suspected was peasant superstition, is a
real and alarming manifestation of evil.
As with Tigon’s earlier Witchfinder General,
the lush landscape of rural green fields and sprawling woodland,
morning mists and gnarled old trees are used to great effect by
photographer Dick Bush who stays well away from the cliché (of the time)
day-to-night trick photography. Contrasting superbly with this rural
beauty is the shocking ritualised rape and murder of innocent Cathy
Vespers (former Doctor Who assistant, Wendy Padbury). The locations are superb, The ruined church at Bix Bottom in Oxfordshire
and Black Park near Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, as well as at Pinewood
Film Studios, supply ample scope for debut director Piers Haggard to
weave this macabre tale.
The
film’s suggestion that the old religion of the Coven is emanating from
the earth, is sustained by clever camerawork, lots of low shots and high
angles succeed in imbuing the film with a certain paranoid
claustrophobia and genuine tension, as if the landscape itself is alive,
watching and waiting. A feeling which is only enhanced further by the film's soundtrack, composed by Marc Wilkinson.
Although
there are some very bloody scenes - Edward butchering his own hand
after a horrifying hallucination and the removal of ‘Satan’s skin’ from
the leg of Michelle (Betty in 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em') Dotrice are pretty extreme for the time, though often Haggard goes for the build-up and cuts away from the gore.
At the heart of the film are two excellent performances. The young Linda Hayden’s (who had debuted in Baby Love (1968), and was also in Hammer’s Taste The Blood Of Dracula
(1970)), character Angel is rendered with great skill both in her naked
seduction of the village curate (Anthony Ainley) and as she manipulates
and controls her teenage coven, driving them on to rape and murder.
Hayden never really fulfilled the promise she shows here, though she did
go on to make the ‘Eye of Agamotto’ favourites; Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Confessions from a Holiday Camp, Let's Get Laid, The Boys from Brazil and the only British ‘Video Nasty’, Exposé.
The other stand out performance is that of Patrick Wymark, a familiar face in movies, including Repulsion and Witchfinder General
in which he played Oliver Cromwell. Once again Blood on Satan’s Claw
deviates from other witch-hunt films as Wymark’s Judge is not some
religious pervert on a crusade to crush the Satanic evil of young girls
and women who he judges to have committed acts of witchcraft. His Judge
is quick to shun such superstitious clap trap. Until he finds that the
terror that has been unleashed upon the village is very real. Only then
does he resort to the doctor’s grimoire to combat the occult power,
encamped in the woodland.
Blood On Satan’s Claw
is a superb British Horror film that takes the peaceful, lush green,
English landscape and makes it its stage, enabling the foul and
depraved antics of the young residents to appear all the more disturbing
and shocking.
It’s
serious approach to the subject of Witchcraft, which in the 1960s and
1970s was undergoing a serious and widespread revival, is fascinating,
and well above the level of pseudo Christian propaganda churned out by
most US releases along the same theme. Eschewing the high camp of other
occult themed thrillers, everything here is played straight and the film
is all the better for it. Now, more than forty years on, it stands as
one of the great British horror films of the early 1970s. A true
classic!
As
for the DVD - An uncensored, widescreen UK DVD release was released in
2010 by Odeon Entertainment, the film deserves far more than the usual
and frankly pathetic trailer and stills gallery combo. It’s a real shame
that Anchor Bay’s commentary by Linda Hayden, Piers Haggard and writer
Robert Wynne-Simmons on the Region 1 DVD/Tigon coffin boxset, isn’t
included. Nor is the Mark Gattis, Jeremy Dyson and Reece Sheersmith for
that matter! But, that said the R2 UK disc does include the original
mono soundtrack as an option (along with the 5.1 surround) not included
on the previous DVDs.
Little Shoppe of Horrors No. 25: The Journal of Classic British Horror Films Mag
[This review was originally posted on my now defunct blog 'The Eye of Agamotto'. I will be re-posting several of those old posts here]
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