Welcome back to Dark Corners Streaming.
British production company Tigon was relatively short-lived but left its mark,
producing films as bad as 1972’s Virgin Witch
and as masterful as 1968’s Witchfinder General, starring Vincent Price.
Made between those two and available to stream on Shudder, The Blood On Satan’s Claw drew heavily on the latter film.
‘Witchcraft is dead and discredited’
It also feels like a precursor to that other British horror classic, The Wicker Man.
Set around a 17th century English village, the film starts with the discovery of a strange skeleton,
‘But it weren’t human sir.’
and soon occult things start to occur
pointing in one direction.
‘We fear that witchcraft has returned.’
Particularly revolving around the children of the village.
‘Wilt thou come and play with us Mark?’
Forever and ever.
Ringleader of the children is Angel Blake, played by Linda Hayden
who had been in Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula the year before,
and whose nude scene here seducing the local Reverend raised a few eyebrows.
The cast also includes another Hammer Dracula alum, Barry Andrews,
former Doctor Who companion Zoe Padbury
and character actor Patrick Wymark,
'We will find your fiend.'
who would die before the film was released, aged just 50.
‘God bless him and keep in exile.’
Wymark’s Judge is the nominal lead,
though he vanishes from the mid-section before returning to route out the evil.
‘I shall use undreamed of measures.’
This is where the film draws most heavily on Witchfinder General
and director Piers Haggard was instructed to include certain scenes.
It also puts the film in an interesting moral grey area
because here the supernatural threat seems to be real,
‘That’s what they call the devil’s skin.’
So, unlike Price’s Matthew Hopkins, the Judge is on the side of righteousness,
but his techniques are still quite heavy handed.
'Where is your meeting place?'
'Woof woof woof.'
'Anywhere.'
The film has a real sense of unease and tension to it,
helped tremendously by Marc Wilkinson’s edgy score
and its use of the countryside is likewise excellent.
It was originally to be a sort of anthology, using the mysterious skeleton to tie three otherwise separate stories together
and the surgery necessary to make it into one story has left scars;
the Judge’s long absence, the speed with which characters get over the death of their nearest and dearest and
a slight uncertainty over what the film really is about, seeming to go down one route,
‘There’s evil in this house’
then another.
‘There is growing amongst you all an insolent ungodliness.’
That, combined with its desire to emulate Witchfinder General leave it a bit unfocussed.
‘Leave me to judge who is innocent.’
and may have cost it at the box office where it under-performed.
The combination of teenage sexuality and mutilation is definitely not for everyone,
and, while not exactly gratuitous,
it can be lurid in a way that doesn’t feel one hundred percent necessary.
Still, it a very well-made film, and a solid example of the folk horror genre which deserves to be better known.
‘Are you bent on reviving forgotten horrors?’
Thanks for watching. What’s your take on this and other films from Tigon,
who also made a couple of films we reviewed for regular Dark Corners.
Let us know in the comments below.
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