THESE days ‘folk horror’ is an expression bandied about with depressing regularity to describe just about any horror film that’s set in the countryside, boasts even a waft of paganism or features sinister goings on out in the sticks.
If you want to know what ‘folk horror’ really represents in a filmic sense, though, you only need to see one film: The Blood On Satan’s Claw. Director Piers Haggard’s 1971 low budget British production is a masterpiece of the macabre and as perfect a distillation of the genre in all its earthy, primal glory as has ever been committed to celluloid.
A brand new, lavishly appointed Blu-ray of it has just been released by 88 Films with more extras and bonus items than you could shake a knobbly divining stick at, so if you haven’t waded through its murky waters to date, you’ve no excuse but to rectify that right now.
The Blood on Satan’s Claw opens where it intends to stay, deep down in the dirt of an ordinary post-English Civil War era field, where a young ploughboy played by Barry Andrews is going about his business digging up the soil and waving enthusiastically at his beloved in a nearby meadow.
This picture of rural bliss is shattered when he suddenly uncovers a grotesque rotting face, a “fiend” as he memorably calls it, in the mud. He runs to tell the local judge, Patrick Wymark, of his discovery, but the damage is already done - strange forces are now at play.
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This “devil” unleashed in the fields exerts a growing grip over the children of the village, who turn feral and start hunting and killing each other with an ever increasing relish. Director Haggard frames this tale of witchcraft and superstition with a rare non-judgemental approach that allows the nastiness to flourish without the need for a traditional clean-cut hero charging in to save the day.
The cinematography by Dick Bush is lush and evocative, but Haggard shoots much of his film from the ground looking up, as if to remind us of the hole the horned one is coming from.
It’s a fairly fragmented narrative, caused by Haggard originally envisioning the film as a trio of tales in the then popular portmanteau format before screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons cobbled them together as one piece, but the three fables that unfold here interlink in mood to create a genuinely unsettling atmosphere of evil that grows as the film progresses.
The first story features a groom-to-be (Simon Williams) who finds his intended has been contaminated by contact with the Devil himself, the second zooms in on those creepy kids whose evil escalates towards a harrowing scene of rape in a disused church, while the final segment tackles the witchcraft which plagues the town folk and leads to a showdown between the hooded figure of darkness and Wymark’s righteous but aging law giver.
It’s a powerful study of evil that can still shock today – watching the children led by a scowling Linda Hayden descend into a sexualised gang of murderers is particularly distasteful – but it remains an incredible piece of art all the same, and one that captures the essence of ‘folk horror’ effortlessly.
