Spooktober 3.2 - Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)
George Daniel Lea, Elliot Chapman, and I, discuss another film in our Folk Horror series, and oh yeah this is one of the big ones. We're tackling one third of the now canonical 1970s British 'Folk Horror Trilogy', Piers Haggard and Robert Wynne-Simmons' frail behemoth Blood on Satan's Claw (Tigon, 1971).
Stars fiery ball of charisma Linda Hayden, drunken ball of strangeness Patrick Wymark, slimy ball of outright weirdness Anthony Ainley, powerhouses of intensity Wendy Padbury and Michelle Dotrice, and a couple of boring young men who are also there because you have to have them I suppose.
Deeply flawed, so nonsensical its genuinely dreamlike, aggressively nasty to the point of being traumatising, and freighted with so much apparently accidental mythological and historical significance its actually suspicious... this film is quite simply indescribable.
So listen to us describe it.
Content warnings for discussion of rape.
Comments (1)
Wonderful episode! I checked this one out thanks to you, I’d never heard of it - completely enthralling film. I also came to the Wicker Man more or less blind as a teenager, the only thing I knew about it was that my parents hated it and it was the only movie they’d ever walked out of in the theater, and as a result I became completely obsessed with it lol