The Blood on Satan's Claw in Bloomington, MN

Widely regarded as one of the foundational 'Unholy Trinity' of folk horror film,
The
Blood on Satan's Claw
(1971) has been comparatively over-shadowed, if not maligned, when compared to
Witchfinder General
(1968) and
The Wicker Man
(1973). While those horror bedfellows are now accepted as classics of British cinema, Piers Haggard's film remains undervalued, ironically so, given that it was Haggard who coined the term 'folk horror' in relation to his film. In this Devil's Advocate, David Evans-Powell explores the place of the film in the wider context of the folk horror sub-genre; its use of a seventeenth-century setting (which it shares with contemporaries such as
and
Cry of the Banshee
) in contrast to the generic nineteenth-century locales of Hammer; the influences of contemporary counter-culture and youth movement on the film; the importance of localism and landscape; and the film as an expression of a wider contemporary crisis in English identity (which can also be perceived in
, and in contemporary TV serials such as
Penda's Fen
).