The Blood on Satan's Claw
A chill-filled festival of horror!
In a seventeenth-century English village, the discovery of a demonic creature at the forest's edge awakens an ancient curse. A wounded child bears marks of the supernatural, and soon the townsfolk fall prey to a creeping possession that transforms the young into servants of an underground cult. A local magistrate must confront the roots of evil coiling around his community.
Haggard's film strips away satanic theatricality and roots dread in the soil itself—a fragmentary structure closer to collected folklore than plot machinery. The episodic rhythm troubles audiences expecting genre momentum; instead, Wymark's magistrate drifts through investigations that feel cursed to repetition. What lingers isn't resolution but atmosphere: those glimpses of bone and claw dissolve into pagan substrate beneath the English pastoral. The cinematography treats the village not as backdrop but as organism, a landscape that remembers what predates Christian law.
- Original Format
- 35mm
- Aspect Ratio
- 1.85:1
- Original Runtime
- 93 min
- Sound
- Mono
- Color Process
- Eastmancolor
Restored in 4K by Arrow Video. Shot in the Chiltern Hills and at Pinewood Studios.
