HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 62
4th of 4 folk horror films

I’m definitely going to have to get to Kier-La Janisse’s folk horror documentary sometime soon, because I want to know what was in the air in the late 60’s / early 70’s that triggered all these amazing folk horror flicks. I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say maybe it was a reaction to the whole hippy movement thing? Horror has this knack of honing in on our latent fears and conjuring something concrete out of even the most abstract ones, so maybe these films were a manifestation of our reservations of the whole idea of going back to nature and eschewing technological progress. A way of saying “hmmm, maybe the countryside is not all butterflies and daisies”.

In Blood on Satan’s Claw (I just can’t cope with the “the” at the front of it), there is something to fear literally in the earth itself. Farmer Ralph (Barry Andrews) inadvertently uncovers the skeletal remains of something he can only identify as some kind of demon. On running to the local judge (Patrick Wymark) and hauling him back there, the remains are gone. Did they seep back into the ground or get up and walk off? Whatever happened, things start getting seriously weird for the village from this point on, as its younger residents start developing an eerie cultish psychosis and bizarre patches of demonic hair and claws and so on start appearing on people’s very flesh. One of the girls, Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) – ringleader of the wayward youths and secret object of lust of most of the village’s men (there’s a reason she was chosen by the devil, perhaps) starts holding something like a blend between a black mass and a fertility ritual in the countryside’s hidden places, generally leading to some poor sap’s demise.

Although the plot is rather impenetrable, it’s also a little thin – and that’s assuming one can make much sense of it. What’s important is that a demonic force is clearly corrupting the youth and leading to the strange horror of bodily mutilation – this is almost like a cross between The Wicker Man and Hellraiser in that sense and, although if you come in expecting Clive Barker levels of viscerality you will be a little disappointed, there’s definitely a nasty streak here which probably shocked the theatre-goers of the day. The luridness gets ramped up by the film’s overt sexuality, especially in the performance of Hayden who pretty capably portrays the embodiment of lustful temptation and raw sex appeal.

Patrick Wymark is less sexy (maybe I’m biased) but he brings great gravitas to the role of The Judge – never a particularly sympathetic character (he’s a 17th century English authority figure, after all) he is a powerful symbol of the draconian rule of the era. Not someone you’d ever want to tussle with (the rough justice of the day is clearly demonstrated in the treatment of the priest after he rejects Angel’s naked proposition in the church), these guys were the face of what law and order society had, and so the collision between rigid, repressive male Christian hegemony and brutal, nature-based mysticism (notably presided over by a female) is set up as the logical conclusion here.

My only slight complaint is how less layered the film is to The Wicker Man. It’s impossible not to compare the two films, and maybe that’s unfair, but whereas The Wicker Man posits the idea that the Church is just as superstitious and damaging to the individual as Summerisle’s brutal island-bound paganism, Blood on Satan’s Claw allows the pagans to simply be the vassals of an unspeakable Hellish evil and the Law to be the only possible saviour (albeit without making the Law look all that great in the process).

Where the film does excel though is in the general aesthetic. When we think about the term “folk-horror” it’s hard to think of a film that exudes such a quintessentially folk-horror atmosphere* than Blood on Satan’s Claw. It feels somehow simultaneously like a time capsule back to early 70’s Britain and to 17th century backwaters. Piers Haggard and the producers were desperate to create something which departed tonally from the horror output of Hammer – something less camp and perhaps slightly more avant garde – and I think they succeeded admirably. It’s certainly an odd film, but then folk-horror should feel odd, I always think. It’s a vehicle to explore the pathways of ancestral fears which remain in our psyches – grown over with thorns and nettles and disorienting to travel down, but still definitely there. There’s a certain excitement to that kind of exploration, and my general feeling is that I wish we had more films that deal in such subject matter and tone.

*We talk about an “Unholy Trinity” of folk-horror films: this, The Wicker Man and The Witchfinder General. And having recently watched Witchhammer, it’s really striking to me how dissimilar in tone I find movies about witch trials to films like Blood on Satan’s Claw. The commonality is setting, but the difference is in subject matter. Most folk-horror films – the kinds I’m talking about which use supernatural or otherworldly, or even just outrageous, ideas to expose ancestral fears – have that horror-fantasy sheen to them. They might be serious minded, but they’re still fun horror flicks. Movies about the actual historical witch trials are disturbing and horrifying in an entirely different way. I’m not saying they’re any less worthy than the others, but they give me an entirely different reaction – usually one of mild depression at how convincing and inevitable it all is and how shit we are as a species. They’re almost more like historical true crime than “horror” in the usual sense.