The Blood on Satan's Claw
The Blood on Satan's Claw is a 1971 film from the UK, directed by Piers Haggard, running 93 minutes. reelscum files it under occult & satanic panic and folk horror.
- Year
- 1971 · 1970s films
- Country
- UK
- Runtime
- 93 min
- Director
- Piers Haggard
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (33/100)
- Also known as
- Satan's Skin · The Devil's Touch · The Devil's Skin · The Blood on Satan's Claw
Defined in the glossary: Occult & satanic panic, Folk horror
A plough turns up a skull and a village falls apart. Coined the term.
One of the founding films of British folk horror, and the one whose director is credited with coining the term. In a seventeenth-century English village, a ploughed-up fiend corrupts the local children into a witch cult, and the film builds a genuine sense of rural evil rising from the soil itself.
Piers Haggard shoots the countryside as beautiful and menacing, and the film's unease comes from watching a community rot from within. It sits alongside Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man in the unholy trinity of the subgenre.
Atmospheric, unsettling, and foundational to a whole tradition.
Trailer
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Filed alongside
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Veerana
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Race with the Devil
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God Told Me To
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Calvaire
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Şeytan
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