The Blood on Satan's Claw

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.