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31 Days of Horror Cinema

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971): 31 Days of Horror 2021

Nature of Shame:
Unwatched Severin BD, “Folk Horror” Essential

Hooptober ’21 Challenge Checklist:
Decade: 1970’s
Folk Horror
Country: UK


THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW ELEVATOR PITCH

A farmer overturns a mysterious skull, which sets off mass demonic possession among the village youth, aka raging puberty + ritual sacrifice.

IDLE THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW MUSINGS

Folk horror became a buzzy subgenre after Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) shocked and horrified audiences with their relentless sense of self-importance and eerie and effective, long-game subversive terror. If that statement confounds you and blurs your understanding of where I stand on these films, I’ve done my job. Goodnight. Tip with your waiter. He doesn’t want to be here because he could be collecting a fat unemployment check and finally finishing up Red Dead Redemption 2 on his couch.

blood on satan's claw main satanic hottie

Having not heard the term folk horror pop up in my cinematic travels before The Witch, I struck out on my own in search of its nexus. Based on The Witch‘s singularity (in a contemporary sense), the concept seemed rather self-explanatory, but seeming and knowing are two wildly different states of being. The former works best when buzzing on two pints, the latter for writing a bl-g post about one of the Unholy Trinity, the three British films identified by writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell as the origins of the folk horror subgenre in response to a 2003 BBC interview with The Blood on Satan’s Claw director Piers Haggard. This interview represents the first known usage of the term folk horror. Mark Gatiss, in the 2010 BBC4 series A History of Horror, furthered the usage and yada yada yada… now it’s a thing, almost 40 years after the release of the final film in the Unholy Trinity. They are Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973).

If I wanted to do something useful with this space, I’d have watched all three just now, but that’s not what we’re doing here. I’ve seen the breads. It was time to watch the bologna in this here folk horror sandwich.

THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW REVIEW

If you look at Piers Haggard’s film as the Blood and Black Lace or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage of the subgenre, the tenets of folk horror fall into place. Like the giallo, the folk horror film relies on a narrow bandwidth of available visual tropes. Rural, pre-industrial landscapes (The Wicker Man and Midsommar artificially create this setting). Horror elements introduced via the occult, witchcraft, loopholes in religious doctrine. These limited elements work in service of a mood — isolation.

The remote landscape provides the perfect playground for a moral and spiritual corruption brought about by external supernatural influences such as demonic spirits and witches. Sometimes even the big bad Satan himself. The violence contained within often stems from a darker, buried human past, one that’s permanently entangled with these spirits and will continue to erupt because of mankind’s tenuous grasp on morality. There are startling comparisons to be made with the recurring themes in folk horror and the ebb and flow of political movements like fascism standing in for demonic possession, but that’s a tangent I’m simply not prepared to entertain in this space. I’ve placed upon you the burden of deeper thought and that’s more than enough for your average Tuesday.

On folk horror, writer and illustrator Andy Paciorek mused: “One may as well attempt to build a box the exact shape of mist; for like the mist, folk horror is atmospheric and sinuous. It can creep from and into different territories yet leave no universal defining mark of its exact form.”

The horror found within the genre tends arise from grotesque visions, but bloodshed occurs when humans turn on humans in service of dark spiritual forces. In one particularly brutal scene in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the town teenagers lure one of their more innocent peers into a rape and ritual sacrifice to summon the dark lord. The unsettling power arises because one day earlier these were all average teens, joking about sex and idling in the fields. They played a game with Satan’s claws and now the innocents have become agents of pure, monstrous evil. The rape relished. The murder as natural and easy as killing ten minutes in Snapchat.

We, the viewer, feel remotely complicit. Due to the lack of sensationalism and stylized cinematics in folk horror, the dread and low-lying terror provides a greater unsettle to overt horror imagery ratio. The rape/sacrifice scene made me uneasy in ways that gore and violence in other supposedly shocking horror movies has not.

Like my immediate response to Eggers’ The Witch, I wanted to escape immediately, but chew on deliberately. Pardon my ghastly adverb abuse, but I’ve deemed them necessary. These are fascinating movies about human ties to the spiritual and our dormant, innate capacity for evil. They do not provide me with the same visceral and preternatural pleasures of the giallo movement, to put a capper on that analogy. Perhaps folk horror burrows too deeply, too coldly, whereas the superficial pleasures of garish colors, chiaroscuro, and black-gloved killers allows distance and escape.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I can’t be the only one that’s interested in what happens after the events featured in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Twenty teenagers just kidnapped, raped and murdered a girl in addition to summoning the devil. Sure, this one had a deus ex witchfinder kind of finale (hooray!) that predicts evil’s certain return (booo), but there has to be some kind of ramifications beyond revoking idling in Satanic fields privileges.

Unsettling, fascinating, and defining film in the definition of the folk horror genre, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready for more.

blood on satan's claw severin bluray cover

I watched The Blood on Satan’s Claw on an OOP Severin Blu-ray. It is still widely available on a UK Blu-ray for you region-free hounds.

2021 @CinemaShame / #Hooptober Progress

#1. Gamera, the Giant Monster (1965) / #2. The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

James David Patrick currently writes for DVD Netflix. He’s written just about everything at some point or another. Add whatever this is to that list. Follow his blog at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com and find him on TwitterInstagram, and Facebook.

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31 Days of Horror Cinema

Gamera, the Giant Monster (1965): 31 Days of Horror 2021

Nature of Shame:
Massive Amazing Stupendous Unwatched Gamera Arrow Box Set

Hooptober ’21 Challenge Checklist:
Decade: 1960’s
Kaiju!

 

GAMERA, THE GIANT MONSTER ELEVATOR PITCH

[ahem]…it’s GODZILLA, except… wait for it… HE’S A TURTLE…

And he flies and spins and fire comes out of his mouth. Plus some other weird places on his body because nuclear bombs and planes and war are bad! REAL BAD.

GAMERA THOUGHTS

My first viewing of an un-MST3K’d Gamera movie. Even during the riffs, Joel and the bots didn’t set out to undercut the movie’s relative quality. In my opinion, they’re not among the best Mystery Science Theater riffs because they’re more hangout-inspired rather than a celebration of the joys of bad cinema. The same observations could be made about any non-Godzilla (1954) kaiju film that strains its budget to an obvious breaking point. More on this later.

Gamera, rising from the Arctic

While watching these low-budget kaiju offerings, it’s easy to slip into a childlike frame-of-mind. The obvious model-work (and destruction) and person-in-a-rubber-suit costume party doesn’t lend itself to mockery so much as isn’t it cool they made a movie like this? You can see clearly how the film comes together absent the moviemaking magic allowed by money to make those models and costumes less obvious.

It probably benefitted the MST3K riff that the version used was the 1985 Sandy Frank-commissioned release featuring an atrocious English dub and new soundtrack.

I love watching these movies with my youngest daughter (now 9yo), who thinks all of the kaiju are just adorable and has started to identify some of the filmmaking and special effects techniques. Enjoying low-budget monster knockoffs like Gamera isn’t about ignoring the shortcomings; it’s more about embracing the artifice as its presented. We watched through a handful of offerings on the Criterion Godzilla set last year, so she’s primed for everything Gamera has to offer.

GAMERA REVIEW

In 1964 Dalei Film studio head Masaichi Nagata wanted to piggyback the success of both Toho’s Godzilla (obviously) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (not as obvious?) by creating a “Nezura the Giant Horde Beast” franchise and replace birds with mammoth-sized man-eating rats created by a revolutionary high-calorie food source that causes mutations. The real Japanese health department shut down production because the flea-infested wild brown rats used for the film escaped the set and had the potential to spread disease. The climax? Neutralization through rat cannibalism.

Nagata conceived Gamera as his Nezura replacement. Due to an extra-tight budget and schedule, the production used outdated equipment and faulty props and faced the wrath of other Japanese film producers for its unrepentant clone of Godzilla right down to its nuclear anxieties. This time, however, an American jet shoots down an unknown, unidentified aircraft in Arctic waters. The blast awakens a dormant prehistoric tusked turtle that an Eskimo chief identifies as Gamera. “Action” shifts back to Japan where the story localizes on a kid whose turtle obsession is threatening to derail his studies.

Anytime a monster film focuses on the kid, I have concerns. Toshio (played by Yoshiro Uchida). Perhaps because he’s mugging in Japanese I’m less bothered by this tendency to put himself in irresponsible situations. Goshdarnit he’s gonna stand between that turtle and the collective forces of the U.S. and Japanese military to ensure its safety. A few moments of sisterly hand-wringing aside, everyone seems okay with this crusade even as little Toshio stows away to the frontlines of Gamera battle.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Gamera lands on that elusive intersection of corny and cool. Outdated effects, hokey dialogue, and blatant Godzilla lifts don’t betray the film’s independent spirit. A fire-spitting turtle that hurtles through space and destroys Japan? What’s not to enjoy about that? It’s not great or original or Godzilla — it’s just Gamera.

Gamera, the Giant Monster is available on a now OOP Arrow Films Blu-ray box-set featuring 12 Gamera films. Arrow subsequently broke up the massive box into two smaller sets: Gamera: The Showa Era Collection and Gamera: The Heisei Era Collection. 

2021 @CinemaShame / #Hooptober Progress

#1. Gamera, the Giant Monster

James David Patrick currently writes for DVD Netflix. He’s written just about everything at some point or another. Add whatever this is to that list. Follow his blog at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com and find him on TwitterInstagram, and Facebook.

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31 Days of Horror Cinema

Hooptober / 31 Days of Horror 2021

Prior Hooptober/31 Days of Horror Lists on Letterboxd.com: 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / 2019 

After taking a COVID-break last year (8yo being remote-schooled next to me would have received a very interesting brand of education based on some Jean Rollin I’d planned to watch), I’m refreshed and ready to Hoop it up in 2021. Not familiar with Hooptober? Here’s a primer. The Cinemonster started Hooptober on Letterboxd.com as a way for horror fans to come together during this holiest time of year. The rules of engagement? Watch 31+ horror movies during the month of October (starting September 15th because we’re adults and we can do what we want) and write a review on Letterboxd.com for each and every flick. I’ll be documenting my progress here and on Letterboxd. More words here. Short bits there. Each year The Cinemonster comes up with some specific parameters to direct viewing and highlight filmmakers and subgenres.

I always attempt to watch as many new-to-me movies as possible. Cinema Shame demands it. I must broaden my horizons… even if they’re the more unsavory horizons. It makes me a better and more respectable human to watch as much Eurotrash as possible. I will assault innocent bystanders with conversations about Jess Franco and Sergio Martino. Inevitably, some old favorites sneak into the mix because goddammit, yes, I want to watch An American Werewolf in London again, okay?!?

CINEMONSTER’S 2021 HOOPTOBER 8 GUIDELINES:

6 countries
8 decades
2 folk horror
4 films from 1981
2 films from your birth year
2 haunted house films
The worst Part 2 that you haven’t seen and can access. (I realize that this will take a little work)
1 film set in the woods
1 Kaiju or Kong film (not the new K v. G)
2 Hammer films
3 films with a person of color as director or lead. (excluding Asian)
3 Asian horror films.

And 1 Tobe Hooper Films (There must ALWAYS be a Hooper film)

***FOR THOSE THAT LIKE TO DO EXTRA WORK: WATCH JD’s Revenge, The Skull and The Scooby Doo Project

30Hz/CINEMA SHAME 31 DAYS OF HORROR 2021 ROSTER

Prior #31DaysOfHorror Shame-a-thons: 2013 | 2014 | 2015 Part 1 | 2015 Part 2 | 2016 | 2017 | 20182019

*rewatch

American Werewolf in London (1981)*
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)
The Black Cat (1981)
The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)
Bones (2001)
The Boogens (1981)
Cat People (1942)*
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)*
The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)
The Fly II (1989)
Gamera, the Giant Monster (1965)*
Ganja & Hess (1973)
Ghost Story (1981)
The Girl With All The Gifts (2016)
The Howling (1981)*
The Howling II (1985)
Invaders from Mars (1986)
Lake of the Dead (1958)
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
Murder Obsession (1981)
Mystics in Bali (1981)
The Old Dark House (1932)*
Patrick (1978)
The Pit (1981)
Suddenly in the Dark (1981)
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Night (1995)*
Thirst (2009)
Ugetsu (1953)
Venom (1981)
Viy (1967)
Wolfen (1981)

MY UP-TO-DATE HOOPTOBER ROSTER ON LETTERBOXD

What’s your list? What’s your plan for horror movie watching this year? If you’re keeping a list or participating in the Hooptober challenge, I’ll link to your Letterboxd list or blog in the header for my posts. Just leave a note with a link in these comments. Together we shall overcome… or we’ll be the losers knocked off in the first act to establish the killer’s indomitable menace. It’s more comforting to know you’re not doing this alone.