The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) on Netflix
Ralph Gower turns up a furred skeleton with one eye in a field, and the Judge dismisses it. Angel Blake picks a small object out of the earth and hides it.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.4/109,392 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes73%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ralph Gower, plowing a field, uncovers a furred skeleton with a single eye, and tells the Judge and Isobel Banham. The Judge will not treat the find as important. Ralph leads him back to the field, where only bones remain: the fur and the eye have gone. Peter Edmonton brings his intended, Rosalind Barton, to stay at his aunt Isobel Banham's house, and Rosalind is given an attic room long unused. She screams in the night, and Isobel, going in to her, is struck and comes out bleeding.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The role of the judge was first offered to Peter Cushing, who turned it down because of his wife's illness; Christopher Lee was considered but his fee was too high, so Patrick Wymark was cast. It was Wymark's last English-language film, released three months after his death.
SPOILER
Tigon executives ordered a new ending for The Blood on Satan's Claw: screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons's original finale had the Judge raising a militia to murder the entire village and wipe out the cult, but the studio found it too bleak and replaced it with one where the demon is defeated and the villagers survive.- The BBFC passed The Blood on Satan's Claw with an X rating only after mandating under ten seconds of cuts. Some sequences were optically darkened, including a nude Angel seducing the curate, and a shot of Angel performing oral sex on the demon was heavily truncated and darkened, though a brief portion remains.
- Tigon had Robert Wynne-Simmons insert elements from its earlier hit Witchfinder General into the script, among them the "Book of Witches" and a scene in which locals duck a suspected witch; Wynne-Simmons said the producers wanted to repeat it because it had been so successful before.
- Screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons drew the film's horrors from real cases: his screenplay was inspired in part by the Manson Family and by the Mary Bell child murders.
- The film's ruined church is the old Saint James Church in Bix Bottom, Oxfordshire, which had stood abandoned since 1875. Before The Blood on Satan's Claw, the derelict church had already been used as a filming location for The Witches (1966).
