The plot of this story is demonic interference in a rural village in the olden days (I'm not sure it is possible to be more precise about the date of the setting than this.) The main performers are perhaps better known for their comedy shows, but this is not a comic tale -- well, not deliberately, anyway. As always with Audible productions, the sound engineering is excellent, with convincing sound effects and fitting music. The voice acting is Hammer-like -- melodramatic and overstated. I presume this is intentional. The plot, well -- Hammer again; nothing we haven't heard or seen a dozen times before. The story carefully balances a sense of desolation with moments of violence as supernatural elements slowly creep into the tale. While gradual at first, it cleverly works to show only so much of what’s going on, unveiling it as the devil begins to move more openly. The excellent sound design and voice acting is really what helps to convey the story’s atmospheric strength, and the script knows when let them take the heavy lifting when it comes to drama. Between this and the excellent sound effects, it manages to outshine its source material in moments of true terror.

The story and its themes are stereotypical binary folklore: women are both more mystical and thus more prone to evil or darkness; men represent civilization, rational thinking and authority; Christianity must prevail against an ancient pre-Christian evil. It's still a weird and engaging story, just rooted in traditional tropes.

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Something evil is stirring in the woods. Something that is corrupting the village youth, who retreat to the woodland deeps to play their pernicious games. Hysteria spreads as it becomes clear that the devil has come to Hexbridge, to incarnate himself on earth. Can the villagers, led by the Squire Middleton (Mark Gatiss) and Reverend Fallowfield (Reece Shearsmith), prevent the devil gaining human form?

Possessing a WITCHFINDER GENERAL-type atmosphere, helped immeasurably by Mark Wilkinson's truly beautiful score, this tale of superstition and a Satanic contagion that exhibits itself as an ugly, hairy patch on the skin (motivating alternate title SATAN'S SKIN) is evidence of solid horror-making afoot.

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PDF / EPUB File Name: Blood_on_Satans_Claw_-_Robert_Wynne-Simmons.pdf, Blood_on_Satans_Claw_-_Robert_Wynne-Simmons.epub Anthony Ainley, who plays a curate who Linda Hayden's character attempted to seduce, once said in an interview, "When it came to doing the nude scene where Angel comes into the rectory at night and disrobes this was done at least three times and Linda was spot on with every take...she was a total professional with a refined sense of the erotic unusual for her age...I believe she was only 17 at the time." [22] Musical score [ edit ]

I'm partial to these rural horror stories about communities collectively engaging with the devil, but not necessarily when they take the premise so straightforwardly as this. This audio drama has a very nice soundscape and better acting than most audiobooks, and on a scene to scene level the writing is good enough. The problem is that overall, despite the witchy trappings, it has the mentality of a very unimaginative slasher movie. The devil possesses practically all of the kids in town almost immediately, and the middle 80% is just a sequence of the same "kid getting murdered" scene playing out over and over again without much escalation or character building or mythology to build a more interesting context for them to fit into. It relies heavily on familiar tropes to get right into its business and get right out of it as soon as it's time to stop, without any particular narrative tissue in between. Moreover, while there are some kind of neat touches, a lot of the specific expression of the devil is either boring, problematic, or just dull. My favorite part about the community aspect of these stories is that the devil gets to be a social lever exploiting internal conflicts and prejudices, and this devil has exactly 0 of that subtlety or charisma. As noted earlier, Linda Hayden is dynamite as the sexually provocative Angel and makes it easy to understand how many a fool would follow her to the depths of hell just for a taste of her own brand of heaven. Flower curtains open as the sun rises at noon, and people with animal masks prey upon trespassers as spring makes way to summer. There is blood dripping like strawberry jam on your fingers and the group chants to honor your work. That, my friends, is folk horror—bloody and ritualistic terror thriving by day. Blood on Satan’s Claw reigns as one of the Unholy Trinity films of the folk-horror genre, and for good reason. It engraved the genre’s key components in stone for all who wanted to wander its forbidden and supernatural powers that continue to terrorize audiences 50 years after its release. Unlike the fictional creatures and growling monsters, the movie reveals the evil existent in humanity. Now that is terrifying. Set in the early 18th century, this is a time when the beliefs and customs of folklore and old Paganism still held firm and Christian fears of witchcraft and Satanism were at the height of hysteria, beliefs combining and conflicting, with the English Civil War and England's witch trials still in living memory. Exploring the epidemic qualities of terror and hysteria, which we've witnessed so often throughout history and continue to this day, Wynne-Simmons crafts an atmospheric narrative of compelling and creeping dread.

Hamilton, John (2005). Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser. London: FAB Press. ISBN 978-1-903-25426-4.