The Blood on Satan's Claw

Something is dug up in a field, and the children of an eighteenth-century English village form a cult around it.

The plough turns up a skull with one eye and fur on the bone. Piers Haggard shoots the countryside in genuine sunlight and lets the horror grow out of the soil, which is the folk horror method in its purest form.

It was written as three separate stories and stitched into one film during production, which is why the structure wanders. The wandering is part of why it feels like something recounted rather than plotted.

Linda Hayden plays Angel Blake, and the film's willingness to make its cult leader a teenage girl who is visibly enjoying herself is the thing that unsettles people.

Marc Wilkinson's score, built around an ondes Martenot, is one of the strangest in British film.

Haggard called it folk horror in a 2004 Fangoria interview, years before the label became a category.