Another old gem

Recently I got another of those urges to to revisit one of the old movies that stuck in my head when I was younger. These are the films that I watched either lying in my bed with the lights off some night during the summer or the weekend when I could stay up as late as I wanted, or sitting on my mom's bed on a Saturday morning taking advantage of her larger TV while she was at work. During those years I probably watched hundreds of movies, ranging from the high-quality, professionally made ones to the films where you could see the actors standing there, waiting for their opponent to throw a punch or kick so they could scream 'Ugh!” with Shakespearean passion.

In that odd mix, a certain group has always had its own special place. They're not only horror movies, but they have a certain flavor and style that comes from being made in England by Hammer and other companies that knew what they were doing. This is where I got a lot of the images and situations that eventually gelled into the protoplasm that I pull my ideas from. This is the stuff that nightmares are made from.

'The blood on Satan's Claw,' from what I've read, came from trying to follow up on the success of 'Witchfinder General.' It takes place in an isolated country village, where an innocent/naive farmer plows up an inhuman set of bones. From there, the whole village is affected by something that we never get a good look at, and in ways that are more subtle than you will see in most other movies, past or present.

Not having seen it in many years, when I sat to down and watched it last week, it was all the details that made it stand out. Aside from good acting, there are subtleties that make it feel bigger and richer than its contemporaries. The evil corrupts the young people in the village, and they seem to take to their new lives with wicked enthusiasm, with passion that everyone else lacks. The local reverend loses control of the children in his Bible class, and ends up reviled and accused of murder. The only adults we see as part of the unrest are the truly old, part of an age that this bright, shining country worked hard to bury, and is working harder to forget. There are references to England splitting from Catholicism and creating their own church, as well as to generation gaps and the slow struggle out of the dark ages. We get the sense of larger events that overshadow the villagers and their problems. If they die, and darkness takes them and everything they know, it's doubtful anyone in the outside world would even notice.

All that in ninety-seven minutes, made back in nineteen seventy one. They didn't have CGI, or digital watches, or Pac Man. Star Wars had not yet come out, and Elvis was still alive. They just had film, actors, and a script.

That's writing.