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Blood On Satan's Claw

In a remote English village in the early 1700s, ploughman Ralph Gower digs up a grotesque skull with one staring eye and patches of strange fur. He alerts the visiting Judge, who dismisses it as superstition; by the time they return, the remains have vanished. Shortly afterward, Peter Edmonton brings his fiancée Rosalind to stay with his aunt. That night Rosalind is attacked in an attic room and later reveals a monstrous claw where her hand should be. She is committed as mad. Children playing near the field discover a claw, and a series of increasingly sinister events follows: the aunt disappears, Peter is attacked and ends up severing his own hand, and the village youth begin behaving strangely. Under the leadership of the beautiful and manipulative Angel Blake, the children form a secret cult. They lure one of their number, Mark, to a ritual death, attempt to corrupt the local curate, and later abduct Mark’s sister Cathy. In the ruined church they hold a Black Mass, during which they rape, murder, and flay the fur from Cathy’s back—patches of the same “Devil’s skin” that have begun growing on the children themselves. These pieces are being gathered to restore the physical form of a demonic entity (sometimes identified with Behemoth). Ralph, who has been courting Cathy, discovers her body and tries to raise the alarm, but the authorities are slow and divided. When another girl, Margaret, is nearly drowned as a suspected witch, Ralph rescues her and has the fur cut from her leg. Once free of the mark, however, she remains loyal to the cult. The Judge, now taking the threat seriously, returns from London and learns the cult will gather to complete the ritual. He leads a mob to the ruined church. In the climactic confrontation Ralph nearly sacrifices himself under the demon’s influence before the Judge destroys the creature with a sword fashioned into a cross, ending the curse and restoring the survivors. The film is notable for its slow-building dread, its focus on the corruption of the young rather than a single external monster, and its bleak, earthy atmosphere of rural superstition and emerging modernity.

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