Widely regarded as one of the foundational Unholy Trinity of folk horror film, The Blood on Satans Claw (1971) has been comparatively overshadowed, if not maligned, when compared to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973) While those horror bedfellows are now accepted as classics of British cinema, Piers Haggards film remains undervalued, ironically so, given that it was Haggard who coined the term folk horror in relation to his film In this Devils Advocate, David EvansPowell explores the place of the film in the wider context of the folk horror subgenre its use of a seventeenthcentury setting (which it shares with contemporaries such as Witchfinder General and Cry of the Banshee) in contrast to the generic nineteenthcentury locales of Hammer the influences of contemporary counterculture and youth movement on the film the importance of localism and landscape and the film as an expression of a wider contemporary crisis in English identity (which can also be perceived in Witchfinder General, and in contemporary TV serials such as Pendas Fen)