A Green and (un)Pleasant Land

Abstract

This chapter considers how the landscape is depicted in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. In examining the depiction of the rural landscape, the film’s pre-credits and opening sequences receive particular scrutiny. The chapter explores the countryside within the film through a number of different lenses: as a worked, agricultural landscape that is markedly different from those seen in Hammer’s gothic horror films; as a pastoral landscape that appreciates the beauty inherent in a stark and unsentimentalised topography as a variant on the richer and more sumptuous landscapes of heritage cinema; as an uncanny landscape that diminishes human presence and in doing so becomes an unfamiliar, disquieting environment; as a malign landscape that is actively hostile to those who dwell within it; and as a landscape that resists occupation altogether. This chapter will also consider how the film mediates cultural understandings of the local and localism.