10/13/2026
Next Late Night Double Feature :
WITCHFINDER GENERAL
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THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW
SAT, 10/17 @ 9:30PM + SUN, 10/18 @ 10:30AM
Total Runtime: 198min (Including 15min Intermission)
WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) - aka. “THE CONQUEROR WORM”
The film follows Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), the proclaimed witchfinder general, as he travels through East Anglia during the English civil war on the hunt for supposed witches. In each town and village he visits, mass panic is whipped up in order to justify the interrogation, torture and eventual ex*****on of innocent people, mostly women. However, murdering a priest and torturing his daughter, Sara (Hilary Heath), leaves Hopkins on the run from a roundhead, Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), who seeks revenge for the violence inflicted upon his fiancé and her family.
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THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)
The Blood on Satan’s Claw is a chilling and atmospheric film set in 17th-century rural England. When ploughman Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews) unearths the grotesque fragment of a devilish creature, a series of nightmarish events unfold in the nearby village. As inexplicable occurrences plague the community, the village’s youth begin to indulge in increasingly sinister behaviour, led by the malevolent Angel Blake (Linda Hayden).
“Come now, rise now, from the forest, from the furrows, from the fields, and live!”
So goes one of the ritualistic chants heard in Piers Haggard’s terrifying horror of haunted landscapes The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Produced for Tigon Pictures, Haggard’s film was one of the defining moments of countercultural British folk horror. In fact, it is one of the few films of its time actively made as a folk horror before the term really gained prominence. “I was trying to make a folk horror I suppose,” Haggard once told horror magazine Fangoria.
Released in the UK on 19 May 1968, Witchfinder General is a subversive masterpiece that turns a journeying revenge horror into a genuinely questioning film about the power of belief and the true horrors that lurk in the fields and forests of England.
Michael Reeves died tragically early (aged 25, just nine months after this film’s release) and never got to esc
