In my book Holy Horror I limited my discussion to fairly widely available and well-known films. Part of the reason for this is that nobody can watch all horror movies and for those of us who work, there’s just limited time. All of the films are at least American co-produced, most of them American productions. The one exception to that is The Wicker Man. I couldn’t bear to leave that particular movie out. I didn’t realize at the time that it was classified as the newly coined “folk horror.” Another film, released two years earlier was the strangely titled The Blood on Satan’s Claw. It’s a strange but competent British horror film that has an eighteenth-century village falling prey to a demon that is accidentally plowed up in a field.
It is a film that could’ve been included in Holy Horror. Indeed, the Bible appears in it and one of the adult characters is the local curate. As the children are succumbing to a Satanism that’s raising a demon, he tries to teach them their Bible lessons. Like Village of the Damned, the horror here centers on the children. Flaunting the reverend’s rules, they play in the woods, raising the Devil. Almost literally. The demon they summon is called Behemoth. Perhaps surprisingly, the judge actually saves the day in this one. At first he’s convinced that the age of superstition is over and insists that it not be brought back. He learns, however, that the demon is real and deals with it by rather physical means. Who is Behemoth?
The word translates rather literally to “beasts.” In the book of Job Behemoth is the land-bound companion to Leviathan, the two monsters that God cites to demonstrate his superiority over mere mortals. As time wore on into the middle ages Behemoth and Leviathan were recast as demons, although it’s pretty clear that the book of Job doesn’t present them that way. One of the points I make in Nightmares with the Bible is that demons aren’t fully formed beings in the ancient imagination. Since the Bible says so little about them, ideas were drawn from folklore and other sources to flesh out these somewhat amorphous entities. Descriptions of The Blood on Satan’s Claw quite often state that the children of the village are possessed. If so, it is quite a different form of possession than will become standard two years later with the release of The Exorcist. It is fitting, I suppose, for folk horror to have a folk demon for its antagonist.
