There's a little bit of the devil in all of us. While plowing a field, a seventeenth-century British bumpkin unearths a malformed skull that just reeks of bad things to come. Pretty soon, patches of unsightly hair, “Satan's skin,” begin appearing on the bodies of children in the nearby town. It's as though some demonic force were piecing itself together, part by part, like a collective evil. To make matters worse, the children have gone haywire-when they're not rolling in the hay, they're indulging in human sacrifice, all under the tutelage of witchy woman Angel Blake, played by sirenic Linda Hayden. Like The Wicker Man that would soon follow, The Blood on Satan's Claw peers into the primeval mind, noting the somnolent hysteria of superstition. In this beautifully rendered but horrific pastoral, the Beast is as natural as the double-backed beast, or perhaps as unnatural.