A Green and (un)Pleasant Land
A Green and (un)Pleasant Land
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.
Keywords: rural landscape, pastoral landscape, uncanny landscape, malign landscape, heritage cinema, local
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
