PIERS Haggard, who passed away this week at the age of 83, will be remembered for many things.
The London-born director was the great-great-nephew of legendary King Solomon's Mines author Sir Henry Rider Haggard and more than a little of that writer's adventurous spirit clearly flowed in his veins when you consider his life and where it took him.
As a practically minded player in the film industry he established Directors UK, the directors' guild, and devoted much of his life to campaigning for the rights of his fellow film-makers while from a creative point of view he made some of the most interesting art of anyone from his generation.
In a five decade-spanning career that embraced the theatre, television and the cinema he helmed productions that, oddly enough, managed very often to be both popular and cult friendly.
That's a trick that's considerably harder to pull off than it sounds. The sheer variety of material that he handled is also to his credit.
He may be best remembered for his brilliant 1978 adaptation of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven for example, for which he earned a Bafta, but he also delivered the dystopian Quatermass Conclusion with Sir John Mills in 1979.
That grim vision of Britain crumbling to dust in the grip of imminent apocalypse, carved skilfully into a miniseries for ITV, rarely gets the love it so clearly deserves but in my book it remains the best ever screen adaptation of Nigel Kneale's powerful and prescient work.
While the television credits on his considerable CV are impressive, ranging from teeth-cutting years on Armchair Theatre and classy crime dramas like Callan, there are far fewer films on there that really stand out.
He helmed an undervalued snakes-on-the-loose thriller called Venom in 1981 that deserves a better reputation than it currently has but also turned in the disastrous final Peter Sellers flick The Fiendish Plot Of Fu Manchu in 1980 that is, at best, borderline unwatchable and, at worst, an utter shambles.
Such fripperies fade into insignificance however when you remember that this is the man who gave us The Blood On Satan's Claw in 1971. As one of the trio of the so called "unholy trinity" of folk horror, alongside The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General, The Blood On Satan's Claw is a remarkable piece of work.
An eerie and unsettling tale of devil worship and sacrifice in the muddy fields of seventeenth century England, it's earthy evil and unrelenting nastiness failed to garner much of an audience on its initial release but that has changed progressively over the passing years.
Today it is rightly held up as a masterpiece of the macabre and a film that captures the witchy wonder of England's pagan past like few others.
Envelope-pushing in its own way, it features children as the key players and a young girl as the leader of the devilish dabbling, and still shocking today it's directed with real panache by Haggard who brings the dark side firmly out into the light.
If you remember him for one thing, let it be this. Watch it this weekend. You won't be disappointed.
