Tigon. The horror the world ignored.

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A crueller man than I once remarked that if Amicus was the poor man's Hammer, Tigon was the poor man's Amicus.

He was, of course, completely wrong.

Well, admittedly, he wasn't completely wrong.

However, there was far more to Tigon than being doomed to dwell in the shadow of two other content creators.

Tigon was a British film production company founded by the splendidly named Tony Tenser, way back in the dark days of 1966 and it quickly made a name for itself as a purveyor of the kind of horror that all sensible people avoided.

It never achieved the National Treasure status of Hammer nor the quirky distinctiveness of Amicus and it was never in danger of winning the Queen's Award to Industry that the former company had but it did bestow upon us a string of chillers that are strangely difficult to forget. And at least two of those proved to be pivotal in the history of British and, even, world horror.

But just what kinds of triumphs did Tigon present to us during its seven year history?

Doomwatch, a kind of Wicker Man for people who like common sense solutions. 

The Beast in the Cellar in which Beryl Reid and Flora Robson shared their house with a spectacularly unfriendly brother.

The Crimson Altar brought together Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Barbara Steele and future Coronation Street serial killer Mark Eden for a tale of witchcraft that promised to be far better than it actually was.

On the other hand, The Creeping Flesh united Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing to pleasing effect in the tale of a man who acquires a mysterious skeleton with a penchant for finger removal.

The Sorcerers brought Catherine Lacey, Boris Karloff and Ian Ogilvy together for the tale of an ageing couple who take possession of a young man and force him to do terrible things.

The Blood Beast Terror saw UFO star - and mother of Benedict Cumberbatch - Wanda Ventham as a woman who habitually became a giant homicidal moth in a film that, it has to be said, bore more than a passing resemblance to the far more popular Hammer film The Reptile which had materialised a couple of years earlier.

And there was more than even that. Among Tigon's other films were For the Love of Ada, Au Pair Girls, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, Hannie Caulder, The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, Virgin Witch, The Body Stealers, What's Good for the Goose, The Haunted House of Horror, 1917, Monique, Zeta One, Black Beauty, Love in Our Time and Mini Weekend.

The more astute reader will have guessed that not all of those were horror films. Not even Black Beauty.

But perhaps the company's two most important offerings were Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan's Claw. The former being a highly fictionalised account of the work of Matthew Hopkins, as played by Vincent Price, with the second being a study of what happens to a small rural community when the skull of a mystery creature is unearthed.

Both films are set in the same milieu, occur around the time of the English Civil War and involve accusations of witchcraft. However, while the former makes it clear there are no supernatural happenings and the only evil exists in the hearts of men, the latter makes it clear the supernatural is very much present and eagerly warping the minds of teenagers.

Together, these two films form two limbs of the three-legged milking stool which is often credited with being the very foundation of the genre known as British Folk Horror. The other being the previously mentioned Wicker Man which Tigon had no involvement in. Both Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan's Claw share a nihilism that would probably have had Hammer running a mile and are genuinely uncomfortable watches in a way that Hammer's more flamboyant fare never was.

So, which is my favourite of Tigon's movies?

I do have a fondness for The Creeping Flesh and seem to be the only person alive who enjoys The Blood Beast Terror. Witchfinder General is, of course, highly regarded.

But I have to go for The Blood on Satan's Claw in appreciation of its total lack of traditional narrative structure and refusal to have anything that genuinely qualifies as a protagonist. These factors are often cited as critical flaws but they lend the piece the feeling of a fly on the wall documentary, as though a film crew has, somehow, turned up in an 18th Century village and started filming what's going on without being totally sure what's going on. As one who appreciates those who eschew story-telling convention, I find this a more interesting approach than if the tale had had the sense to follow the rules.

You may of course, disagree with me.

On the other hand, you might not have a clue what I'm talking about. In which case, should you wish to know more about Tigon and its output, the studio's, admittedly not exhaustive, Wikipedia page can be found by clicking this very link.