Fetching lass Candance Glendenning (TOWER OF EVIL) discovers her evil heritage during a family reunion in Norman Warren’s SATAN’S SLAVE, making its Blu-ray debut courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome.

Despite ominous premonitions, Catherine Yorke (Glendenning) is going to the countryside with her parents (ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE’s James Bree and THE SHUTTERED ROOM’s Celia Hewitt) to spend the week with her father’s brother Alexander (Michael Gough, LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE). Although she will miss celebrating her twentieth birthday with her boyfriend John (Michael Craze, TERROR), she feels compelled to go along on the family trip. Once they reach the grounds of the Yorke Estate, Catherine’s father suffers a strange migraine and crashes the car into a tree. Catherine gets out to seek help from the main house only for the car to explode seconds later killing her parents. She is taken in by her uncle, his “secretary” Frances (Barbara Kellerman, THE MONSTER CLUB) and his son Stephen (Martin Potter, GOODBYE GEMINI). Alexander, a former doctor, tells Catherine that she is in shock and welcome to stay as long as she likes. In between grisly hallucinations while wandering the estate’s enchanted gardens, Catherine falls in love with Stephen – who is more than a bit psychotic with a penchant for mutilating beautiful women – which makes Frances jealous. Frances informs Catherine that Alexander and Stephen are obsessed with necromancy, and have been trying to bring back the spirit of their witch ancestress Camilla Yorke in a new body. After several unsuccessful tries – usually involving nude women spread-eagled on an altar – Alexander has discovered that the ritual requires a direct descendent, and it just so happens that Camilla was burned at the stake on her twentieth birthday and Catherine bears a striking resemblance to her.

After a couple of softcore sexploitation pics, director Norman J. Warren embarked on a quartet of horror films starting with SATAN’S SLAVE (conceived with cinematographer/producer Les Young and his wife Moira who also produced and did continuity – in addition to playing the opening sacrificial victim when the intended actress did not show up – and scripted by David McGillivray [HOUSE OF WHIPCORD] in nine days). As with Pete Walker’s horror pictures, the slump in the British filmmaking industries during the mid-1970s afforded Warren some screenworthy talent in front of and behind the cameras. The story is largely predictable with the exception of an interesting back-story for Stephen and a pretty good ending twist. The film makes no bones about who the villains are, but Catherine spends much of the middle of the film seeing things and saying “but it seemed so real” to Stephen, Alexander and Frances. The audience is way ahead of Catherine, and both Warren and McGillivray know it; as such, most of Catherine’s hallucinations involve lots of censor-baiting boobs and blood (as well as an EXORCIST-inspired bit with a wooden cross and the branding/whipping of model/softcore actress Monika Ringwald [EROTIC INFERNO]). Glendenning and a handful of other actresses (credited and otherwise) are undraped, and make-up artists Robin Grantham (THE LEGACY) and Nick Maley (THE KEEP) provide some suitably grisly slashings, stabbings and eye-piercings (as well as a lame body splattered on the pavement after falling from a great height) in the service of audience entertainment. It helps immensely that Glendenning is a likable and sympathetic lead, Gough dials himself down to sinisterly avuncular for much of the running time, while Kellerman and Potter make the most of their characters’ complex love-hate relationship (which is just there for more running time filler). The score by John Scott (GREYSTOKE) builds effectively on a simple melody with clarinet and shrieking, stabbing horns, and gets shrilly, unnervingly experimental during the psychic attack on John. Scott also composed the minimalist scores for Jose Ramon Larraz’s British pictures SYMPTOMS and SCREAM AND DIE, and would go fully electronic for Warren’s later film INSEMINOID. Cinematographer Les Young – who also produced – lensed the film in Techniscope format, a format on which twice as much footage could be shot per reel since the widescreen image was produced on two of the 35mm negative’s four perforations per frame; since an anamorphic squeeze was not required to produce the wide image, spherical lenses were utilized which requiring less light than anamorphic lenses (an anamorphic squeeze was imposed when the negative was converted from 2-perf to 4-perf interpositive and internegatives for CinemaScope projection-compatible release prints). Here he combines psychedelic wide-angles and superimpositions with the mossy greens and burnished wood paneling of traditional gothic horror. Young served as camera operator on Warren’s first feature HER PRIVATE HELL under Pete Walker’s later go-to cinematographer Peter Jessup, and on Gordon Hessler’s THE OBLONG BOX, SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN and CRY OF THE BANSHEE under John Coquillon (WITCHFINDER GENERAL). Young also produced and shot Warren’s TERROR.

The first legitimately available DVD release of SATAN'S SLAVE was a cropped version of the export cut as part of Rhino Video’s HORRIBLE HORRORS DVD collection (which also included a fullscreen print of Warren’s TERROR). The first widescreen DVD was made available through Anchor Bay Entertainment in the UK as part of their five-disc NORMAN WARREN COLLECTION. That version – which featured upmixes in Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS and optional English HoH subtitles – was easily the best the film had ever looked up to this point; however, fans were disappointed that it represented Warren’s preferred domestic cut, which featured an alternate version of Potter roughing up Gloria Walker. Walker met her make-up artist husband Nick Maley on this film, and they later contributed the script and special effects for Warren’s INSEMINOID as well as the creature effects for Tobe Hooper’s LIFEFORCE. The version that went out for export featured Potter cutting away Walker’s clothes with scissors and running them over her body (a big no-no for the BBFC). The print used for the Anchor Bay disc did indeed feature this scene, so Warren substituted his preferred softer version from an inferior source. It was hoped that this would be rectified when BCI released their double-feature disc that paired the film with a new anamorphic widescreen transfer of Warren’s TERROR; however, the Crown International 35mm print used for the transfer was hacked up and missing most of the film’s nudity and violence. Scorpion's 2012 DVD featured a progressive, anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film’s complete export version featuring the aforementioned “scissor” scene and the rest of the nudity and gore intact along with some of the Anchor Bay extras (the commentary by Warren and writer David McGillivray regrettably could not be included since it synched up to the soft version).

Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray comes from a new 2K scan of the original 35mm camera negative featuring the Brent Walker distributor logo and the hard version of the bedroom scene. The title was delayed because the original restoration was in the wrong aspect ratio. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC Blu-ray here is framed at roughly 2.30:1 and the anamorphic DVD side at 2.20:1 but the compositional information appears to be not only identical to one another but also the 2.35:1 Scorpion DVD. The blacks are deep and the greens and reds are striking, but the HD master draws more attention to the intriguing use of color gels in the lighting, spiking the corners of the manor's rooms with green and the dining room mantelpiece with purple well before Warren's SUSPIRIA-influenced TERROR. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track boasts clear dialogue and a more vivid rendering of Scott's distinctive score including its ear-splitting more experimental passages. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.

In place of the Warren/McGillivray commentary is a new track featuring Warren and composer Scott – for a director of relatively modest output, Warren may end up being one of the British cult director's with the most commentaries including three for PREY and two for TERROR, one for INSEMINOID, and two for BLOODY NEW YEAR – in which the composer marvels so much at Warren's achievements on a low budget that he was to be prompted by the director to comment on his scoring choices, his seven musician crew (including himself on flute, Blue Mink's Barry Morgan on bongos, and mention of a quadriplegic clarinetist), and the experimentation he did for the supernatural sequences including Craze's terror in the elevator. Warren covers much of the same material as the earlier commentary, including how he felt that the harder version of the bedroom scene was out of place – along with the later disemboweling of LOVING FEELING's Paula Patterson – Potter being called in at the last minute to replace Michael Gothard (SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN), Gough taking the role because he liked the script, and production designer Hayden Pierce finding the Tudor manor house location – also used in TERROR – which belonged to an elderly aristocrats and the extraordinary production value of all of the paintings and furniture that they brought with them from France (as a thanks, the production paid to have the furniture and painting frames fixed after the shoot). While Warren notes that associate producer Moria Young – wife of producer/cinematographer Les Young – replaced the original actress in the opening black magic sacrifice scene, he neglects here to mention that the woman violated with the wooden cross in another of the hallucinations was sexploitation film actress Monika Ringwald (NAUGHTY WIVES). Also included is a new track by Diabolique Magazine's Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan who contrast the film and the rest of Warren's oeuvre with the more restrained work of Hammer and competitors Amicus and Tigon – particularly in the ways it caters to horror audiences of the time without the embarrassment of DRACULA A.D. 1972's hip dialogue or TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER's stodginess – as well as the context of the British horror boom winding down and the slump in British filmmaking in the late 1970s. Ellinger notes Warren's attempts to blend the contemporary and the gothic while Deighan notes the recurring element of taking modern characters "out of time" with the gothic settings and supernatural elements (literally so in the time-warping BLOODY NEW YEAR).

“All You Need is Blood” (13:14) is a vintage making-of documentary in which a young Warren classifies the film as more of a thriller than a horror film. Gough seems to be enjoying himself (“It’s always nice to play the beast”), and expresses an enthusiasm to be working during the 1970s slump in British filmmaking. We see Les Young performing double duties as cinematographer and producer, Grantham and Maley working on make-up and effects, Kellerman getting her head smashed through fake glass by Potter, as well as a touching group portrait of the cast and crew to cap things off. “Creating Satan” (29:37) is a longer retrospective documentary put together by Warren himself, and features input from Les Young, Warren (in the same film office seen in TERROR with the SATAN’S SLAVE/THRILLER [THEY CALLED HER ONE EYE] double bill poster still on the wall), McGillivray (who met Warren in the cutting room during the editing of HER PRIVATE HELL), actor Martin Potter, art director Hayden Pearce, Moira Young and Ken Dowling of the film’s distributor Brent-Walker. Young discusses the financial motivations for picking the horror genre – at the time, it was either do a horror film or a sex film for that budget – and the resources available to him as a cameraman for the production, promoting various assistant and junior crew members in other productions to primary roles here, and how game the house’s owners were to have them shooting there. Potter discusses the research he did to make his psychotic character realistic. McGillivray discusses rounding up some friends to shoot the hotter scenes for the export versions (Warren mentions that most of the cast and crew found the scissor scene unpleasant). Pearce mentions that the painting of Camilla Yorke was actually a photograph of Glendenning augmented with oil paint. He also discusses the title sequence that he designed. Moira Young discusses being volunteered by her husband when the actress for the opening scene was apparently arrested. Dowling discusses the film’s first release supporting American International’s edit of THRILLER and its second even more successful double bill with Curtis Harrington’s RUBY (“A devilish combination of women and hell!”).