The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema

A HEADPRESS BOOK

This revised edition first published by Headpress 2024, Oxford, United Kingdom. headoffice@headpress.com

THE SATANIC SCREEN

An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema

Text copyright © NIKOLAS SCHRECK

This volume copyright © HEADPRESS 2024

Cover design and book layout: MARK CRITCHELL <mark.critchell@gmail.com>

The Publisher wishes to thank Gareth Wilson and Jennifer Wallis

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Views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Publisher.

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Images are used for the purpose of historical review. Grateful acknowledgement is given to the respective artists and studios.

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: DARKNESS VISIBLE

1 THROUGH THE DEVIL’S LOOKING GLASS

2 WHEN SATAN WAS SILENT

3 THE DEPRESSION AND ITS DEMONS

4 WAR IS HELL

5 ATOM AGE ANTICHRIST

666 SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

7 DELUGE AND BACKLASH

8 RAISING HELL IN THE REAGAN YEARS

9 EVEN HELL HAS ITS HEROES

10 EPITAPH: #DEVIL 2.0: THE NEW DARK AGES

INDEX

ACCORDING TO TRADITION, the Devil has always been a celebrated patron of the arts. Quite apart from the vague and somewhat contradictory references to his personage found in the Bible, Satan has maintained a long and distinguished presence in Western culture. Indeed, it is as a constantly shapeshifting entity of the creative imagination that Lucifer has been most enlivened in mankind’s consciousness.

Mephistopheles was the muse of such composers as Liszt and Paganini, whose virtuosity inspired rumors of pacts with the Devil. Opera houses still resound to a repertoire of infernal arias. Medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen’s Sequentia included one of the Devil’s earliest appearances as a musical character, a heritage continued more recently in the Satanic pieces of Penderecki and Maxwell Davies.

Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s Faust count among the masterpieces of their respective national literatures, each conveying an indelible Satanic vision whose influence has lasted centuries. The Prince of Darkness was praised in the litanies of Baudelaire and the hymns of Carducci, among countless other bards drawn to sulfurous verse. Ever since the Everyman plays of the Middle Ages, the Devil has strutted the boards of the world’s stages, from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to Shaw’s Don Juan In Hell.

Satan has been an obliging model for artists of the caliber of Durer, Bosch and Goya, later materializing on the decadent canvases of many great Symbolist painters. The first sculptures of the Devil were seen in 12th century churches, and secular Satans of stone were molded by the romantic Rodin.

These demonic apparitions in the arts have all been exhaustively chronicled, bearing witness to the immense magnetism the Devil has exercised on the creative impulse. Considering this, it’s strange that Satan’s impressive showing in the seventh art of cinema has gone almost entirely unexamined until now. For, as one looks back on the first century of film, it becomes apparent that the movies have been the Devil’s domain from the very beginning. The Prince of Darkness stars in one of the very first narrative films, France’s LA MANOIR DU DIABLE (1896) by cinema pioneer Georges Méliès. Germany’s DER STUDENT VON PRAG (1913), recognized as the first cohesive feature-length picture, tells the tale of a Faustian pact with the Devil, a theme that would be reinterpreted again and again in the next eleven decades. Throughout the entire development of the motion picture as art form and entertainment in the 20th century, the figure of Satan stands firmly in focus, a mirror of changing times and cultural tides.

La manoir du diable

Extending its scope far beyond the predictable handful of films that might first come to mind, this study of the Satanic cinema reveals that Beelzebub is invoked to interesting effect in a kaleidoscopic array of pictures, striding across genre lines into often unexpected territory. In this, the first filmography of the Fallen Angel, it becomes evident that the Satanic archetype knows no boundaries. Here are toe-tapping Satanic musicals like DAMN YANKEES (1958) and avant-garde underground experiments, such as INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER (1969). Satan is summoned in the salacious hardcore pornography of THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES (1972) and the wholesome Disney fare of FANTASIA (1940). There are sci-fi films positing the Devil as an extraterrestrial, and Blaxploitation flicks placing Hell right in the hood. The Devil rides the range in the Satanic western THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS (1966). Such works as F.W. Murnau’s FAUST (1926) and Richard Burton’s DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1967) give us Archfiends suited for the salons of high classical culture. Despite such lofty forays, Satanas is no snob, equally at home in any number of Z-grade grindhouse quickies. Consequently, I’ve cast as wide a net as possible, as the cheapest exploitation film tells us as much about our shadowy subject as any of the more refined infernal essays.

The Student of Prague (1913)

Tracing the evolution of the Satanic archetype on film, one quickly discovers that few characters have inspired such wildly differing interpretations. Charming rogue with impeccable manners; slavering monster of bestial aspect; seemingly innocent child; seductive woman; unseen metaphysical force: these are only some of the contradictory depictions of the Devil offered by the Satanic cinema. With so many filmmakers centering on this mercurial figure through the lenses of so many cultures and times, an unpredictable procession of shifting images appears. The enigmatic nature of Lucifer has unleashed the cinematic imagination to intensely individual expression. It’s rather odd to note how rarely filmmakers have presented the Devil as the trite emblem of pitchfork-bearing, cloven-hoofed fiend. Subversive visions of the Devil as dark anti-hero collide with the traditional cliche of Satan as a one-dimensional Christian bogeyman.

Blood Orgy of the She Devils

These disparate filmic portrayals of ultimate evil’s primary symbol reflect the rapidly changing swing of the 20th century’s societal pendulum back and forth between transgressive impulse and safe conservatism. True to its mirroring nature, the Satanic cinema has often portrayed the Devil as whatever force was perceived by consensus consciousness as embodying cosmic maleficence at the time. Satan has been portrayed on film as being in league with such divergent social scarecrows as Saddam Hussein, the 1960s hippy counterculture, Nazi Germany, the legal profession, heavy metal music, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and The President of the United States.

Above and beyond any of these strictly temporal anxieties, the Satanic cinema has most often associated Lucifer with the intoxicating and subversive power of Eros. As film after film testifies, Satan is seen as presiding over the eternal rites of sex, most effectively through his principal agent on Earth, womankind. Tertullian wrote that "Foemina janua diabuli" — Woman is the gate to the Devil — and this dictum has been hammered home in hundreds of diabolical films. Depending on the climate of the times, Satanic sexuality and feminine eroticism has been celebrated (HÄXAN, 1921), exploited (BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE-DEVILS, 1972), and condemned to death (THE EXORCIST, 1973), sometimes all at the same time. The demonic Other is very often simply the other woman, causing enchanted hearts to stray from the bonds of holy matrimony. In those films produced in prurient and Puritan Hollywood, a strong streak of misogyny has informed these portrayals of the female as accomplice of Satan. Such pictures echo the words of Kramer and Sprenger, those Papal inquisitors who wrote The Malleus Maleficarum: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable … wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils. This hatred and fear of the flesh was far less pronounced in European Satanic films, which generally paint a more positive image of Luciferian lust.

The Magician

As a necessary adjunct to the history of the Devil on film, I account for cinematic depictions of his adherents, the self-proclaimed practitioners of Satanism and the adepts of black magic. In covering this subgenre of the Satanic film, I focus on the previously obscured interplay between the burgeoning cinema and the actual black magical revival, two unprecedented 20th century phenomena that, like rivers linked by unseen subterranean streams, fed each other in synergetic fashion.

Aleister Crowley, the most notorious occultist of the last century, exercised an influence on a veritable cottage industry of magical films, including the silent classic THE MAGICIAN (1926) and Kenneth Anger’s Thelemic underground cycle. Although Crowley was emphatically not a Satanist, his sensational popular reputation as The Wickedest Man in the World and the so-called Beast 666’s darker elements inspired several significant British horror films of a diabolical bent. Other occult Orders have played a far more direct role in the production of Satanic films. The obscure German artist-magician Albin Grau, a confederate of Crowley’s, was involved with the production of NOSFERATU (1922) and other classics of the silent era. The screenwriter for THE SEVENTH VICTIM attended a 1943 meeting of New York Satanists while researching the film. Cameron Parsons, an artist/sorceress legendary in magical circles, can be seen in several sinister films. Michael A. Aquino, the late founder of the Temple of Set, was the first practicing Satanist to serve as technical adviser on a film in 1972. And in 1975, Anton Szandor LaVey, principal purveyor of Satanism as showbiz, was hired by director Robert Fuest to add a sense of realism to a forgotten drive-in Devil flick known as THE DEVIL’S RAIN. The films covered in this volume not only drew on actual magical practice, their powerful fantasies often inspired neophytes to experiment with the Black Arts — especially during the occult time warp of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

On its most elemental level, the Satanic cinema forms an arena of war between two violently contradictory impulses: the stasis of the known vs. the eternally transforming Other. At one extreme, a certain number of these films express an unrelieved fear of the Devil as embodiment of all that is hidden, unfamiliar and threatening to the status quo of family, religious orthodoxy and sexual repression. At the opposite pole, Satan is depicted as a mysterious but desirable liberating force, breaking the bonds of normative consciousness, and freeing up possibilities that allow for unlimited expansion of human power in the Spenglerian sense of The Faustian.

At the heart of the dramatic conflict in almost every diabolical film is the relentless battle between the socially defined mass mind and the self-defined individual consciousness coming into being of its own accord, a process Jung usefully defined as individuation. Power, knowledge, adventure, eternal life, erotic license; these are the temptations the Devil offers to the dramatis personae of the Satanic cinema. Of course, the lion’s share of filmmakers ultimately opt for a reversion to the tribal good, quashing the dangerous rebellion of Lucifer in the final reel.

However, we will also consider those intriguing works that allow the evil Other — usually as a manifest symbol of the untrammeled independent self — to triumph over the obedient herd. As for the sources that inform the current archetype of the Devil, they actually extend far beyond the limited framework of Judaeo-Christian mythology. Wherever Christianity wandered, it found a devil to hate, demonizing such adversarial beings as the Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca, the Egyptian war god Seth, Grecian Prometheus and Pan, Islamic Iblis, and Indian Kali, to name only a few of the non-Christian entities woven into the popular imagination’s patchwork quilt, creating a being of truly cross-cultural dimensions. The ever-changing Satan of the cinema, like its literary forebear, is in fact a mythical alloy composed of many strands of legend and folklore. NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957) is one of the few films that suggest the universality of the Devil in any convincing way.

The casual viewer of the Satanic cinema will tend to dismiss diabolical doings on screen as nothing more than monster movies with theological trappings. However, I have added another point of view to the consideration of these films. After all, Satanism and the veneration of the Devil are not simply figments of screenwriters’ imaginations. The practice of the Black Arts is a real and flourishing phenomenon, reflected both in an arcane magical subculture and in the omnipresence of Satanic symbolism in different strata of pop culture.

Satanism’s sensational aura may draw customers to the box office — the most compelling motivation of any producer — but I have also examined these films in light of the authentic black magical tradition they occasionally make reference to.

However, my commentary on the spiritual-magical aspects of these films isn’t the usual theoretical interpretation of second-hand sources one encounters too often in treatments of this little understood topic. Rather, my analysis of the Satanic cinema is informed by my own deep immersion in the practice of religious diabolism and ceremonial magic from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.

Due to the plentiful but often inaccurate coverage of my past life as a public practitioner of the Black Arts, some readers and reviewers of this book’s first edition in 2001 understandably but erroneously assumed that this was a Satanist’s guide to the diabolic cinema. This misconception was especially pronounced among those whose awareness of that phase of my spiritual search was limited to mass media coverage of me during the hysterical mid-80s and early-90s moral panic now known as The Satanic Panic. In fact, I’d already renounced my former devotion to the Devil and his works in the mid-1990s, several years before writing the first version of this study.

This is not the place for a full account of my own journey through the netherworld of black magic, an initiatory voyage which eventually led to me to reject all forms of Satanism and occultism and to formally convert to Tantric Buddhism. However, since any author’s personal experiences inevitably color his or her work — and the very mention of the loaded word Satanism automatically stirs a serpent’s nest of false assumptions from both its opponents and its supporters — a few clarifications of my stance are in order.

In 2011, when interviewed by French journalist Max Lachaud for the music magazine Obskure, I clarified that despite my disavowal of diabolism, That doesn’t mean that I now deny the existence of the Devil, by whatever name you prefer to call him. But now he’s more like an old friend I don’t have much reason to keep in touch with anymore.

With that in mind, perhaps my position in this book can be likened to a former soldier turned pacifist writing a book on war in the cinema, noting the discrepancies between movie combat and his witnessing of the real thing. Just as the reformed soldier would be able to understand the horrors of warfare while still understanding the powerful fascination war holds for mankind, I am in a position to convey from experience both the serious perils and deceptive pleasures of demonic congress.

In viewing even the most marginal entries in the Satanic cinema, it becomes apparent that cinema was truly the folklore of the 20th century, working on the same unconscious level of myth and dream. Just as certain iconic figures and themes recur in dreams and mythology, so does the diabolic film consistently present symbolic leitmotifs. Of these recurring images, perhaps one of the most frequent is the Double. Vexing the Satanic cinema with its confusing presence from the earliest days of the movies, the Double sometimes illustrates the simple Manichean notion of good and evil by splitting one character into a purportedly good Jekyll and a Satanic Hyde. Reflecting a basic cultural distrust of women, this doubling often takes the form of the nice girl and the libidinous seductress, played by the same actress. Such twinning can be most effectively seen in METROPOLIS (1926) and LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIC (1960). Often, the Double is evoked in a more subtle manner by the use of a Satanic mirror, reflecting a reality unseen by unilluminated mortals.

Many of these films can be viewed as initiatory quests, in which characters embark on a magical journey which transforms their identity, or brings them into contact with hidden aspects of their beings previously unknown or forbidden to them. The mythic power of the cinema is such that even a film with absolutely no other ambition than the financial can unintentionally project a numinous resonance that tells us something about the primordial archetype of the Devil. Just as seemingly trivial dreams may possess uncanny force and meaning, film can be a kind of waking dream, touching deep chords in the subconscious.

On a more mundane level, there is unquestionably a subtext of class conflict in many of these pictures. According to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote: The very rich are not like you and me. In the Satanic cinema that’s certainly true, since in the majority of these films, the very rich customarily worship the Devil. Money, in the theology of the cinema, is second only to female sexuality as a depraving Satanic influence. Film audiences are consistently offered images of Lucifer’s minions as conspicuously moneyed snobs, symbols of class envy and suspicion taken to the furthest extreme. In the mass psyche’s wish-fulfillment fantasies, the unbridled erotic decadence presumed to typify the upper class leads directly to consorting with Satan. A standard location in almost every film concerning the practice of organized Satanism is the opulent chateau concealing unholy rites behind its civilized facade. In keeping with this well-heeled undercurrent, there have been a surprising number of celluloid Satans played by actors whose forked tongues speak with upper-class British accents. This trend, particularly evident in Hollywood productions, seems to symbolize some archetypal recognition that the Devil, despite his poor reputation in some circles, is essentially a gentleman. After all, an entity sporting the honorific title of Prince of Darkness must be a noble of some kind. In Das Böse In Kino, Hans-Joachim Neuman observes that the cinema Devil is … a thoroughly polyglot, often elegant, urbane and, above all, well-spoken apparition. His terror is the terror of a provincial public before the seductions of the great wide world.

Other curious patterns will be seen to rise and recede as over a century of screen Satans unreels in these pages. Certainly, I have allowed my own eclectic tastes to decide which episodes in this long journey should be emphasized. It would require an encyclopedia to chronicle every diabolical production, and limitations of space simply forbid listing them all. I’m convinced that the homogenized sterility of 1980s and 1990s culture (not to speak of the cultural wasteland that followed) marked a dismal nadir. So the reader will notice that I’ve been far less exhaustive in covering that aesthetically void era. When possible, I’ve tried to illuminate the darker, more obscure corners of the Satanic cinema. Consequently, influential but forgotten early figures like Georges Méliès, Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Hans Poelzig have been afforded more space than some well-known contemporary players. I make no apologies for my admitted prejudice against big-budget Hollywooden product in favor of less publicized independent productions.

Several films whose plots aren’t exclusively Satan-centered are handled here due to especially memorable, off-beat or iconic cameo portrayals of the Devil or his disciples. In that category, you’ll find such diverse fare as JOSEPHANDREWS (1977) THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1985), and GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953). Aficionados may rue the absence of a whole genre of seemingly Satanic entries in the vein of WITCHFINDER GENERAL, THE MARK OF THE DEVIL series, THE CRUCIBLE, and other more or less historical witch-hunting dramas. Certainly, such commentaries on overzealous Christian persecution of the falsely accused offer insight into the changing social construct of Satan. However, in keeping with my own metaphysical understanding, I’ve restricted this exploration’s scope to those productions presenting the Devil as an actual supernatural intelligence.

Glen or Glenda?

My primary selection consideration has been to determine if the film in question really deals with the Devil and/or his agents specifically rather than some sort of general demonic, occult or pagan activity.

As the demarcation point between the Prince of Darkness and his lesser minions is often indistinct, I sometimes had to break my own rule. One case in point was THE EXORCIST. The unpleasant vomiting intruder who possesses that film’s heroine is not Satan himself, but the minor Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu. Nonetheless, THE EXORCIST calls for extensive coverage since it so decisively shaped public understanding of the Devil, rousing a reactionary wave of conservative anti-Satanic religiosity that submerged the Satan-sympathetic tone of occult-infused late ’60s pop culture. Several films based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft also fall into this category. These productions feature the fictional pantheon of Lovecraftian elder gods, rather than Satan per se. Yet their portrayals of ritual summoning of demonic entities are essential to an understanding of cinema’s treatment of black magicians in a time when Western counter-cultural experimentation with non-Christian spirituality often embraced ceremonial evocation of metaphysical evil as an option.

From a relative perspective, secular cineastes and atheist film fans can certainly approach this book as a study of how one of Western culture’s most enduring characters has been shaped by the social currents reflected in and shaped by popular culture. But that worldly pursuit masks a deeper spiritual level of inquiry into the confounding question of the Devil’s identity. Despite the undeniable artistry a select few of its creators demonstrate, it would be foolish to expect too much cogent theology or profound philosophical understanding of this matter from the cinema. As hired hands producing a compromised art form largely in the hands of a corporate entertainment industry motivated by maximum commercial profit, filmmakers rarely set out to communicate genuine religious insight. However, it’s my contention that the movies may tell us more about the changing human understanding of the puzzling personality called the Devil than more sober sources ever could.

The erratic but perceptive Carl Jung convincingly speculated that the symbolic figures we encounter in our dreams are drawn from the same storehouse of universal psychic images, or archetypes, populating the mythic narratives of the world’s religious traditions. By actively engaging with these potent spiritual forces summoned in our nightly sleeping visions, Jung proposed, we can attain an initiatory integration far surpassing the meager results afforded by strictly rational analysis. Similar insights may be attained from the scrying stone of the cinema, modern civilization’s collective unconscious.

Even the most artistically modest mechanically produced visions of that shadowy trickster projected on the cinema screen can enhance our comprehension of his nature, along with our own psychic relationship to him. To undertake such a process, even if it involves trying to make spiritual sense of an artistically ambitious porno movie like THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES, or a risibly absurd horror flick like BLOOD-ORGY OF THE SHE-DEVILS, requires that we take the Devil seriously. An archaic attitude that doesn’t come easily to current consensus culture’s flippant and ironic postmodern mindset.

In his book The Spiritist Fallacy, Traditionalist philosopher René Guénon addressed this problem when he observed: Among those who pride themselves on being more or less ‘modern’ it is the convention not to speak of the devil without a smile of disdain or an even more contemptuous shrug of the shoulders.

If that was true when those words were penned in 1923, this lack of gravity when it comes to the Devil is even more pronounced today for a shallow restlessly distracted populace looking for little more than the latest LOL. Outside the circles of a hardcore but culturally marginal shrinking minority of nominally Christian believers and an even smaller subculture of self-professed theistic Satanists, few earnestly ponder the Devil’s mysteries. In these Kali Yugic times, when attachment to the material world blinds humanity to the unmanifest dimensions transcending physical corporeality, spiritual inquiry in the West has been largely left to crackpots, charlatans and psychopaths seeking religious justification for their worldly hatreds.

Normative Western rationalism, or what passes for such, largely presents the Devil as just a silly superstition, usually dismissed as a psychological exteriorization of human fears and socially prescribed taboos into an all-purpose scapegoat. If some faithful literalistic Christians still earnestly fear him as the ferocious dragon of the End Times, the majority of non-believers only encounter him as a humorously naughty emoji depicting the red-skinned horned hobgoblin of cliche. Reduced to that familiar cartoon, the Prince of Darkness has been sufficiently defanged to appear without much controversy as the logo for any number of products. Satan’s image has sold beer brands, served as the mascot for football teams, and peddled rock band merchandise. The Devil has even suffered the indignity of his distinctive forked tail adorning Dirt Devil brand vacuum cleaners.

In such an environment, to expect any initiatory insight about the Devil in art, especially in a field as driven by mercantile considerations as the movies, must seem crazy. But that’s because of our cultural amnesia concerning the forgotten but eternally present spiritual nucleus deliberately or unconsciously inherent in every act of artistic creation.

René Guénon, in his The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, again distills the most salient points of this forgotten traditional understanding: All art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane ‘recreation’ to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries.

But the symbolical-ritual aspect of arts such as the cinema is only one of the metaphysical layers hidden within any creative work. For ritual is also a magical operation that will, according to the inviolable laws of cause and condition, produce a result. A dim glint of this understanding lies encoded in the common phrase the magic of the movies.

As William Burroughs, whose confused but intuitively sound spiritual approach I have examined elsewhere, once stated, It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts – music, painting, and writing – is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result … the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.

In a manner that would be self-evident to the ancients, but might strike reductionist modernists as laughably superstitious, the ritual of projecting images of the Devil on screen has indeed tapped into latent magical energy and unleashed dangerous forces in the psyches of spectators. I contend that audiences absorbing over a century of cinematic Satans activated the demonic presence in the world more than all the previous millennia of ceremonial black magic could ever have hoped to conjure. The principal danger being that despite several thousand years of contending with the Satanic mythos introduced to Western culture from the Middle East via the conquering Church militant, we still cannot answer one of the most vexing questions any serious investigation of the Infernal One must perforce broach: Who the hell is the Devil anyway?

With only a few exceptions, the majority of contemporary books exploring the Western world’s most familiar symbol for the principle of personified evil are not of much help in answering this question. Luciferian lit tends to fall into four categories. Most mass market writing on the subject is filtered through the currently predominant social dogma of modernist secular humanism, reducing the Devil to an archaic curio from less enlightened times. Such works may grant Satan some sociological and cultural interest but certainly don’t take him seriously as a genuine spiritual phenomenon. Some Christian studies of the Devil, while not blinkered by the materialist mindset hampering secular studies of the subject, occasionally offer insight but are often distorted by whatever particular ecclesiastical doctrine they are ascribed to.

The relatively small number of works purporting to actually represent a Satanic perspective, when not windy exercises in bombastic rhetoric, are marred by the same preachy tone of pushing some particular organizational agenda or personality cult that we find in their Christian foes. Besides, modern Satanists are far too busy worshiping themselves to pay much attention to the Devil himself, which is in any case usually just a convenient symbol they employ to decorate their narcissism.

By far the most useful and impartial information on the Devil in history, culture and religion can be gleaned from scholarly studies. Unfortunately, the politically correct bias tainting many intellectual scholars has lately led academic apologists to whitewash the genuinely negative and self-destructive aspects of modern Satanism in an excess of zeal to be fair to a minority religion.

If any celebrity deserves the hoary show biz platitude of needing no introduction, you’d imagine that it’s that illustrious international star of stage and screen: Satan. And yet the deeper we look into this most elusive of subjects, the more evasively do even the most elementary facts shrink from our grasp. Gaze into the Satanic cinema’s mirror, and you are confronted by a diverse quicksilver array of reflected apparitions, all purporting to portray the same creature. Indeed, the sheer contradictory multiplicity of on-screen incarnations suggests just how much the ever inventive human imagination is obliged to fill in the gaps of what turns out to be a surprising lack of solid information concerning this notoriously slippery personage. Like the illusory movie screen upon which his shifting forms so often flicker, the Devil provides a blank space perfectly suited for projections and fantasies.

When we speak of the Devil, we cannot even be sure which of his many emanations we address. Save for those of his adorants throughout the ages who have troubled themselves to successfully follow the procedures required to conjure him and those of his spiritual opponents tempted by him in mystical visions, reliable sources of knowledge concerning his actual nature are far fewer than one might imagine.

Every human culture documented since the dawn of recorded history acknowledged the existence of what we can characterize as evil spirits, ranging from relatively low level demons personifying various diseases to malefic entities whose avowed power grants them the dignity of full-blown deities. A study of comparative religion confirms that these darker manifestations of the metaphysical realm share some characteristics in common. Several core concepts of the Judeo-Christian Devil mythos were influenced by far more ancient spiritual traditions, such as Canaanite demonology and the figure of Ahriman, the destroyer god posited by a heretical dualist strain of Persian Zoroastrianism. But the specific being most commonly referred to as Satan, the Devil, or Lucifer is intrinsically entangled with a particular complex of Middle Eastern myth cycles preserved for millennia as oral history before codification in the books holy to the Abrahamic religions.

Even the most secular of my readers could probably recount the basic narrative conventionally supposed to comprise the Devil’s biography. To touch on the key plot points promulgated by Christian popular tradition, if not in scripture, the saga begins when Lucifer, one of Jehovah’s chief angels, is driven by the sin of pride to rebel against the self-proclaimed Creator of the Universe, seeking to usurp Him in a celestial civil war and cosmic coup. When the loyalist archangel Michael routs Lucifer’s insurgency, the disgraced dissident and his troops plunge to Earth, cast out of Heaven as fallen angels.

When Jehovah has the bright idea of populating the paradise he’s created with the first human beings, the disgruntled seditionist appears as a serpent in the Garden of Eden to tempt the first female of the species into original sin, thus inspiring mankind’s fall from grace and providing fuel to the witch-burning fire for centuries of murderous Abrahamic misogyny to come.

After the ill-tempered Creator punishes his consistently disobedient mortal creations with a few plagues, floods, and other wanton acts of mass destruction, Jehovah finally sends his son to Earth to redeem his sinful creation. When God’s son comes to grips with his messianic mission during a 40-day desert retreat, the fallen angel vainly makes three attempts to tempt the budding Saviour away from his filial piety. Jehovah, Jr. refuses the Devil’s offer of all the kingdoms of the world.

Despite this rebuff, like any good franchise villain, the Tempter returns for a sequel. At the End of Days, after Jesus’ Second Coming, the Devil will be bound for a thousand years, only to be loosed in the form of a dragon before his ultimate permanent defeat during the battle of Armageddon. If we are to believe this account of the struggle, the sin Satan brought into the world is thus forever banished, freeing humanity at last from the consequences of that impertinent Eve’s transgressive consumption of the forbidden fruit.

However, despite the familiarity of this tenacious myth, scholarship conclusively proves that it’s almost entirely based on a centuries-long series of mistranslations, misunderstandings, and willful after-the-fact misinterpretation. Contrary to popular opinion, almost all of the fragmentary received ideas informing these confused conceptions concerning this creature are not canonical. They derive instead from a mish-mash of apocryphal texts, latter-day theological guesswork, folklore, and secular literary references drawn from poetry and fiction.

A full analysis of the various disconnected components coagulating over many centuries into our contemporary idea of Satan would require a book ten times the size of this one. A brief overview of the pertinent details suffices to show just how much of a puzzle the Devil’s identity really is.

One common popular misunderstanding about the dark star of this show is that the primary source for our knowledge about Satan derives from the texts revered by the Abrahamic religions. Upon closer examination, however, the Big Three scriptures sacred to the monotheistic Middle Eastern faiths are surprisingly sketchy in relaying any coherent picture of the Devil at all. As far as providing promising source material for screenwriters, the Book of Books is disappointingly short on detail when it comes to the particulars of that narrative’s main bad guy.

Dante’s Inferno

Indeed, it’s a damned good thing for the Devil that such literary geniuses as Dante, John Milton, and Goethe immortalized him in The Inferno, Paradise Lost, and Faust. For the Bible itself grants the very vaguely defined and contradictory character it calls the Satan and the Devil little more than a walk-on part. If we are to take his adherents’ claim that the Bible is literally God’s Word, then we can only conclude that whatever virtues the Creator of the Universe may possess, telling a coherent story that makes any chronological sense is not one of them.

With such disorganized sources to work from, it’s no wonder that despite the centuries of effort engaged in by the often conflicting strains and sub-sects of Christianity, Judaism and Islam to forge a coherent doctrine regarding the Devil’s nature, each branch of the Abrahamic tree has come to very different conclusions. Which is why so many films about the Fiend are forced to make up suitably cinematic Devil lore from thin air.

Still, no earnest grappling with the problem of the Devil can ignore the Abrahamic scriptures. I’ve noticed, however, that many of the most vigorous critics of the monotheistic religions, including self-professed Satanists, often refuse to actually read the very texts they are so quick to refute. To paraphrase a common article of faith I’ve frequently heard expressed by true believers of the modern atheist creed, I don’t believe in a bunch of silly fairy tales about some old man with a beard up in Heaven and a guy in a red suit and horns carrying a pitchfork in Hell.

In fact, very few serious practitioners of the interrelated Abrahamic faiths posit such a simplistic and literal-minded understanding of God and the Devil. That widespread sophomoric notion is just a polemical straw man that tells us more about atheist ignorance concerning the actual complexity of metaphysics and mysticism than the religions being critiqued. Since this glib misunderstanding of myth and spirituality is so prevalent, before we can meaningfully approach the Devil’s changing face in the cinema, at least a few of the most fundamental questions about his mythos must be asked.

What makes that pursuit such a challenge is the fact that no one definitive source for an authoritative summation of the Devil phenomenon exists. Human understanding of this being evolved gradually in piecemeal jumps and starts over time, leaving us to ponder fragments of scattered puzzle pieces that often don’t fit together. It’s true, for instance, that the word satan appears in the Hebrew Bible. But its meaning has been deliberately distorted and willfully retro-engineered to accommodate later Christian exegesis. Satan as we know him does not play a role in the oldest known authorized expression of the Abrahamic religious complex, although as we will see, he is a far more vivid presence in many texts omitted from the Bible’s final draft.

As early Christian theologians developed their heretical offshoot of Judaism, they drew in part on pessimistic apocalyptic rabbinical literature of the intertestamental period, grasping at a few disjointed references in the much more ancient Old Testament to buttress their crudely dualistic concept of the Devil as the epitome of evil. Although no such creature is suggested in the texts assembled as the Old Testament, the edition of the New Testament ultimately authorized by the Church proposes the existence of a powerful supernatural being alternately called Satan and the Devil, an independent agent who actively opposes God. But this concept is based very shakily on an arbitrary sleight-of-hand connecting the dots of several completely unrelated Old Testament episodes in order to craft the illusion of a unified figure.

Yes, Genesis tells us of a nameless cunning snake, the most clever of all of the beasts of the field that YHWH had made, who tempts Eve to transgress the divine commandment not to eat the apple (probably a pomegranate in the original texts) that will make her and Adam as gods. But sometimes a talking snake is just a talking snake.

After all, when the tale of Edenic banishment in Genesis was composed, the particular mythological construct we recognize as the Devil had not yet formed. So that couldn’t possibly be who the authors of Genesis were referring to. Neither the Old nor New Testaments ever even suggest that the snake who offered Eve the forbidden fruit was Satan. This lack of any logical connection did not prevent influential Church fathers, including such holy heavy hitters as Tertullian, Irenaeus and St. Augustine from arguing that the dragon, that serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan mentioned in Revelations, an apocalyptic text composed long after Genesis, must be a cryptic reference to that sneaky reptile in the garden. Most modern Biblical scholars consider these theorists to be barking up the wrong Tree of Life.

So much for the snake. The Old Testament does include nine mentions of the Hebrew phrase ha-satan, or the satan. But in none of these instances is the word ever used as a personal name for a metaphysical malefactor.

The satan, which can be translated to mean a prosecutor, an accuser, an adversary, or an opponent, is merely a job description. Anyone posing an obstacle can be described as such. The word was specifically utilized for a prosaic legal functionary who functioned as an attorney in court proceedings. Contrary to the romantic notions of some modern day Satanists, the word adversary is not meant to imply that a satan is a totally awesome subversive rebel ideal for depicting on black metal band T-shirts. It’s used in exactly the same mundane sense as British English still refers to a prosecuting attorney as an adversary. This adversarial function is in no sense antinomian, contrarian, or insurrectionary. The satans of the Old Testament don’t rebel against God, for they are his prosecutors serving as adversaries against errant sinning mankind, cosmic cops checking up on mortals to make sure they’re behaving.

Five of those Old Testament mentions of a satan refer to ordinary mortals who act as an opponent in some way. More relevant to our concerns are the four celestial satans who make fleeting cameo appearances in the Books of Numbers, Job, Zechariah, and Chronicles. Those unfamiliar with the actual Bible as opposed to popular misunderstandings of Judeo-Christian lore are often surprised to learn that each of these satans are clearly identified as obedient messengers and servants of Yahweh diligently following their boss’s orders.

None of the Old Testament satans are specifically described as angels, fallen or otherwise, although they are in the company of the Sons of God. This inner circle tribunal of Yahweh’s heavenly court council seems to be a remnant of an earlier pantheon of gods similar to those we encounter in the divine assemblies surrounding the father deities Zeus and Odin. The Hebrew phrase for Sons of God (bene haelohim) actually means Sons of the Gods, a plural form that internally contradicts the Bible’s strict monotheism and reveals a glimpse of a more ancient cosmology venerating many deities. These sons of the gods may be the mysterious Watchers, a class of spiritual beings whose fall to earth and subsequent mating with mortal women bears many similarities to the account of Satan’s exile from Heaven and may be the true source of the notion of the Devil’s tempting Eve.

Angel, derived from Latin and Greek, simply means messenger or courier. It does not refer to the winged benevolent beings shown in later Christian art. Are the satans, like the Jinn of Islam, a different order of being than the angels and cherubs? This uncertainty only serves to blur their precise spiritual identity and their relation to Yahweh. None of these satans are seen to take any action independent of the deity they dutifully serve. One satan, we are told, wanders to and fro on the earth, a spiritual spy keeping an eye on mankind and snitching back to heavenly headquarters in case any sinners, blasphemers or idolaters are in need of divine punishment.

The only thing even slightly malefic about the Old Testament satans is that in their zealous serving of their jealous Lord, as in the well-known case of Job, they go a little too far in roughing up disobedient humans. In this sense, the satans depicted in the Hebrew Bible come off not as rebellious evil-doers but as low level mafia enforcers overseeing the Capo di Capo’s business interests. Though the satans aren’t given much in the way of dialogue, we can imagine them telling the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, nice place you got here, shame to see anything happen to it.

It could be argued that the non-canonical but popular more recent depiction of an individual being named Satan as Hell’s warden and dispenser of torment to the damned is rooted in these modest functions a satan performs in the Old Testament. But it’s quite a leap from God’s humble messenger boy to mighty Prince of Darkness. Although hundreds of the films we will examine place the Devil in Hell, usually presented as his seat of government, neither the Old or New Testament situate Satan there — he is only shown as part of the staff in Heaven or carrying out his God-given mediating and threatening duties on earth.

The Old Testament’s chronology alone refutes the commonly accepted article of faith that a completely hypothetical and never mentioned fallen rebel angel and the Edenic snake are identical to the satan. After all, if the spiteful satan tempted Eve in Eden after his prideful rebellion and exile from Heaven, what the Devil is he doing back in the divine throne room hobnobbing with the celestial gang and still on such friendly terms with the notoriously short-tempered and unforgiving Yahweh in Job? This is only one of the lapses of continuity that make it clear that the Bible is a cut and paste effort compiled from many disparate sources.

Lest there be any doubt that Satan is a completely neutral term, consider that in Samuel, it is written of King David, irrefutably presented on the side of the good guys, that "he may become a satan in battle."

Further confusion has been wrought by some misleading Latin translations of the Old Testament’s Isaiah which tell of somebody named Lucifer falling from heaven. After all, everybody knows that Lucifer was the angel’s name before his fall, right? Wrong. Like the Hebrew noun satan, the Latin word lucifer (light-bringer) is not a personal name of any being. Nor, as has been widely but erroneously stated, is it a reference to the minor Roman light god. It was the word Latin translators used to render the Hebrew heylel, the morning star, or Venus, the brightest body in the heavens. The particular light-bearer referred to here — precisely once — is not a fallen angel cast out of Heaven, but an obvious poetic metaphor for the hubris of a mortal Babylonian king whose luminous kingdom fell from its former power, glory and pomp.

That even the later authors and editors of Christian scripture did not in any way associate the name Lucifer with the satan is further proven by the fact that the New Testament’s Revelation 22:16 clearly refers to Jesus as Lucifer, and that the