7. Lucifer Rising (1980, Kenneth Anger)
This short film directed by Kenneth Anger was completed in 1972, but wasn’t distributed until 1980. Anger began working on ”Lucifer Rising” in 1966 by hiring a young musician with whom he began a creative partnership. That musician was Bobby Beausoleil, who composed the soundtrack for the film. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned in 1967, with mutual accusations between Anger and Beausoleil involving wasteful spending and theft of footage.
Some of the material filmed by Anger resulted in another film, using the Devil theme with the title “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969). “Lucifer Rising” was resumed in the early 1970s and with a soundtrack from Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, who also parted ways with Anger in the middle of production.
Beausoleil, who was arrested and accused of murdering his associate Gary Hinman under the orders of Charles Manson, completed the soundtrack from prison. With a production so uncertain and turbulent, the result is a unique and complex film, with images of magnificent events in nature combined with pagan symbols in a continuous and ritualistic flow, leading the viewer through various magical landscapes.
In Anger’s film, Lucifer is not just an evil entity or a supernatural being that can destroy the will of a human through possession, but rather the multiplicity of forms of Nature itself, interpreted by many pagan cults of the past before Christianity.
6. Häxan (1922, Benjamin Christensen)
This Danish film, released in 1922, is linked to both the documentary tradition and horror fiction. This is partially a film about Malleus Maleficarum (1487), a dreadful and well-known treatise on witchcraft and Satanism written by two Catholic priests, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, and a kind of guideline for members of the Inquisition to question and condemn their defendants.
The central thesis of ”Häxan” is the ignorance about diseases in general, and mental illnesses in particular, associated with superstitious beliefs that led to mass hysteria represented by the hunt for witches and heretics.
It is a simplistic and positivist approach, typical of director Benjamin Christensen’s time, but the film transcends the mere description of a barbaric past with theatrical and dramatic vignettes that emerge during the film, rebuilding the medieval belief in the Devil, the courts of the Inquisition, and even the Sabbath of witches with such realistic and fancy precision that the film loses the documentary objectivity and approaches the language of terror and exploitation.
It isn’t by chance that authors associated with the counterculture (such as William S. Burroughs) would recover ”Häxan” from oblivion in the footnotes of cinema history. As if to contradict his positivist belief in the progress of civilization, Christensen played – as Méliès did before him – the role of the Devil in these dramatic vignettes, the great corrupter in the center of a landscape distorted by sexual repression, superstition and folly.
5. Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)
The mask is a usual way to indicate the Devil and the relative or absolute evil, employed in many cultures. In this sense, Hannya, a usual mask in Japanese Noh theater, expresses the invincible malignancy with its horns, bulging eyes, and grim expression between sadness and hatred, with teeth bared in a Devilish grin.
In “Onibaba”, Kaneto Shindo uses this incredibly expressive mask that fascinated even William Friedkin (he used a stylized version of Hannya in “The Exorcist”).
The film is set in Japan during an unspecified time during the 14th century. Two women treacherously killed samurai warriors who were survivors of the battles that swept the region, in order to sell their belongings. The youngest of these women started a love affair with a neighbor while the other found a samurai wearing the Hannya, another potential victim. But the truth is that this strange samurai will bring destruction, leading the two women to the hellish depths of a very specific hell.
Loosely based on a Buddhist parable – yome-odoshi no men (bride-scaring mask) or niku-zuki-no-men (mask with flesh attached) – this is an interesting version about the Devil as a supernatural being whose function is to be the mask of monstrous acts perpetrated by human beings.
4. Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)
The adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel of same title, the plot of “Rosemary’s Baby” focuses on a young couple who moves into an apartment in New York. The new apartment seems initially idyllic to the young couple in love, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes). However, strange occurrences soon begin to destroy the peaceful order of the Woodhouse family.
Terrible coincidences in inoffensive details, unexpected intrusions of neighbors, and Rosemary’s complicated and painful pregnancy converges in what looks like a demonic conspiracy of dark and gigantic range.
This extraordinary horror film with methodical structure is part of a trilogy; this is the second film, “Repulsion” (1966) is the first, and the last is “The Tenant” (1976), in which Roman Polanski exposes his vision of horror based on old apartments and their many mysteries.
Thus, Polanski’s Devil appears to be seductive and ambiguous, worshipped by a fauna of ordinary people, unremarkable but still capable of manipulation and hideous crimes. And the pact, which is essential in many narratives about the Devil, appears here as a gentle consequence, with no visible blood or violence, yet still terrifying.
3. Faust (1926, F. W. Murnau)
The silent film made by F. W. Murnau in 1926 was perhaps the first incarnation by the German legend about the wise alchemist who made his pact with the Devil due to boredom and a love of learning.
Others would follow this first one, but few had Murnau’s visual sensitivity, together with the apocalyptic supernatural boldness of images taken by cinematotographer Carl Hoffmann, inspired by “Night on Bald Mountain”, the most extraordinary segment in the Disney animation ”Fantasia” (1940).
Murnau chose to retell the old story of Faust by mixing medieval traditions with the classic version of Goethe, resulting in a complex and apocalyptic plot. The demon Mephisto (Emil Jannings) proposed to an Archangel (Werner Fuetterer) a bet worth the dominion over all the Earth: be the demonic entity that corrupts a righteous man and destroys what was divine in him.
Mephisto uses various schemes, beginning a plague that ravages the village where Fausto lived. The desperation of the wise alchemist, with what he interprets as divine silence, will lead to the pact with Mephisto, but the powerful and climatic end indicates that the possibility of love can defeat even the most terrible damnation.
In “Faust”, the evil appeal of the Devil’s malignancy is the result of human despair before the silence of God. Human pain facilitates access to the demon that may be expelled only by the rediscovery of our human essence.
2. The Devils (1971, Ken Russell)
Nothing seemed impossible for the witch covens in Europe, even after the end of the Middle Ages. They could summon storms and droughts, kill cattle, kidnap children for Satanic rituals, and even generate sterility in animals and men.
This imaginary power had a big role in the outbreaks of mass hysteria that resulted in the death of thousands of women (in general, they were the main ones accused) who were seen as “witches”, and the victims did not fail to feel something of the power provided by hysteria and dark beliefs about covenants, the Devil, and hell.
On the other hand, all this mass hysteria was quite convenient for the establishment, which exploited these superstitions in order to maintain the status quo. Ken Russell’s “The Devils”, in this sense, is a idiosyncratic work focused precisely on these paradoxes that fueled the fires of religious persecution.
In 17th century France, Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) tries to avoid the corrupt power ascension on the city of Loudun, represented by Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue). In this struggle, however, Grandier is cornered due to accusations of witchcraft and demonic pacts departing from a group of sexually repressed nuns who imagined being possessed by demons, led by Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave).
Free adaptation of the celebrated novel by Aldous Huxley about the famous case of collective possession in the city of Londun, “The Devils” still remains a disturbing film that explores the powerful relationship between the politics of hunting witchcraft, and transient sense of liberation and power that seems emanate from the demonic.
1. The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)
The possession, the change that transforms a body into something else, is one of the scariest events possible, even in the case of cultures that find some benefits in possession. Thus, “The Exorcist” became one of the most mythic horror films in the history of cinema – the fantastic, truculent and absolute representation of demonic possession exercising its devastating powers in the virgin body of a girl.
The possession scenes were played endlessly; they were copied, satirized, and discussed on a level when even the sense of the film’s narrative was erased, a pity because William Friedkin’s work had an excellent atmosphere and did a meticulous job in building up to an incredible climax.
The young Regan (Linda Blair), the daughter of the famous and busy actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), begins to exhibit strange behavior, until her mother abandons all hope in medicine and their rational explanations, and appeals to the Church in order to perform an exorcism. This growing process (even the most daring scenes never break the dramatic progress or become ridiculous) efficiently loads the plot with a sense of metaphysical horror.
One of the most powerful and creative criticisms about “The Exorcist” was from writer James Baldwin, in a devastating vision about the film and the idea of trivialized possession, a serious reflection on the nature of Evil when the human being projects this evil in some convenient potential scapegoat.
Such criticism says a lot about the film; it is horror pulp in a brutal style, which can serve as food for highly complex reflections and concerns.
Author Bio: Alcebiades Diniz Miguel is a researcher in film and literature, with many published articles about these two themes. Some of his production could be seen at the Bibliophage weblog: http://bibliophagus.weebly.com/.