As tomorrow is Walpurgisnacht, we at Brutal As Hell decided this would be as good a time as any to celebrate Satan on screen. Kicking things off, here’s an appropriately devilish entry from Keri O’Shea…
The Devil’s relationship with cinema is a lengthy one. As the horrors of Hell have always found their way into art and literature, so the complex figure of Satan has always been at home on the silver screen – a medium which has long enjoyed playing with many of the ideas we associate with Old Scratch. From playful outrage to catastrophe, from the desire for power to the power of desire, Satan’s been a key player all along, and as such, we’ve seen him (or maybe even her) in lots of different guises down through the years. Well, the cloven feet aren’t always appropriate to the event, are they?
In putting together my list of my ten favourite representations of the Devil (and closely-related figures) on screen, I’ve tried to gather together examples which are as different from each other as they are memorable to me: yes, Satan may often be seen as an impresario with a good suit, but we don’t need or want just a cluster of good suits any more than we want a roomful of people with horns. I’ve also put together a fairly eclectic list; when I researched this article, and looked at what other people had made of the topic, I saw the same old faces and films, again and again, Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, and so on, and so on. I hope at least a few of my devils and unholy denizens are new and interesting, without ignoring too many characters who deserve their notoriety. So, without further ado…
10: Viggo Mortensen in The Prophecy (1995)
Biblical beings returning to Earth to effect changes in their own sphere: this has been the basis of a quite a few films through the years, but The Prophecy is an artistic take on this theme with a great cast, including Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer himself. Now, for my purposes here I’ll be conveniently ignoring the finer points of the plot to repeat – Viggo Mortensen. As Lucifer. As a very attractive Lucifer, it’s fair to say, especially when we remember that Satan has always been associated with the pleasures of the flesh. The Prophecy has a great many strengths, to be sure, but bringing a LILF to our screen is something I personally treasure it for.
9: Enrique Rocha in Satánico Pandemonium (1975)
Enrique Rocha’s deliciously camp turn as a Devil in red polyester definitely deserves a mention. His is a performance played with relish and a sense of fun, as he assaults the pious sister Maria at every turn, teasing her and tempting her to relinquish her high morals. A number of entertaining scenes are included to this purpose, such as Lucifer emerging naked from the river where Maria has gone to sit and enjoy the simple pleasures of God’s green earth, and the impish way Lucifer enjoys his (symbolically-loaded) apple, again, to Maria’s horror. People seem to really enjoy playing the Devil, and Enrique Rocha is absolutely one of them.
8: Peter Cook in Bedazzled (1967)
The Devil needn’t arrive intoning serious Biblical lore; in fact, one of the best on-screen Devils usually arrives with a cheery ‘Allo, Stanley!’ before wreaking sly and very funny, if plaintive, chaos on his unassuming charge. The Devil – or, as he walks amongst us by many different names, one of which is George Spiggott – saves the down-and-out Stanley (Dudley Moore) from the suicide he’s decided is the best way out of his miserable, unfulfilling life. Stanley decides to make a go of it instead, with George’s ‘help’: George buys his soul, and gives him seven wishes as compensation. However, every time Stanley uses a wish, George exploits some loophole in what he’s asked for to make poor Stanley all the more miserable. The verbal sparring between these two is a pleasure to watch, and Peter Cook brings one of the most likeable rogues ever to the screen here, all against the lost but ever-charming backdrop of Sixties London.
7: ‘Cernunnos’ [uncredited] in Alucarda (1975)
Before anyone comments to say I’m getting my mythology mixed up, consider the plot of the batshit-insane Mexican nunsploitation flick Alucarda: novice nun with a pathological attraction to dark forces signs a blood pact with a strange hunchbacked gypsy she and friend Justine meet in the woods. As you do. The coven they join with might be trying to raise Cernunnos, the horned god of the forest, but Alucarda keeps calling out to Judeo-Christian entities like Belial, so it’s not me that’s mixing up my mythology per se, it’s writer Juan López Moctezuma, and we wouldn’t have it any other way, now would we? The statuesque horned being which materialises to welcome the new girls and to oversee a nice celebratory orgy obviously has enough in common with depictions of the Devil to be allowed his place here, I reckon, especially as pagan gods have in the past been demonized by jittery religious folk.
6: Siobhan McKenna in Daughter of Darkness (1947)
A little-known film filled with ambiguity and undercurrents of repressed sexuality, Daughter of Darkness introduces us to the at-first gentle and persecuted Emmy, a young woman inexplicably hated for her supposed malign influence on the town’s menfolk by the women of the small Irish village where she lives. Emmy protests her innocence, and seems genuinely afraid of the situation unfolding around her, but the women have their way: the orphan girl is soon sent into service in England, far away from them, and their men. But is she truly as bewildered and innocent as she protests? Before long, we see a subtle darkness to her character. She does seem to have a chaotic effect on the males of our species after all, and we see – though never fully understand, to the film’s credit – the damage she does in her new place of residence. Emmy’s position as a temptation, an unknown force and a threat to order makes her an effective devil’s advocate if not a manifestation of Satan, and Daughter of Darkness manages to explore these themes with a subtlety which is years ahead of its time. The Devil could, indeed, be a woman…
5: Chernabog in Fantasia (1940)
The Disney Corporation, getting a mention on a site like Brutal as Hell? Really? Well, it turns out that many horror fans have a soft spot for their early animated fairy stories – which are themselves full of the sorts of details we’d probably spare overprotected children nowadays – and then of course, the ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ sequence in Fantasia has that fantastic, though brief, appearance from the Slavic ‘dark god’ Chernabog – another example of Old Nick getting mixed up with European pagan deities, but, with his majestic, winged and horned appearance, his skills as a necromancer and having his fun curtailed by church bells, he’s obviously has a great deal in common with Satan. As a child, incidentally, I was bitterly disappointed when he and his cohorts were vanquished by the insipid strains of Ave Maria…
4: Emil Jannings in Faust (1926)
We travel back further still for our next two on-screen devils, first with Murnau’s stand-out exploration of the enduring myth of souls-for-sale in Faust. If ever a film embodied the phrase, ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions’ then it is this one, because Faust the alchemist wants to save his village from a deadly pestilence by selling his soul. He wants to help people. Mephisto (Jannings), whose fault the plague is anyway, manipulates Faust, providing him with youth and lust, but always nurturing human misery along the way. It’s a technically-staggering early film with a versatile and conniving antagonist.
3: Benjamin Christensen in Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)
A staggering ninety years old this year, Häxan is still a breathtaking piece of film. Possibly in part thanks to how early it was made, it plays with structure and format in innovative ways which many filmmakers would avoid even now, but when Christensen made this film, there was very little to tell him how he should do it. Nothing had been set in stone at this stage. He felt free to go for a series of vignettes on the topic of sorcery, spanning from the 14th Century to the society Christensen knew, ostensibly forming a documentary on witchcraft, but with fantastical sequences forming part of it. Could he resist imagining witches’ sabbats on-screen, if this was his subject matter? No, absolutely not, and not only that, but Christensen himself features as the Djævlen (Devil) in his film, having the usual great time doing so. The Devil here is a traditionalist – horned, cloven-hooved, fleshly and insurrectionist.
2: Tihomir Stanic in The Enemy (2011)
The mysterious man here is certainly not a traditional devil in the sense of how he appears, but in how he behaves – dividing friends, exploiting weaknesses – his character is an interesting interpretation of the Devil. This comes through a stunning, low-key performance from Stanic as Dana, a man whom a group of soldiers find walled into a derelict factory as they perform a sweep of the nearby area at the end of the Bosnian War. They take him back to base, give him shelter but – there is something indefinable and threatening about him. When he talks to the men alone, he sends them into panic, or rage, or self-doubt. He is clever, and elusive, but gradually the soldiers ascertain who he is, but not yet what he can do or what he wants with them. A genuinely novel approach to some age-old themes, The Enemy (or Neprijatelj, to give it its Serbian title) deserves to be seen by far more people than have so far had the chance.
1: Eddie Powell in The Devil Rides Out (1968)
He’s officially uncredited for the part of The Goat of Mendes, otherwise known as Baphomet, in this lurid, clever adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s novel, but stuntman Eddie Powell is almost certainly the man behind the goat, so to speak, in one of the strongest of the pop-occult movies of the 60s. One of its many strengths (not least the performance of Charles Gray as Mocata, who summoned our horned f(r)iend in the first place) is that it’s a film with some research behind it. The creature being played by Powell – allowing for the fact that the make-up used looks rather dated – is indeed Baphomet, as imagined by famed 19th Century occultist and magician Eliphas Lévi, a man whose influence on the occult revivals which came after his lifetime is not to be underestimated. Baphomet has a long pedigree, going right back to the fall of the Knights Templar in the 1300s. It also has a complex history, embodying anything from early Christian fear of Islam (‘Baphomet’ as a name is thought to stem from the word ‘Mahomet’, an early word for Muhammed) to those ever-balanced Christian perceptions of paganism, taking on various characteristics along the way. Essentially, Baphomet is an icon to fear and misunderstanding which has taken on a life and image of its own, and the team behind The Devil Rides Out were aware of this, using Lévi’s vision of the Goat of Mendes to powerful effect in an excellent film.