Let’s hear it for the diabolically entertaining Late Night With the Devil, the latest example of the Ghostwatch school of things going horribly wrong on live TV. It’s a stunning exercise in sweaty desperation from the always brilliant David Dastmalchian, as a 1970s chatshow host whose ratings grab goes south when he makes the mistake of inviting a demonically possessed cult survivor on to his show. And hello there, long time no see, to Pazuzu (or is it Lamashtu? The jury’s still out), popping up again in The Exorcist: Believer, which tries to get one over on its ancestor The Exorcist by offering two possessed schoolgirls for the price of one – though, alas, the film is not twice as scary as its predecessor.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” said Verbal Kint (paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire) in The Usual Suspects. This might have been true back in Kint’s heyday, but nowadays it’s depressingly obvious that devils do indeed exist, clad in the trappings of politics, religion or super-wealth as they sow conflict, contagion, oppression and conspiracy theories throughout the world. Meanwhile the actual devil’s malign influence can be felt in the current crop of horror cinema, always a reliable bellwether of society’s fears and anxieties, even when taking into account the time lag between conception and release. It’s hard to pretend the archfiend doesn’t exist when he’s crowding out the competition on screen, where the biggest and baddest of the big bads and his evil emissaries (Pazuzu, Asmodeus, Baphomet et al) have taken over from vampires and zombies as dark fantasy villain du jour.
Fifty-six years after Mia Farrow made the mistake of eating that drugged chocolate mousse in Rosemary’s Baby, the Prince of Darkness is back to his old satanic shenanigans, impregnating nice Catholic girls in both Deliver Us and Immaculate, though – without going into spoilerific detail – the identity of Sydney Sweeney’s impregnator in the latter is not exactly clearcut, so good luck to her claiming child support. Given BBFC and MPAA guidelines on bestiality, one wonders just how far The First Omen will go in explaining Damien Thorn’s jackal DNA, teased in the original The Omen from 1976 and regurgitated two years later in Damien: Omen II – where the doctor who makes the discovery is bisected in an unfortunate lift accident before he can share his findings with the world. Nell Tiger Free, who plays an American novitiate in the new prequel, set in Rome, told the Hollywood Reporter: “I definitely had some one-on-one time with the jackal.” So you never know.
Talking of beasts, the priapic old goat takes the form of a literal goat, Black Phillip, in The Witch from 2015, tempting Anya Taylor-Joy with the proposition: “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Nun-bothering duties in The Nun and The Nun II are delegated to Valak, who likes to dress up as a Roman Catholic bride of Christ, while gender-fluid Paimon makes a late entrance in Ari Aster’s Hereditary to cruelly sideline the actor whose performance has hitherto done most of the film’s heavy lifting. In other news, Asmodeus in The Pope’s Exorcist is a rare case of a demon who apparently prefers to possess male bodies, including that of Russell Crowe, rather than those of the usual luckless women or girls.
The Manichean struggle between the forces of light and darkness feels more pertinent now than ever before, with the planet heating up to hellish levels, politicians casting their opponents as evil incarnate, and so-called Christians forgetting everything Jesus ever said about compassion, charity and tolerance. Off screen as well as on, good and evil are at war, and as ever the battlefield is the female body. In devil-themed horror, girls and young women undergo hideous mutations, are repeatedly subjected to forced pregnancies and other violations, or are tied up and tortured – for their own good, naturally – by priests, scientists and other savants. As girls grow up and reveal their potential as sexual beings, they are systematically restrained by the trappings of law and religion, stripped of their autonomy, and reduced to pawns in the conservative patriarchy’s obsession with purity and control by lawgivers who seem to be taking their cue from Vincent Price’s chilling, atypically humourless performance as Matthew Hopkins in Witchfinder General. “Strange, isn’t it? So much iniquity the Lord vests in the female.”
Since the 1960s, devil-themed horror has never really gone away, though it has recently gone into overdrive, perhaps not unconnected to the peculiarly existential uncertainties of our era. So for all Old Nick’s traditional folklorist bag of tricks – shape-shifting into dogs and cats, bartering for souls at crossroads in return for dispensing preternatural guitar-playing skills, inducing me into fracturing my foot on the Pont du Diable in the south of France – it’s a tad disappointing that in the cinema, the Dark One and his evil entourage so often restrict their depredations to bog-standard demonic possession, preferably of a young female, whose physical transformation never strays far from the special makeup designed by Dick Smith for Linda Blair in The Exorcist more than 50 years ago: facial weals, off-colour complexion and lips in urgent need of balm. Not to mention pea soup; it would surely be easier to lead mankind astray by more seductive means, but this unholy rabble is addicted to projectile vomiting, bed levitation and other forms of evil showboating.
And the prevailing film method of combating demonic possession still involves religion and its accessories: crucifixes, Bibles, “The power of Christ compels you” and all that jazz, which presumably carry more weight when you’re not an atheist. To its credit, The Exorcist: Believer does try to ring the changes by co-opting Voodoo and denominations other than just Roman Catholicism, still depicted in horror films as a fine, upstanding religion that tries to protect young people from the devil and not abuse them at all, give or take tying them to chairs and making their complexions sizzle by spritzing them with holy water.
This all marks a major change to how things used to be. Prior to the 1960s, the devil would occasionally pop up in Hollywood mainstream cinema as a sort of novelty act, usually in variations on the Faust theme, striking bargains in return for riches and power and often accompanied with a nod and a wink to the audience. Walter Huston, for example, plays the affable, cigar-smoking Mr Scratch in William Dieterle’s whimsical parable The Devil and Daniel Webster from 1941, and dapper, red-tie-wearing Ray Walston, in baseball musical Damn Yankees from 1958, waxes nostalgic about the politically incorrect old days when Native Americans were whooping savages with tomahawks, and Jack the Ripper was a lighthearted femicidal folk hero.
But the success of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist unleashed an avalanche of films about devils, witch cults and the imminent birth of the antichrist, all of which dovetailed with the predominant 1970s mood of moral uncertainty, exposure of the traditional nuclear family unit as not necessarily benign, and all-round diminished trust in institutions and governments. In 1976 we got To the Devil a Daughter, in which Hammer Films pitted Richard Widmark against Christopher Lee as good and evil sages fighting over pregnant teenage nun Nastassja Kinski, while The Omen, starring Gregory Peck, was the first mainstream film to depict an explicit onscreen decapitation after David Warner’s luckless photographer crosses the nascent antichrist. Inevitably, Italian film-makers got in on the act. Mario Bava’s agreeably bonkers Lisa and the Devil, co-starring a lollipop-sucking pre-Kojak Telly Savalas, was rereleased in 1975 with added exorcism content and a new title: The House of Exorcism.
As the millennium approached and Y2K Armageddon loomed, the devil redoubled his attempts to take over multiplexes with a bombardment of diabolically themed horror featuring A-list stars versus the apocalypse – and very lively they were too. In End of Days from 1999, Satan trashes half of New York City in the body of an investment banker who looks an awful lot like Gabriel Byrne, but his plan to impregnate a young woman is foiled by alcoholic ex-detective Arnold Schwarzenegger; the highlight of this, and of probably any Schwarzenegger vehicle, is when he gets beaten up by a demonically possessed Miriam Margolyes. The same year saw Johnny Depp as an antiquarian book dealer schlepping around Europe in search of an ancient volume containing the means to summon Satan in The Ninth Gate. Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate from 1997, chewing scenery as the fiendish CEO of an evil Manhattan law firm, when asked, “Why law?”, trumpets: “It’s the new priesthood, baby!”
Now the devil is back, and in a big way. Late Night With the Devil puts the fun back into horror films and, for 93 minutes at least, makes us forget all the ranting real-life pretenders to the Dark Prince’s throne of lies who are currently monopolising the world stage while amassing alarming numbers of blinkered cult members ready to do their bidding. Eat your heart out, Damien – there’s no point in waiting for the antichrist when he’s already here.
• The First Omen is in cinemas in Australia from 4 April, and in the UK and US from 5 April. Late Night With the Devil is in cinemas now.
• Anne Billson is the author of The Coming Thing, a horror novel about the birth of the antichrist
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