MOVIES GIVE THE DEVIL HIS DUE

By Joe Williams

From St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10.27.2000

The fall film schedule includes a frightening number of movies about Satan and sorcery. The list includes: The Exorcist (re-release), Bedazzled, The Little Vampire, Lost Souls, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (re-release), Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Little Nicky

What the devil has happened to the movies?

The studios know that the Halloween season is a shrewd time to release horror films. But even compared to previous years, this season's slate includes an unusual number of movies about Satan and the supernatural. The most notable is the re-release of The Exorcist, William Friedkin's 1973 film about a 12-year-old girl who may or may not be possessed by the devil.

The menu at the multiplex also includes Bedazzled, a remake of the 1967 comedy about a lovelorn schmo who sells his soul to the devil; The Little Vampire, a kiddie flick about misunderstood bloodsuckers; Lost Souls, a moody potboiler about the imminent arrival of the anti-Christ; the re-release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas; and Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a sequel to the 1999 hit about backwoods sorcery. Coming next month is Little Nicky, an Adam Sandler comedy about the good-hearted son of Satan.

This trend mirrors a similar development in the other arts. Demonic imagery is rife in popular music, fantasy literature and television shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Why is the devil suddenly so hot?

One theory is that in the era of global communications, pagan traditions are seizing a bigger share of the airtime, and the Judeo-Christian mainstream is simply misinterpreting these beliefs as demonic. (Witness the furor over "Harry Potter.")

But the more immediate explanation for this spate of supernatural movies is the symbolic significance of the new millennium. Arnold Schwarzenegger's End of Days, the first of several movies about photogenic Manhattanites who thwart the devil, was released last November, when it was still a possibility that the Lord of the Underworld might erupt from our busted computers to inaugurate the reign of terror that was foretold in the Bible. Although the world didn't come to an end at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, similar movies followed, including Bless the Child, Lost Souls and the rapture story Left Behind.

Yet it's a measure of our religious ambivalence that none of these movies scored big at the box office. There's a famous scene from The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey's character says, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Even among theologians, there is considerable debate about whether the devil is a real entity. But although polls indicate that 70 percent of Americans believe in the devil, the concept doesn't galvanize Western civilization the way it did in the Middle Ages, when the threat of a punitive hell was the big stick that kept the masses beholden to the Vatican.

Old bugaboos took a beating during the Protestant Reformation, and for many intellectuals, the superstitious worldview was finally kicked to the gutter by the likes of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and Darwin. Rather than the devil, early films found a source of horror in primordial nature (King Kong), in ancient curses (The Mummy) and in misguided science (Frankenstein). By the middle of the 20th century, the devil had become a secular symbol that was just as applicable to canned-meat products and musicals like "Damn Yankees" as it was to moral guidance. A comedy like Bedazzled, with Elizabeth Hurley as a bikini-clad Beelzebub, derives from this folkloric conception of the devil rather than the Gothic. For most people around the world, the Christian devil is now just another metaphor to explain why humans do bad things to each other.

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho revolutionized horror films by locating evil within the human psyche itself, and by the late '60s, skepticism and psychology were replacing religion as the American credo. When the incredulous Mia Farrow was impregnated by a demon in Rosemary's Baby, she exclaimed "This is no dream! This is really happening!" A year later, Charles Manson's instruction to his flock as he dispatched them on their notorious murder spree was to "do something witchy." The bloody slogans that the killers scrawled on the walls of the Tate home were a ghoulish form of irony rather than a genuine expression of Satanism. (A lesser kind of irreverence explains why suburban mall rats are attracted to profane music without actually worshipping the devil.)

The Exorcist was perhaps the last horror movie that could cash in on the religious beliefs of its audience. When the movie was released, abortion had just been legalized, Billy Graham and Richard Nixon were golf buddies, and you couldn't say the word "hell" on any of the three television networks. In this moral climate, it was still possible for a movie to be transgressive, to shock the sensibilities of a church-going public.

The film underscored the tensions between the old orthodoxy and the new order with a character (Jason Miller as Father Damien Karras) who was both a psychiatrist and a priest. Karras' shaky faith echoed the doubts of the American public in the Vietnam era. But there was still enough vitality left in the old belief structures to make The Exorcist one of the biggest and most controversial box-office successes of all time. (Of course, it helped that the movie had some really cool special effects.)

As horror movies grew more explicit in the '70s and '80s, they lost their capacity to shock us. Befitting an era of skepticism, supernatural ghouls were replaced by dysfunctional spree killers. Inevitably these violent slasher movies resorted to irony to circumvent the stylistic dead-end of the genre. Ever since Scream turned the genre inside out, the most successful horror films have addressed the cliches of storytelling rather than the complexities of human nature or the mysteries of the cosmos.

The brilliance of The Blair Witch Project was that it returned the horror genre to the shadows where demons used to dwell. There wasn't a single moment of on-screen violence in the entire movie, yet this story of a documentary film crew that gets lost in a forest was genuinely frightening.

The sequel takes an opposite tack, assaulting the senses with a thrash-metal soundtrack and close-up images of ritual violence. Yet even when it devolves into a Scream-type exercise in hysteria, it locates its horror in the supernatural. Although the pagan character played by Erica Leerhsen complains that Wiccans are unfairly associated with a devil in which they don't believe, diabolical forces wink at the action from the margins of the film. The most provocative notion in the movie is that our violent society is secretly controlled by spooks who disappear as soon as their human puppets are apprehended. This dark conspiracy is a perfect complement to our renewed belief in angels. Such beliefs reflect our hunger for meaning in the midst of material prosperity.

So now we have a new generation of movies about demons. Some of them are comical, and some of them are dead serious. But all of them derive from a medieval world view where human reason is irrelevant and external forces control our destiny, thus absolving us of responsibility for the world we've created--and the lousy movies we make.

Kevin Spacey was wrong. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing our storytellers that he ever existed in the first place.