Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

90 Fire (Hellfire)
horror is the “deal with the Devil” This notion has
formed the basis for more than a few films, such as,
in very different ways, such early movies as Angel
on My Shoulder (1946) and Alias Nick Beal (1949).
A threshold time for diabolically inspired
movies was the late 1960s through the mid-
1970s. This period saw the release of three influential
films that have been described as “Satanic
blockbusters”—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The
Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976). During
the same period, Hammer Studios produced a
number of relevant B movies, including film
adaptations of several Dennis Wheatley novels.
These films uniformly feature a Satanic conspiracy,
with the sole exception of The Exorcist. The
Exorcist was the most successful horror movie of
all time.
This film quickly became a cultural phenomenon.
Audiences were spellbound, reacting with a
combination of fear, revulsion, and fascination. In
the film’s wake, more than a few people began
claiming that they were possessed. Despite the
sensationalistic appeal of its graphic content,
however, the real core of The Exorcist’s narrative
was the crisis of faith of the younger priest, who
had to regain his faith in order to save the
possessed girl. Thus by the end of the movie the
Devil is thwarted and the power of the Christian
god reaffirmed. Like The Exorcist, the great majority
of horror movies featuring a diabolical theme
adhere rather closely to traditional theology.
Although modern religious Satanists such as
Anton LaVey disliked The Exorcist, they tended to
be positive about horror movies like Rosemary’s
Baby and The Omen. In an interview in Gavin
Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising, LaVey, who claimed to
have been a technical advisor on the latter two
films, went so far as to assert that Rosemary’s Baby
“did for Satanism what Birth of a Nation did for
the Ku Klux Klan; our membership [in the Church
of Satan] soared after its release” (cited in
Baddeley 1999, 88).
What LaVey fails to realize (or neglects to
mention), however, is that the pervasive horror
movie theme of Satanic conspiracies—whether
the Satanists end up being portrayed negatively,
positively, or in shades of gray—helped to shape
the Satanic conspiracy theories that became so
influential during the ritual abuse scares of the
1980s and 1990s. As Andrew Tudor, the author of
Monsters and Mad Scientists, observes, the period
of the late 1960s and early 1970s “is dominated by
a growing concern with Satanic cults and conspiracies.”(Tudor
1989, 170) Similarly, Baddeley notes
that the movies of the 1970s “established Satanic
cultists as stock movie monsters”(Baddeley 1999,
86). Thus while the publication of Michelle
Remembers in 1980 may have been—as many
analysts have asserted—the precipitating event
that set the scare into motion, it was Hollywood
that plowed the ground of cultural awareness in
which the seed of the Satanic ritual abuse idea was
able to take root and grow.
For Further Reading:
Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship
and Rock’n’Roll. London: Plexus, 1999.
Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions,
and the Media. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2000.
Paul, William. Laughing Screaming: Modern
Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994.
Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A
Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford,
UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Fire (Hellfire)
An essential component of the traditional conception
of hell is that it is a hot, fiery place where
sinners are punished by being burned. This characteristic
is reflected in everything from revivalist
sermons warning about the wages of sin to infernal
jokes. It is even common to allude to hell as
“the hot place.” The most general source of this
notion appears to be the intersection between
observations of volcanic activity and the widespread
practice of burying the dead. It is only a
short step to associate the afterlife with residence
in a volcanolike realm.
In Western culture, the immediate source of
the fire and brimstone image (brimstone is an
antique word for sulfur) is the Book of Revelation.
In the Revised Standard Version, the relevant
passage reads: “But as for the cowardly, the faithless,
the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators,
sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in