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

Advertising 3
diabolical is still striking enough that it catches
people’s attentions, making the Devil and hell
attractive for marketing purposes.
As long as they are used carefully enough to
avoid overly offending individuals who are
devoutly religious, infernal images can be alluring
and even glamorous. This is partly because of
Satan’s carnal associations, making certain
portrayals of the demonic sexy. As early as the
nineteenth century, advertisers deployed such
images. Thus in an 1880 French café ad, Parisians
are invited to a “Party in Hell.” The poster’s graphics
showed an enthroned, smiling Satan overlooking
a grand dance by citizens who were obviously
members of the upper crust of society.
One early television commercial drew from the
same association. This 1950s era ad for cosmetics
shows a rather demure housewife transformed
into a sexy demon after a couple of drops of
perfume. She curls up with her husband (the
1950s was not ready for portrayals of unmarried
seductiveness on TV), who is obviously highly
responsive. The commercial ends by asserting that
even the most quiet woman should get in touch
with her “dark side” every once in a while.
A more long-standing tradition has been to
portray one’s enemies as aligned with the Prince
of Darkness. This propagandistic utilization of
the diabolical is very old, as reflected in medieval
Protestant woodcuts portraying Catholics as
Satanic and vice versa. More recently, in both
world wars propaganda posters were produced
that showed the enemy as evil or as somehow
allied with the Devil. Political cartoonists have
also relied upon infernal associations to attack
opponents.
Then there are ads and products that rely upon
hell’s association with heat to promote their products,
such as the names of and ads for hot sauces.
The product name Red Devil was taken from the
company’s line of canned, deviled meats (deviled
meat and deviled eggs are so-called because of the
hot spices that are sometimes included). This
association can also be inverted. In a 1997 radio
commercial for Cool Iced Tea, for instance, comedian
Penn Jillette begins by saying, “I’m in Hell,”
seated “next to some former IRS auditors.” In the
background, one hears various sounds associated
with the underworld—shrieks, flames, and the
like. Despite the heat, however, Jillette stays cool
because of the iced tea he is drinking.
Other product names are more indirect. Dirt
Devil, for example, is the name of a very popular
vacuum cleaner. The name is derived from a
short-lived circular wind pattern that briefly stirs
up dirt like a minicyclone. The quasi-spectral
appearance of the cloud of dark, moving dust may
be responsible for its name. The connection with
vacuum cleaners is straightforward, although Dirt
Devil pushes the association one step further by
including a curved, pointed tail under its brand
name as a logo. Yet other ads are harder to classify.
In a Roy Rogers restaurant ad in the early 1990s, a
fellow who had recently died in an automobile
crash comes before what appears to be a kind of
review board. The backdrop for the scene is a pair
of escalators, one going down and one going up.
Asking if they “cook anything” in the celestial
realm, an angel interjects that he must be “thinking
of the other place.” Immediately fire and smoke
belch out from a black chimney as a voice cries,
“Yow! I hate this place!” Although the association
between cooking fires and hellfire is straightforward
enough, this ad otherwise trivializes eternal
damnation: The point is not that this fast-food
chain is somehow linked to hell, but, rather, infernal
imagery makes for a humorous ad.
Playing on the theme that everyone’s punishment
in hell is unique to the individual, an advertisement
for British Knights athletic shoes features
a “basketball player’s nightmare” in which Derrick
Coleman dreams about a dark realm in which a
group of overweight over-forties play as well as
Coleman because they are wearing this specific
brand of shoes. A smirking demon laughs at the
basketball player who wakes up abruptly from his
nightmare. The devil’s laughter, however, still
echoes in his bedroom.
Another amusing ad using the theme of
damnation is one of the creative “Got Milk” TV
commercials. As a heartless business executive is
on a cell phone firing his own mother from her
job, he is hit and killed by a bus. Awakening in the
next life, a soft unseen voice says, “Welcome to
eternity.”After asserting that he must be in heaven,
the ex-businessman starts eating giant chocolate