Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema

The first collection of essays to address Satan's ubiquitous and popular appearances in film

Lucifer and cinema have been intertwined since the origins of the medium. As humankind's greatest antagonist and the incarnation of pure evil, the cinematic devil embodies our own culturally specific anxieties and desires, reflecting moviegoers' collective conceptions of good and evil, right and wrong, sin and salvation. Giving the Devil His Due is first book of its kind to examine the history and significance of Satan on screen.

This scholarly collection explores how the devil is not just one monster among many, nor is he the "prince of darkness" merely because he has repeatedly flickered across cinema screens in darkened rooms since the origins of the medium. Satan is instead a force active in our lives. Films featuring the devil, therefore, are not just flights of fancy but narratives, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes calling into question, a familiar belief system.

Starting with the inception of motion pictures in the 1890s through present day, these essays examine what cinematic representations tell us about the art of filmmaking, the desires of the film-going public, what the cultural moments the films reflect, and the reciprocal influence they exerted. Loosely organized chronologically by film, though some chapters address more than one film in order to compare films across eras and genres, this collection studies such classic movies as Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Angel Heart, The Witch, and The Devil's Advocate, as well as the appearance of the Devil in Disney animation.

Guiding the contributions to this volume is the overarching idea that cinematic representations of Satan reflect not just the hypnotic powers of cinema to explore and depict the fantastic, but shifting, social anxieties and desires that concern human morality and our place in the universe.