The devil and his minions crop up in a rash of new horror films, from Deliver Us and Immaculate to reboots of The Exorcist and The Omen. What does this tell us about our current anxieties?
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.
