Other Films of Satanic Interest

I think its probably the 14 year-old me's frustration with being a goofy suburban kid still lingering somewhere inside of me that has kept me so enamored with Satanic and blasphemous imagery in film. I thought now would be a fun time to share some great examples of this that we have not got a chance to look at in this course.

1975's "Alucarda," (Dracula backwards...get it?) directed by Juan Lopez Moctezuma is really an exceptional piece of work which I give my highest recommendations. The plot is a little shakey, but then again, its more about the elaborate visuals and truly over-the-top performances anyway. As best as I can remember, it follows a young woman, Justine, as she joins a convent where she meets and immediately befriends Alucarda, an outsider within the community who is suspected of being a witch and apparently is the child of the Devil himself. The two partake in a Satanic ritual where the two proclaim allegiance to the Devil and then all hell breaks loose. There is a particularly interesting aspect of the narrative which parallels the warmth and goodness of the two women's homoerotic relationship to the cruelty and harsh conviction of the nuns and priests within the convent. The imagery employed by Moctezuma is really its strongest point, however. Examples of this include (but certainly not limited to) a very goat-like gypsy wandering around the convent, grotesque renditions of Christ's crucifixion, and, most memorable, the costume design for the nuns making them appear to wrapped up like mummies and stained with menstrual blood. There is a lot of nudity, screaming, and gore, but somehow it never feels all that gratuitous. There is something very beautiful about how its all pulled off and is definitely worth checking out. Below is a trailer for the film.




We talked briefly about "Haxan" in class, but I still thought it was worth posting a scene from that here. It is the most wonderful depiction I have ever seen of Satanic and Occult themes and it very well may contain some of the most captivating images ever committed to film, if you were to ask for this guy's two cents. For those not familiar, this is a pseudo-documentary about witchcraft and the persecution of witches through time ending with beginning of medical understanding of mental illness. I'll rely on the clip to do the rest.




A more recent film that doesn't deal directly with the occult but does have its share of Satanic imagery and blasphemy is Jan Svankmajer's "Lunacy" (2006). The film follows a young man named Jean, who has violent fantasies stemming from his fear of institutionalization, as he deals with the death of his mother. Preparing for her funeral, he meets the Marquis, based on the Marquis de Sade, and "becoming an unwilling accomplice to de Sade's debauchery" (allmovie). There is one scene in particular that I think makes it an appropriate mention here. The Marquis is driving large nails into a sculpture of Christ while in front of him a group of nuns, whose breasts are exposed, sit with four men as they eat a large chocolate cake, rather sloppily, that is in the shape of the cross. Meanwhile, as Marquis is condemning God as weak and fallible, another nun comes and places a robe over him which bears an inverted cross that appears to have been make up from cutouts out of pornographic magazines. After he is done, animated meats wriggle out from Christ's wounds. Certainly, a far cry from the refined and subtle qualities of Castevette. Nevertheless, this a pretty exciting film that is notable in it being the most blasphemous picture I've seen in a while. The trailer unfortunately, does not really show anything to the extent described above, its still worth a look.