Satan Is Scariest When Subtle

THE DEVIL IS irresistible horror bait, the central figure in some of the best scary movies ever made. A tour through Satan’s oeuvre finds plenty of examples of an outside force of evil, such as Al Pacino’s diabolical attorney tempting Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate (1997) or Elizabeth Hurley’s sensual temptress raising hell for Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled (2000). These movies generally have the theological heft of a Carman music video, but occasionally, Hollywood tries an angle on Satan that’s a bit more sophisticated, spooky, and, ultimately, instructive. Take, for instance, John Carpenter’s low-budget 1987 box-office flop Prince of Darkness. 

The movie follows professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and his students as they investigate a mysterious green ooze in a monastery’s basement. The team discovers that the slime is the literal embodiment of Satan, a twisted take on the consecrated host. While we get a brief glimpse of a giant red figure with black fingernails, Prince of Darkness doesn’t focus there. Instead, the danger is far more immediate. Anyone exposed to the slime is possessed by its essence, transformed into a mindless murderer. The true adversary remains in the shadows, sowing mistrust and division. The only thing our heroes can attack is each other.

Carpenter was following in the tradition of better, more nuanced depictions of the devil among us and within us. The Exorcist (1973) is an obvious example, where a mother reckons with the devil setting up permanent shop in the person she loves most. Even more disconcerting is Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where a woman realizes that the devil is all around her, poisoning every bond, whether professional, social, romantic, or parental. Rosemary has no one left to trust. It’s a supremely effective depiction of patriarchy as a sinister force, made more jarring when the sexual violence of director Roman Polanski came to light. Movies like these are instructive about the actual nature of the devil in the world — a necessary corrective to the image we’ve been stuck with for centuries.

The devil’s most significant pop culture glow-up came in the 1600s, when John Milton cast Satan as a tragic figure of broken majesty, almost an antihero. “Evil be thou my good,” he pledges in Book IV of Paradise Lost, swearing fealty to evil as a way of staking his own claim on part of creation: “By thee at least Divided Empire with Heav’ns King I hold.” In Milton’s cosmology, Satan is God’s chief competition. He may rule with an inverted moral code, but it is a code, and one that impacts our new world just as much as God’s own judgment.

Milton’s characterization would shape the devil in the popular imagination for centuries to come, even if that characterization doesn’t really line up with the biblical account. The devil of the Bible isn’t like Die Hard’s Hans Gruber, a malevolent genius whose sinister plots have contingency plans for their contingency plans. He’s more like Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue, a petty twerp who whines whenever he doesn’t get his way.

Take the biblical book of Job, where Satan engages God in a strange human chess match. When God declares Job “blameless and upright,” Satan counters that he can get Job to curse God by killing his family. God agrees to this game and though Satan loses, he keeps going back to haggle about the rules.

This sets up the depiction we have of the devil throughout most of the Bible. In Matthew 4, Jesus is 40 days into a fast when the devil shows up. Given this golden opportunity to tempt the Son of God, Satan’s efforts are cartoonishly harebrained, especially his first attempt: “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread,” he says, essentially offering Jesus a chance to eat rocks. We can see why the devil prefers that others do his dirty work: Showing up in the flesh has not historically been a winning move.

Sometimes, the devil’s influence is more understated, like when Jesus tells Peter to “Get behind me, Satan!” in Matthew 16. We are not given any indication that Peter was possessed by the devil, but Jesus reacts to Peter’s resistance to Jesus’ foretelling of his death as forcefully as we ever see in scripture. It’s Satan’s subtlest attack — appearing to Jesus not as a horned monster or a goat thing, but in the well-meaning, entirely understandable entreaties of one of his closest friends. For the reader, it’s a jump scare. We didn’t even know the devil was in the room. 

This is probably the closest any of us will ever get to the devil, provided such a being exists. We find Satan not in occult symbols or fiery pits, but in the mundane, everyday actions of people doing what they think is right and sensible. Not on a Ouija board, but on a cable news show where we’re told that these Palestinian kids had it coming. Not at a sacrifice of lily-skinned virgins, but in the swift, simple denial of medical coverage.

I understand the inclination to be skeptical of the existence of the devil. Part of the genius of Robert Eggers’ The Witch is showing how Christian paranoia about Satan is every bit as destructive as any real demon could be. But I do believe in something like a devil, even if just as a way to think about a specific wickedness in the world that transcends the general human capacity for cruelty. Wherever there is a spirit that seeks to turn us against love and grace — wherever we’re tempted to think of others as expendable — we’re as close to the devil as Rosemary was, slowly finding all our connections to love and trust poisoned by hell.

In Sam Raimi’s 2009 horror comedy Drag Me to Hell, a loan officer named Christine (Alison Lohman) is pressured by her boss to be tougher on applicants if she wants a promotion. So, when an old woman begs for an extension on a mortgage payment, Christine turns her down. It’s the sensible thing to do. It’s her job. And it’s the beginning of her undoing, as this old woman ends up having some powerful connections.

Raimi says that he devised Drag Me to Hell as a morality tale about a good person whose life is ruined by one weak moment of cruelty. It was savvy of him to look for hell in a loan office, where evil often becomes a daily matter of course. “She did do the wrong thing,” Raimi said, reflecting on Alison’s grim fate. “But holy cow! Give her a break.”

But it is not in the spirit of Satan to give people a break. Behavior like that — offering grace where none is deserved, offering mercy when it would be easier to demand payment — is left up to us.