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The Devil has always enjoyed a good box office. Poet and artist William Blake claimed that Milton was of his party without knowing it, and Percy Bysshe Shelly liked Milton's Satan so much that he thought him the hero of Paradise Lost. But despite these good reviews, Satan or his appointees remained not only the villains but also the losers in horror movies-that is until recently. But in the past few years, Old Scratch has started winning a few in cinema. In Rosemary's Baby he scored big with Mia Farrow at the fade, and his son Damien comes out a winner in two of the three Omen movies. Moreover, his minions-vampires, werewolves, and assorted evil spirits in human form-are working out a better winning percentage in films. In short, it's no longer unusual for evil to be in charge when the lights come on in the theatre. But in no recent horror film does Satan win so convincingly as inAngelHeart. And director/writer Alan Parker makes the victory of evil all the more impressive with the stunning visual symbolism he incorporates in the film.
Angel Heart, which is based on William Hjortsberg's novel Falling Angel, offers an interesting example of a new formula in horror fiction-the victory of the forces of evil. But the film is more important for its pattern of Satanic imagery-sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle-that permeates the film from the opening credits to the final shot. Director Parker uses images drawn from the Satanic and occult tradition, including pentagrams, hexagrams, imagery drawn from the Black Mass ceremony, and a host of other visual symbols and allusions to create the most consistently disturbing screen ambience of recent years. Indeed, whether Angel Heart can be described as a good film or not, it gives new meaning to the designation film noir.
Angel Heart's Satanic iconography and occult allusions come from a well-documented historical tradition. Arthur Lyons traces the beginnings of the Satanic mass to Europe of the middle ages and to sharply differing social groups. For peasants, Satanism offered a response to the oppressiveness of the Church of Rome.
For the peasant, who saw himself victimized by the Church, the Mass served such a purpose. It was a way of venting hatred, of outpouring all...