The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to episode 666 of Scriptnotes a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to Satan.
Craig: We will eat your soul.
John: Probably not, but today on the show it is a deep dive into the unholy trinity of films that established the genre of movies about Satanism. We are going to discuss how we got here how these films work and the future of the devil on screen.
Craig: The future of Satan. It’s like the worst deadline article ever.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: Like Satan ankles hell.
John: Totally. 100%. Our bonus segment, we’re premium members. We will pontificate on our best candidates for the Antichrist.
Craig: Oh.
John: Yes. Who would it be? Who should it be?
Craig: Think of a couple of people.
John: I can think of a few. Let’s start off by talking about Satan. We don’t talk about Satan very much, Craig, at all. I don’t think we ever even discuss him.
Craig: Weirdly, it doesn’t come up.
John: It doesn’t come up that much.
Craig: I know that some people in certain parts of our country probably presume that here in Hollywood, we talk about Satan all the time. While we’re drinking the blood of children or whatever it is that they think we do, when in fact, mostly what we do are things like, figure out why there are all these fingerprints on the refrigerator door and take the dog out for a walk. So it doesn’t come up.
John: Quotidian life just doesn’t involve nearly as much Satan as one would guess.
Craig: Also, Satan’s not real.
John: That is true. Let’s talk about Satan, at least the modern conception of Satan. Because when we talk about Satan as an idea, I think we have an image in our head for who Satan is. Satan, in modern conception, is an individual who was thrown out of heaven-
Craig: Fallen angel.
John: -fallen angel, yes. Very, very powerful.
Craig: Yes.
John: The nemesis of God.
Craig: Right, so Satan occupies a very difficult narrative space because he is the antagonist in the Bible, or if you– the Old Testament doesn’t really talk much about Satan, but–
John: Also, we’ll get into that, the New Testament doesn’t really talk about it.
Craig: The church love to talk about Satan. They set up Satan as this rival. Then when you get into Revelations, and then here’s the narrative problem for Satan: Currently, the theory is he’s down there in hell, ruling over a lake of fire, where people burn for eternity but he’s going to come back through his form as the Antichrist or I guess that’s his avatar.
John: Yes, that’s one of the ways he could do it. He could be the equivalent of Jesus where he’s like is incarnate through the Antichrist.
Craig: Yes, he creates his Satan incarnate and son of Satan, whatever you want to call it. And that brings him back to earth where he gets into a huge battle with God and Jesus and all of God’s forces and it’s an actual battle that takes place in a place called Armageddon, I believe, or it’s Megiddo and it becomes Armageddon something, and Satan loses.
Now the narrative part here, that’s rough for Satan, said apparently he knows he loses. It’s already like. What’s he getting ready for? That big fight that he’s going to lose one day?
John: I would say often in our cinematic stories we have heroes who know they’re going to lose and yet they carry on the valiant fight anyway.
Craig: The heroes do.
John: The villains–
Craig: The villains never do.
John: Well, you know what? We’ve just had Wicked. We’ve just reformed the Wicked Witch of the West.
Craig: Yes, but that’s not–
John: That’s not what we’re talking about here.
Craig: No. This devil, this Satan doesn’t seem to be– he’s like he missed those pages. I assume everybody else has read it and then no one wants to tell him. It’s a preordained loss. That’s Satan for you.
John: We also have like the South Park incarnation of Satan, which is basically packaging up all these things and then making him a sad, lonely figure.
Craig: Also a musical theater figure, which is like the best.
John: Absolutely the best.
Craig: Yes, he just wants love.
John: Importantly, we should say that our modern conception of Satanism, and really Satan, is that there are cults who are there who are trying to bring about the end times, hell on earth. He has his minions on earth, which is, without that, there’s really no story to tell.
Craig: Satan is constantly using us to try and get his way and there are the versions where we never actually meet Satan. There are versions where we do, so for instance in Constantine, we meet Lucifer and he’s quite annoyed actually that his son is trying to get back because his son is going to take over his throne or something. Then there are versions where Satan is walking around among us and just by lying and manipulating gets us to just be evil and that would be The Devil’s Advocate where, “I’m a fan of man.” God is an absentee landlord. That is a great line.
John: It’s a great line.
Craig: Yes, it’s a great line.
John: Let’s go back into the roots of Satan and Satanism. This idea of an existential cosmic evil makes sense. It’s always sort of been there and so there’s always been some embodiment, some agent behind misfortune, it’s useful to believe that. It’s useful to believe that there’s some force that created the universe, some fatherly figure or motherly figure who is shepherding us all, but also that there’s a villain out there who is responsible for all the bad things that happen to us. You see that across all ancient mythologies.
Craig: Absolutely. Nyx was the Greek goddess of shadow, I believe, and she gave birth to a bunch of children, discord, war, disease, famine, all the baddies.
John: Then we have Hades who rules over the underworld, so the idea of like ruling over the land of the dead, you sort of combine and conflate these things.
Craig: Hades is a little bit more management than the traditional Judeo-Christian sower of evil. In American tradition, because we go all the way back to our Puritans who came over and Puritans, a lot of people think the Puritans left England because the English wouldn’t let them be freely religious. The problem was that Puritans were too religious. The discrimination was, “You guys are way too religious.” They were like, “Well, we want to be as insanely religious as we want.”
John: As hardcore as we want.
Craig: As hardcore as we want. “We’re going to go.” They really, really had a thing about Satan. They were very much convinced that he walks around. Today we indeed have churches who refer to Satan all the time.
John: Go back to the ancient roots of things too. You have, other religions like Zoroastrianism, had the sense of there’s an evil, there’s a balancing force of evil that’s out there. The idea of a duality between the good and the bad makes sense. You can understand why it’s naturally there. When you have a monotheistic religion like our Abrahamic traditions, it’s understandable that they would feel like, okay, well, what’s the counterbalancing force there?
Craig: Especially if you start to organize yourself, then you need something to scare people with. Jesus was like, “Here’s all this wonderful positive stuff. It’s really difficult to do. You have to be poor, you have to put everybody else first, you have to allow them to hit you and not hit back.” And everybody that came after him was like, “Great. Also, you have to give the church your money and you have to follow our rules or you will be sent to hell. If we don’t like you and you’re saying things we don’t enjoy, like for instance, the earth revolves around the sun, for instance-
John: Yes, heresy.
Craig: -clearly, Satan is working through you.” That’s a nice way to dehumanize somebody and burn them alive.
John: Yes, it’s good. Now, before we get to Christianity, we of course have Judaism, and we have the Old Testament, and we have all the other things that didn’t make it into the official Old Testament. Going back to your Bar Mitzvah days.
Craig: My Hebrew school days.
John: Your Hebrew school days. There’s not a lot of Satan there. There’s the idea of a Satan, which is any sort of adversary, it’s like an obstacle there, and they would use Satan as a verb, like to oppose. It’s not the same thing.
Craig: It was not a thing. I remember asking my rabbi about it because we grew up, everybody watches cartoons, you see the red devil with the pitchfork. Why a pitchfork? I don’t know.
John: Actually pulled from Poseidon is what they’re thinking.
Craig: Maybe. I don’t know why.
John: Maybe the trident of Poseidon.
Craig: Barbed tail, not sure why. I remember him saying, “We don’t even really have a hell.” There’s like a theory of a place you go if you’re really really bad, where it’s just like cold and empty and it’s a wasteland and you’re lonely. We didn’t have that personified guy, the guy who sits there and laughs as you burn and burn and burn, it was just more like, you’re going to be disconnected from other people and you’ll be miserable. Which is enough for me.
John: Yes, we had bad people and bad forces in the Old Testament. The snake in the Garden of Eden is often matched up to Satan, but there’s no direct connection there.
Craig: No, that was– he was not. Yes, it was just more temptation.
John: Temptation. Throughout the Middle Ages, you don’t see a lot of the devil, you don’t see a lot of Satan. If you see him it’s as a comic character, like a pathetic character, and just the same way we have a devil versus the Devil, it’s sort of a blurry line between the two of them. Book of Revelations, you mentioned before, is where we first start to really get into this notion of this capital S Satan of Armageddon. He’s this big third-act villain. It’s important to sort of put the Book of Revelations in context because I think the movies we’re going to be talking about will reference it.
Craig: All the time. It’s the worst book.
John: It is referring to specifically the Roman Empire, which it was written in. Even 666 is actually probably referenced to Nero rather than to any other sort of thing.
Craig: Likely was written by somebody who was mentally ill. It has all the hallmarks of somebody who experiences schizophrenic breaks, is hallucinatory, or I don’t know, it was John of something who was writing Revelations. Maybe that he was just snacking on shrooms because it sure feels shroomy to me. It feels altered. The imagery does correspond a lot to the way people experience hallucinatory images when they take drugs. It’s an incredibly unreliable book, even more so than all the other ones that are also ridiculous in their own way.
John: One of the things that’s different is though, like the rest of the Bible is a history and this is a prognostication of things to come.
Craig: It’s not gospel. A bunch of people kept telling the same story about what happened with Jesus and disagreed slightly from time to time.
John: Sure. That’s why you have four copies.
Craig: Then this guy was like, “Yes, yes, great.”
John: Let’s say what’s going to come.
Craig: I’ve seen, yes, I see the whore of Babylon.
John: He’s mapping out the future seasons.
Craig: Then she’s riding with a host of lions screaming and I’m like, “Get off the drugs, buddy.”
John: Early modern church starts to personify in the season. It’s increasingly powerful. It’s really with John Calvin, Martin Luther. It’s less of a metaphor of like, of temptation or wickedness, but actually an individual. Then of course we have John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is sort of mapping that out. It’s important to understand Paradise Lost is literature. It’s not actually canonical Bible anything.
Craig: No. It’s a story. Calvin was definitely– Look, here in the United States, we’re all still living in the shadow of John Calvin and his crazy ideas.
John: Yes. 2013, a YouGov poll found that 57% of Americans believe in the literal devil compared to 18% of British people, which is just such a shocking difference.
Craig: The answer is again, Britain said, “Go away.”
John: That’s true.
Craig: “Leave. Please leave. Stop saying things like babies are evil because they were simply predetermined to be predestined to be evil. Stop it. Just go. Go away.” I’m not surprised. I’m fascinated by the 18% of British people who are like, “Yeah, I do believe the devil is real.” It seems like such an unpopular thing to talk about in the UK.
John: Also, the British people are also living in popular culture. They’re living in a global popular culture that’s often dominated by American stuff. They’re seeing the three movies we’re going to be talking about.
Craig: True.
John: It’s possible that that’s the influence.
Craig: They’re movies.
John: They are movies.
Craig: They’re movies.
John: Milton’s Paradise Lost is a book.
Craig: I know. I know. Ghostbusters also is a movie. Do you think more Americans believe in– It seems like more Americans probably believe in angels than in Satan.
John: Probably so. I want the polls. I want the polls. People love angels.
Craig: People love angels.
John: They love angels. They love ghosts.
Craig: They do.
John: They do.
Craig: It’s like the idea of children flitting around on wings, just saving them from stuff or I don’t know, making sure Starbucks opens up on time, whatever people pray for.
John: It’s a lot. I think we also, as we get into this, there’s a weird connection to the Catholic church and the Catholic church, not that the modern Catholic church has done a lot of talking about Satan or Satanism, but I think there’s some sense in like the Catholic church being organized and like that it’s a secret conspiracy that they’re hiding from you. The movies we’re going to be talking about often have Catholic priests who are, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but–“
Craig: Yes. What we find when we’re telling this story is that the Catholic church is incredibly useful if you’re a screenwriter because A, it is powerful and it is wealthy. Also, it’s the oldest of the traditions, particularly in the United States. It feels like it goes back to the beginning. The Holy Roman Empire essentially was Catholic. That was what it was. They speak Latin. It has this ancient vibe. It’s almost like they’re as old as the devil himself. Therefore, we need to go into these old scrolls and talk about these things that only the Catholic priests would have access to.
John: I wonder if there’s also an aspect of racism there because you look at the Protestant foundations of the United States and the Puritans and all this stuff, and you had this influx of immigrants who were largely bringing in Catholic traditions, which were also Christian, but not the same kind of Christian. It’s a way of differentiating. We obviously have anti-Catholic leagues. We have this sense of anti-Catholicism. I wonder if some of that gets folded into why we’re thinking about them as being involved with all this.
Craig: Yes. There could be some catholiphobia going on there. I’m not sure it’s racism, per se, because in the United States, there was tremendous fear of white Catholics. John Kennedy, the big thing about him was like, no one’s going to vote for a Catholic. As if that were a thing, it used to be.
What’s interesting is that in our country, we’re predominantly not a Catholic country. Satan is talked about constantly in our Protestant churches, in our Southern Baptist churches. Satan is a massive thing. It’s sort of their big selling point, and yet it feels like a different Satan than the Catholic Satan, which is like older, creepier, more in the shadows. The Protestant Satan comes up to you and offers you a weed.
John: Yes, absolutely. Before we get into our actual movies, let’s talk about the Antichrist because that’s a thing that’s sort of come up in, I think, all three of these, which is the Antichrist is mentioned four times in the New Testament as sort of a false prophet to take the role of Jesus. Again, it’s sort of like a lowercase antichrist, it’s not sort of an individual, it’s like sort of anybody who’s standing in the way of the prophecy of Jesus. According to my Wikipedia research, the first big reference to all this is 400 CE, which is Martin of Tours saying, “There is no doubt that the Antichrist, has already been born, firmly established already in his early years. He will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power.”
Craig: I think it was a running theme. Every generation is like, “This is it.”
John: This is it. It’s always the end times.
Craig: There has to be a term for generational narcissism. Maybe that is the term.
John: Sure.
Craig: We always think that we’re the ones living at the end of the world or in end times because we’re the special ones. No, we’re not. Ever.
John: Ever. And yet, even as we’re saying this, it does feel like it.
Craig: Yes, like probably it is happening.
John: All right. Before we get into our movies, because we’re going to focus on three movies and obviously they’re not the first movies or only movies to talk about Satan or Satanism, we should talk first about Faust, because right from the start of cinema, there were a bunch of movies about Faust. Let’s talk about the Faust story, which is really the devil’s bargain. It’s the idea of a pact with the devil.
Craig: Selling your soul becomes this big thing. The soul itself, the concept of the soul is a very murky one that, at least in Christianity, it’s murky until it becomes part of this bargain story where it’s now this thing you can give away. Again, it’s one of those stories where everyone knows the ending and yet somehow people keep falling for it over and over and over.
This goes to even in the American Black tradition, blues. it was always, thought like this blues man sells his soul to the devil and so that he could play this well. I’m like, but you know how that’s going to end and then lo and behold, you get movies like Angel Heart where it’s how it ends. Every time.
John: Every time.
Craig: Every single time. No matter what. I can’t understand why anyone makes that deal.
John: No.
Craig: Bad deal.
John: Bad deal. Bad deal.
Craig: Totally.
John: We can understand where that story comes from because if you look back at like Rumpelstiltskin or sort of the classic fable myth kind of things, there’s that sense of like, we’re going to make a deal and that person is going to come collect on that deal. Always there.
Craig: Well, what’s interesting is like the Rumpelstiltskin story is a good devil’s bargain story, except in the end he loses. That story is sort of like, this guy took advantage of this poor woman who wanted a child and made the deal and she spun the straw into gold and — oh, that was it, because she just wanted to stay alive.
John: How dare she.
Craig: Right? He lets her turn straw into gold, but his price is, “I’m going to take your baby,” which is crazy. Also, what are you going to do with it? Then she figures out a way to beat him. The whole point of the devil’s story is you lose, every time.
John: That is a whole different class of devil stories. For this episode, I really want to talk about the Satan that is Satanism and how that all fits together.
Craig: I need a chorus going while we talk. [hums] There’s always a chorus. [hums]
John: Latin, you couldn’t understand, but it’s just creepy because it’s there.
Craig: Exactly.
John: The three movies I want to talk about are Rosemary’s Baby from 1968.
Craig: So good.
John: The Exorcist from 1973.
Craig: My favorite.
John: And The Omen from 1976.
Craig: Also a movie.
John: Also a movie. The commonalities, I should say, we’re going to put links to the scripts we found for these three things. You can take a look through those. One thing I’m struck by is they’re all about the horror of parenthood. It’s interesting that our window into these stories of Satanism and satanic cults is about parenthood, which is specific. I guess there’s an aspect of like Antichrist being born. Parents are just a natural thing. If you were to even take out the Satanism of it all, they’re all unified about stories of how scary it is to be a parent.
Craig: Even though they shift gears and sort of concentrate on the father in The Omen, they are all about the conception and then how to deal with the fact that this symbol of innocence, a child, is in fact evil. That contrast is horrifying to us. Even though in Rosemary’s Baby, there is no child until the very, very end and you never get to see him. But, “he has his father’s eyes.”
John: He does.
Craig: It is the year one.
John: We’re starting in 1968, which I’m going to count as the ‘70s because it’s really more– By that point, we’re in the ‘70s.
Craig: It’s ‘70s vibe.
John: Let’s talk about the ‘70s vibe because looking at these movies, they do feel like they’re responding to a thing that’s happening in American culture. We’re starting to realize like, oh, the year 2000 is not that far off. That feels like a marker. That millennial change feels like, oh, 2000 years ago, we had Christ being born, and so there’s that aspect. We have Ouija boards. We have that sense of like, there’s a spiritual outside world there that feels different. We have changing social structures. We have the women’s liberation movement. It’s a different time, so it’s not surprising that we feel like there’s some end-of-times angst going in here. What else about the ‘70s strikes you?
Craig: Well, that was pretty much America’s low point. The late ‘60s, early ‘70s, our cities were suffused by riots, racism. Even though the Civil Rights Act had been passed, the echo of what occurred after that was violent and long and led to multiple assassinations. Presidents were being assassinated. Civil rights leaders were being assassinated. Candidates for president were being assassinated. Cities were on fire. Crime was very high, and there was a sense that America had fallen into, you remember when we were kids in the ‘70s, pollution.
There were ads that were just basically begging people to stop throwing garbage out of their car window as they drove. There were also ads that said, “It’s 10:00 PM, do you know where your children are?” What the hell was going on where parents had to be reminded by television? Maybe it was five o’clock. I can’t remember what the time was. Like, “Hey, by the way, remember? You also have kids. Find them.” Everything was falling apart, and the notion that there was some explanation to this, that there was evil in the air made sense.
You had the Night Stalker, and you had Son of Sam, and serial killers-
John: I agree, yes.
Craig: -they were always there, but I think in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we suddenly became very aware of them.
John: I think we were also aware of conspiracies and things happening behind the scenes, and we had investigative journalism that was uncovering things. The idea that there is a group of people, a cabal, who has secret plans feels like a very natural fit for the time.
Craig: Nixon.
John: Nixon, yes.
Craig: It was happening. So it feels like a smart thing to do. America was still quite religious, and also, you were starting to see shifts in the politics of motherhood. The birth control pill was available. The idea of being a mother was now difficult. People were looking–
John: The idea of choosing when to become a mother.
Craig: That’s right. Single parenthood was now– single parenthood prior to the ‘60s and ‘70s was– and you and I both remember how, even in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Murphy Brown, the sitcom–
John: A woman who chose to have a baby by herself.
Craig: She was yelled at by a vice presidential candidate.
John: Yeah, she was the Antichrist, though. All right, let’s talk about Rosemary’s Baby. Written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin’s novel. I’ve not read the novel. Apparently, it’s a very faithful adaptation.
Craig: It’s a really good book.
John: Development-wise, we know that Polanski wrote a 272-page screenplay for the film in approximately three weeks. I guess it got cut down.
Craig: I’m going to go with cocaine on that one.
John: I think it’s a safe bet that some cocaine was involved. It apparently was very faithful, and it lifted dialogue and stuff directly out of the source material. In our story, we’re following Rosemary Woodhouse, who’s played by Mia Farrow, and her husband, Guy, played by John Cassavetes moving into a new apartment in New York City, they meet their neighbors, Ruth Gordon among them-
Craig: The best.
John: -iconically. It doesn’t start out being about a woman wanting to have a baby.
Craig: No.
John: Talk to us about your experience of Rosemary’s Baby.
Craig: It feels at first like a story about a little bit of a fish out of water, because Rosemary, as Mia Farrow plays her, she almost has that mid-Atlantic accent. She’s very refined, and she’s very delicate. Her husband feels urbane. She is not so much, and she’s trying to figure out how to be a good wife, and she’s trying to figure out how to fit into this world which is–
John: A young wife.
Craig: A young wife, which is very metropolitan, and there are the weirdos down the hall. It’s a pretty good start. We would never be able to get away with it now. The length of time you have to just feel the discomfort of feeling out of place. It also allows the film to zero in on her perspective. Much of the movie, you’re with her, feeling how she feels. Then some things start to go wrong.
John: Notably so, husband is an actor, so he goes off, he’s cast, and things are sort of percolating for him. She’s being left alone more, and the neighbors are starting to intercede. I didn’t go back to him when we watched this, but at what point does she have the chocolate mousse that sends her into slumber?
Craig: The mouse.
John: The mouse.
Craig: The mouse.
John: That sends her into slumber.
Craig: I think it’s middle-ish because there’s someone who dies. I can’t remember. There’s like an early death in the movie that’s very suspicious. It does strike me, we talked about agency recently, and so much of this movie is about somebody trying to find their agency, and everybody keeps taking it away. Ruth Gordon is concerned that she’s not– “Oh, you’re not feeling well, you’re not eating enough, I made this special mouse for you,” which is a mousse. Everybody then begins the gaslighting process. That is followed by one of the most terrifying sex scenes I’ve ever put on.
John: Yeah, it’s a rape.
Craig: Oh, definitely a rape. Also a monster rape. We should probably talk about Roman Polanski for a second because Roman Polanski raped a girl. He raped a child and fled the country, and has never returned. Is he still alive?
John: He’s still alive.
Craig: He’s still alive. And this town only seemed to acknowledge that recently, but even, it was like maybe 10 years ago or so, he got like an honorary Oscar or something, and everybody stood up and applauded, and you’re like, ”The hell is going on here?” Roman Polanski definitely falls into the, okay, person who did very bad things, person who made very good movies.
And that scene in particular is disturbing because it’s oddly restrained. There’s not nudity. There’s just this sudden flash of this thing. Then there’s a delirium that follows and paranoia.
John: Yes. The Satanism of the movie comes from this sense that this pregnancy that comes out of this rape, that there’s something wrong about it, that she’s not being told everything.
Again, we’re locked into a very limited POV, which is really helpful for our storytelling here. It sort of leads to the paranoia here. And yet the edges of the conspiracy are nebulous, which is actually a case with all these things. You never quite know, how big is this? Who’s behind this? Whose plan really was this? How far back did it go? I think that’s one of the hallmarks of these movies is that by being vague, they’re sort of more sinister.
Craig: Sure. The less the more scared you are. There is this entire genre of, I’ll just shorthand call lifetime movies, where a wife or a girlfriend is being gaslit by her husband. Other people join in but she’s like, “No, I know it’s–“ and then there are movies like, was it Flightplan? Is that the one where Jodie Foster is in a plane with her daughter and then her daughter disappears and they’re like, “You never had a daughter on the plane. What are you talking about?”
That’s this thing that echoes how people treat women in society. We now create this wonderful allegory and then you discover how mundane it all is. It’s the mundanity of Rosemary’s Baby that’s so brilliant. When she finally comes to understand what’s happened, everybody’s weirdly relaxed. They’re also so normal. You not only have Ruth Gordon playing the lovely old lady who lives down the hall, but you have just like, there’s this guy from Asia who’s taking photographs and he’s just like a tourist almost. You have Ruth Gordon’s husband, who’s just an old goof. Then there’s like women that look like from the steno pool. The evil, it says, is everywhere you look.
John: Let’s move on to The Exorcist. The Exorcist is 1973 and by that expression, you love The Exorcist. My recollection of The Exorcist is having watched it in like little small segments when it was broadcast on TV because I was too scared and my parents would be out of town. The Exorcist again is a story of the terror of parenthood and the terror of this child being possessed, literally possessed by the devil. What are the responsibilities of a parent?
Craig: Even worse, she’s possessed by a demon.
John: I’m sorry.
Craig: So it’s worse because the devil–
John: Yes, sure.
Craig: One of the things that they did that was so smart, it comes from the book, William Peter Blatty.
John: Yeah, so Blatty wrote the novel and the screenplay.
Craig: Right, brilliant. William Friedkin, of course, directing it. The entity that has occupied her is very powerful and not even close to being the devil, which makes it sort of worse. What you immediately note in the small amount of time between Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the gulf between how vulgar and how shocking things are in The Exorcist. Mia Farrow’s got this like, “What is happening? I don’t believe you. What?”
John: Meanwhile, Reagan is vomiting.
Craig: And masturbating with a crucifix, and using the most foul language possible, and just doing these things. She’s a child. The thought that we could, some of the scenes in The Exorcist now, you simply would not– you wouldn’t even be able to get past the script. People would be like, “We’re going to– No.” Are you going to have your intimacy coordinator come in and talk about how this is going to work? But it also was graphic, deeply graphic in ways that Rosemary’s Baby wouldn’t have even thought of.
John: Because I remember even long before I’d actually seen any clips of The Exorcist, I was aware of the tropes. I was aware of the spinning heads and the vomits and the crawling on the ceilings, because it was just part of popular culture. It was a meme before we had a word for memes.
Craig: I watched The Exorcist in the most ill-advised fashion. I was 9 or 10, which is the perfect age to be deeply traumatized by The Exorcist. I was staying at my friend Eric Freeman’s house, and he had a basement. This was 1980. There was a service in– that’s right, 1980, there was a service in New York called WHT. New York infamously did not have cable for a long time, because of like–
John: It was hard to plug wires and stuff in.
Craig: It was laws. It was just laws and the mob or something, I don’t know, for some ridiculous reason. Then there was a service, WHT, that you would pay for, and it would basically send an over-the-air, scrambled signal, and then you had a little de-scrambler. They would run movies. They would also run some soft-core porn after hours that’s when I also saw porn for the first time. Eric Freeman’s basement was like– it was the hottest club in town.
I knew nothing about what I was in for, and it was so impactful upon me. To this day, it still scares me. I know it shouldn’t, but just seeing her face sometimes scares me.
John: Let’s jump ahead, then, to The Omen. We’ll talk about this for all three of them, and sort of their financial success, and why that’s cemented their place here. Let’s talk about The Omen, because I’d never seen The Omen, so I watched it last night. Written by David Seltzer, directed by Richard Donner. This is where we get the popular culture or knowledge of 666 because they’ve mentioned it a lot in the course of the movie because it wasn’t known at that point. People didn’t know Book of Revelations 666, so they had to explain it a lot in the movie.
Story follows Gregory Peck, who is an ambassador, first we see him in Rome, then he’s coming into London. He and his wife have a young child. Only he knows that it’s actually adopted, because their child died when it was born. This is Damien, which is such a great name. It became iconic in terms of the demon child.
Craig: Basically, we were like, let’s take the word demon, and change it to Damien.
John: Perfect.
Craig: Yes, that sort of goes to why, to me, The Omen feels like somebody said, “Get me Rosemary’s Baby, get me The Exorcist, blend them, and let’s see what comes out the tube.”
John: I’ll try to find a link to it, but I was looking through one article, blog post that was arguing that the movie was deeply impacted by one episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which actually, an episode that had many of the same beats in terms of like politician raising the child, who is the Antichrist. This child, Damien, sinister things happen around them, a nanny hangs herself in a really graphic fashion.
Craig: That’s the best scene.
John: It’s the best scene.
Craig: “It’s all for you.”
John: It’s all for you. There’s a photographer who is tracking the family, who keeps noticing, funny that all these images are showing up in photos they’re taking of you.
Craig: Then he dies.
John: Then he dies. My frustration in watching it is that I really enjoyed how it started, I loved the filmmaking, and that ‘70s feel, it’s like this handheld–
Craig: Real grimy.
John: Yes, it was great to see, and then the movie gets dumber as it goes along.
Craig: Unfortunately, it does, because there’s nowhere for it to go. In the end, Rosemary’s Baby is about Rosemary. It’s not about the baby. The ending of Rosemary’s Baby is so horrifying, because all it is a mother who can’t help but be in love with her child, even though her child is the Antichrist. Because it is about motherhood, and it is about lack of agency.
Rosemary’s Baby is almost like, love is so powerful here that it doesn’t matter what happens, you’re going to love your child. The Exorcist is about saving a child. It’s about a priest who’s started to lose faith, and who feels like he hasn’t been able to help anyone, including his own mother, finally being able to do what Jesus did, give his life to save an innocent. The Omen is just sort of, just the kid is the problem.
John: The kid is the problem, and Gregory Peck ultimately doesn’t have to wrestle that much with it. He’s like, “Oh, I can’t kill my son,” but he can take those daggers. He’s ready to do it.
Craig: Yes, that’s the problem is, you’re just waiting, and then it’s just sort of the same thing of, okay, I can’t do it, I can’t kill him, and so then you end up, everybody dies, and Damien’s the devil who runs everything. That’s the thing. I just think it’s so much more remarkable that the ending of a movie like that, be the parent chooses to pick the child up and love it.
John: Yes.
Craig: That movie just got a little goofy.
John: Yes.
Craig: I don’t like saying bad things.
John: No, not a bit. We should stress that all three of these movies were giant hits.
Craig: Huge.
John: Phenomenons, and they were lines around the block, which is the reason why they’re so anchored into place in popular culture in terms of establishing what we mean by Satanism. I would posit that we would not have our understanding of Satan and Satanism without these movies, in the same way, we didn’t used to be so afraid of going into the water until Jaws. It created a thing that is actually not really a thing. The moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music and all that stuff wouldn’t have happened without these three movies.
Craig: It would not. Just as our understanding of who Santa Claus is because Coca-Cola drew a picture of a guy, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a song written by an advertising firm for a department store in Chicago, I believe. We think these things have been there forever. They have not. We think that there’s been this concept, and it hasn’t. It came out of those movies. It came out of that time.
Then you’re absolutely right. What happened almost immediately, in terms of speed of a nation moving, was something called the Satanic Panic. These movies presented a situation where there was, not in the case of The Exorcist, but in the other two, a kind of conspiracy of people to bring about Satan in our world, who would then do bad things.
Very shortly thereafter, people started to say, I think that there’s a conspiracy to bring Satan out in our world. Just as they did with Galileo and everybody else, it became a great way to take people that no one liked and accuse them. It was Salem Witch Trials writ large. America got so stupid. We think of America now as stupid. No, no, we have been stupider than we are now.
John: Let’s jump forward to where we’re at now and the sequels to these movies. There were other movies that were in their same place. We saw Satanism in our television shows to some degree. Our serial killers that we would put in our stories, might sometimes be satanic. Right now, we’re not actually doing a lot with Satan or Satanism in our movies. Longlegs, head nods in that direction. We have a movie like Hereditary, isn’t Satanism, but it’s adjacent to it.
Craig: It’s adjacent but that feels more like possessory. Again, The Exorcist was about a possession, and the whole concept of exorcism, which is a very Latin word, is connected deeply to the Catholic Church, and it’s the idea that you can be possessed by something. There have been so many possession movies, all of which, ultimately for me, I just wonder, I wouldn’t know, it just feels so weird. It’s like making a movie about two young people falling in love on an enormous boat that’s going to hit an iceberg and sink. Now, do something original, and you’re like, I can’t. It’s done, as good as it can be done.
You’re right, Satan has gotten goofier now because we sort of, again, like The Devil’s Advocate, it’s broad, and it’s very winky, and sort of like, “Satan,” come on. When you see Peter Stormare’s depiction of Satan in Constantine, it’s almost like they said, “All right, you saw how big Pacino got, go bigger.” So Satan becomes broad because he presumes we’ve all heard of it, we all know it, and then it’s almost like he’s rolling his eyes about 666. It’s old-fashioned, it’s hokey.
John: It’s hokey, and I also wonder whether we’re reaching for other forms of cosmic horror. It’s not like we’re making Cthulhu movies all the time, but there’s other senses of just existential dread out there that don’t have to be so tied into one specific mythology there. Maybe we should be reaching for other ways of acknowledging the horror of the unknowable darkness.
Craig: Yes, and it may be that because we’re American, our tradition is so steeped in Satanism, going back to Salem and all the rest. It’s hard for us to feel the same things that we would feel about, say, Cthulhu, even though, of course, also a creation of an American.
John: Yes, 100%. I think we should also maybe wrap this up by saying, of course, this is all based on our very sort of Western views of what Satan is just because it comes out of that tradition. I’d love to hear what the Asian equivalent of this is. I guess we have The Ring.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: Yes, some of those movies. Again, so we’re talking about this otherworldly horror that is unknowable and unstoppable.
Craig: Which, again, draws a lot of it, it seems to me, from The Exorcist. We are all people. We are all scared of the dark. It doesn’t matter where we grow up. We’re scared of the dark, we’re scared of the unknown, and we’re scared of ghosts. Japanese horror does a particularly good job of figuring out how to make ghosts really scary as well. Korean cinema does a beautiful job with this as well. Every culture has its nightmare creatures.
John: Absolutely, a way of showing those primal fears in a cinematic form.
Craig: Lord of the Rings. Sauron. That’s Sauron, Satan, nightmare. That’s on–
John: Absolutely. I say it as opposed to like a Voldemort who is a character who has a full, rich backstory and does it like, even though there’s a cabal trying to bring him back to life, there’s a little of that, but it’s not the same thing.
Craig: No, because Voldemort has not always been. The idea is that Satan was here before man. Before God made man, and Satan makes a bet with God about Job, and there’s all this stuff where it’s quite clear he’s floating above all of us or underneath all of us, I suppose.
John: All right, we have a couple of listener questions that are on topic.
Craig: Great.
John: Eric writes, “As you said, in a good screenplay, the protagonist goes from ignorance of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. It seems to me that in most movies, that involves a process of gradually embracing a positive truth that the protagonist needs to live a better life. What about movies with tragic endings, in particular horror films, where the protagonists end up dead, or at least much worse off than how they started the movie? Are they also still gradually learning to accept and embody a theme? It just happens to be a theme that destroys them instead of making them better. How does the journey from anti-theme to theme play out in The Exorcist for the protagonist, Father Damien, as he approaches his tragic ending?”
Craig: That one’s pretty easy. It is just a straight-up guy who’s questioning his faith. He has doubts. He is not sure how he is supposed to be an effective priest to anyone. He’s certainly not the person that the Catholic Church is thrilled about to go help this girl. They send– the exorcist is somebody else. It’s not him, it’s Max von Sydow. He’s the exorcist, but he dies. It’s really there so that Father Karras, at some point, can decide, “I’m going to commit myself to saving somebody at any cost, even if it’s my own life.”
And so in his final words, he says, “Take me, take me, take me.” It happens. Then he throws himself out the window and goes down those amazing stairs. That is about as clear of a going from anti-theme because in the beginning, he’s like, “I’m not very good at being a priest.”
John: I think other sort of horror films. the first Alien is a horror film. Ripley’s journey is great, to get singled out and actually rise to the occasion in ways that embody a lot of the themes we’re supposed to be doing here. In a lot of other horror films, especially slasher films, you can say that, yes, it’s actually tougher to chart the journey of that character. They’re surviving, but are they growing and changing in a way that is meaningful? Sometimes, yes, but a lot of very successful movies in that genre, you’re not seeing those same dynamics.
Craig: No. Myself, I’m not a big student of those films. Sometimes, when you look at how people describe the mechanics of screenwriting, you should also ask, what kind of movies do they make? I talked about the mechanics of screenwriting all the time, but there are kinds of movies that I’m not that into. I’m not that into– I was never a big fan of the Halloween films or the Friday the 13th films, because it didn’t really do anything for me, mostly for this reason. Didn’t seem like there was much there other than, “I’m not going to let you kill me.”
John: Absolutely, the final girl, “I will survive.”
Craig: The final girl.
John: I’ll see essays that really talk about the dynamics of that, and it’s great. I’m so glad you’re finding meaning in that. It just doesn’t resonate with me.
Craig: Right, and so what I would say to Eric is, you might not see this applying to some of these movies, and that’s okay because that is not really a skeleton key for everything. I think I pretty clearly said this is for mainstream storytelling of a certain sort.
John: I can imagine a better version of The Omen that has a lot more of that character arching, too. It’s not like the father’s desperate for a child and then to have to decide to kill the child.
Craig: It could be better.
John: It could be better.
Craig: It could be better.
John: Emily asks, “What’s the difference really between thriller and horror?”
Craig: Well, it’s whatever we want to say it is. Ultimately, it’s terminology.
John: There’s overlap between the two, but there’s a lot of thrillers that are horrifying, and there’s horror things that actually aren’t thrillers in the sense there’s not suspense. They’re just dark.
Craig: Thrillers, in my mind, are designed to quicken your pulse and get you chewing on your fingernails because you’re nervous. Horror movies are supposed to make you look away because you’re scared. Those are the two–
John: Sure.
Craig: Those are supposed to scare.
John: Absolutely, because there are political thrillers. I guess you could imagine a political horror movie, but it’s like it’s not the, it’d be very different. Michael, our final question. “I wanted to get your opinion on horror films never doing well during awards season. It seems like regardless of the quality of horror films or the performances in them, there’s never any Oscar buzz around them. Does Hollywood hate horror?”
Craig: Does Hollywood hate horror? Hollywood loves horror.
John: Loves horror.
Craig: That’s why they keep making horror films. What you’re asking is-
John: It’s so much money. It’s so cheap.
Craig: -do Oscar voters hate horror? I don’t know if they hate it. They just don’t seem to be that into it, but again–
John: If you look at the films that have incredible quality, they still do get singled out. The Silence of the Lambs, horror film. Well, horror film, thriller, both.
Craig: Thriller. It’s a thriller-
John: It’s scary.
Craig: -with scary moments. Look, the genre films, yes, of course, like comedies, they are generally overlooked in favor of the Oscars to some extent become about these smaller movies a lot. They’ve expanded it to make it a little bit better. Repeatedly, we end up in a situation where, yes, big movies that are very scary and have really lasting, deep impact on culture aren’t even considered.
John: No.
Craig: Because they’re genre and the Oscars are snobby.
John: Also, let’s be realistic that the makers of those horror films aren’t trying to win those Oscars and they’re not doing the work that it would take to win those Oscars.
Craig: Because they know it won’t work.
John: Yes, absolutely. It’s a trick of the day problem, yes.
Craig: I think it would be fair to say like, “Look, you make a big comedy and everybody laughs and they have a good time. You also know, we’re not going to spend money on an Oscar campaign, it’s just not happening.” The Oscars are for dramas and they’re for a certain drama that appeals to a certain age of people.
John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing, I’m reaching back, I’ve probably, this has been my one cool thing, maybe three times, but it’s so topical that I need to do it, which is the short story Gifted by Simon Rich, which is about these parents who discover their child– the child is born with horns. It is the Antichrist. They are so obsessed with getting it into Dalton to get it into a really good private school and to make sure their son’s life is as awesome as it can be. It is just hilarious. It’s just a great reminder of, for all the tropes you set up in a genre, the antitropes can be just hilarious.
Craig: So funny. My one cool thing this week is a television series. You know me, I don’t watch a lot of things. I’m two-thirds of the way through, it’s called Say Nothing or in the parlance of the show, Say Nothin’. It is a series about a woman named Dolours Price, who was a member of the IRA and most infamously perpetrated car bombings in London and was imprisoned and went on a hunger strike and was force-fed and tortured and then sent back.
It’s also about Gerry Adams, who, and this is fascinating. I’ve never seen this before. At the end, so Gerry Adams, this show is based on a book, and Gerry Adams runs the IRA, he’s going through all this stuff, and at the end of every episode, it comes up and it says, “To this day, Gerry Adams denies ever being a member of the IRA or participating in any violent activities.” That disclaimer, I’m sure Gerry Adams’ lawyers thought would be real good for him. It is the most damning disclaimer I’ve– and the fact that they repeat it at the end of every episode is so brutal. I think it’s just beautifully done.
John: Great.
Craig: It’s gorgeously performed and filmed, and the writing is excellent. Josh Zetumer is the showrunner here. Just beautiful work. My kind of show. Congratulations to everybody that clearly worked so hard on Say Nothing. Oh, and also now, because I’ve been watching it, I think I can do this, and if you’re from Northern Ireland, please go ahead and write in and tell me I blew it. This is the phrase I’ve been working on, is do it now. Okay, ready? “Do it nye.” How is it?
John: Nice.
Craig: Well, it may not be nice. We’re going to hear from some folks from Belfast. I want to hear how bad I did, or how good.
John: How good, How good. Where do we see that show?
Craig: That’s on Hulu.
John: Hulu.
Craig: On Hulu.
John: Hulu.
Craig: Hulu.
John: Hulu. That is our show for this week. Scripnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Chilelli, who did our very special outro this week. Matthew, thank you for this.
[music]
John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. It’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Antichrist.
Craig: Oh, there’s more Antichrist?
John: Yes.
Craig: Good.
John: Good.
Craig: Excellent.
John: Craig, thank you.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, the Antichrist today. Let’s figure out who we should– Who’s a good candidate for the Antichrist? Because, and we should also specify, which aspect, is it just supposed to be the son of Satan, or is it supposed to be the false prophet who leads us away from the true teachings of Jesus Christ? Do we need the person who seems evil, or the person who seems really good? There’s lots of ways we can go here, so what are some of your instincts?
Craig: Well, the way that people tend to treat this is somebody shows up who is really slick and appealing.
John: Up-facing the crowd, yes.
Craig: Everybody wants to vote for this person, this person seems great, but then casually starts to convert us all to a one-world government, which is the worst possible thing.
John: Yes, of course.
Craig: Like a one-town government or a one-state government. Why would everybody just– what? Okay, so one-world government’s the worst possible thing, and then they start doing horrible things, and of course, it’s over. The person who would be the most hysterical Antichrist to me would be Kirk Cameron.
John: Oh yes, that’d be great.
Craig: Kirk Cameron was a child actor on sitcoms in the ‘80s.
John: Growing Pains.
Craig: Became very, very religious, and then has dedicated his time since to a lot of evangelical Christianity, but also making these movies about the Antichrist. In those movies, he’s the hero who’s trying to stop everybody from believing in the Antichrist. That is what the Antichrist– that is the movie the Antichrist would be making to get the lens off of him.
John: Oh yeah.
Craig: It’s very clever, see? That said, Elon Musk is a pretty decent candidate.
John: Mr. Beast. Name is right there.
Craig: Wow.
John: Mr. Beast, he’s doing all this good in the world.
Craig: What a put.
John: He’s helping blind people see. He’s giving away all this money.
Craig: Mr. Beast.
John: He’s obviously the most generous person on Earth.
Craig: You’re right. It’s sort of like in Angel Heart, Robert De Niro plays the devil, and he introduces himself as Louis Cypher.
John: Yes, can’t figure that out.
Craig: Lucifer.
John: Wow. Mind is blown.
Craig: Jeez Louise, come on devil, do better.
John: All right, so if we’re starting with somebody who’s already powerful, then Elon Musk or some other billionaire feels like a good choice. Taylor Swift in terms of her influence, in terms of her ability to get the young people motivated to do terrible things like vote.
Craig: This is why I think people get real keyed up about the UN. If you know anything about the United Nations, you know that the one thing you never have to worry about is the United Nations doing anything-
John: Oh, 100%.
Craig: -in a particularly effective, quick–
John: People want to think of the UN as like a government. Does it govern anything? No.
Craig: It’s the biggest Zoom meeting where nothing happens ever. Yet, because it smells of one world government, yes, the person, whoever’s running the UN, the Secretary General of the UN is always looked at as a possibility.
Then I think you’re right, in the modern times what’s happened is kids through rap culture and through hip hop culture have swung over to this idea of the Illuminati. They’re super into the Illuminati, when in fact, I don’t think there is– there seems to be some really screwed up parties going on.
John: I think we should talk about it because I didn’t know that was happening.
Craig: You and I, I think, we are on the outs, man. We have never been invited to anything like that, nor did we– We’re actually quite sweet in that, I’m sure you were like–
John: I’ve been invited to board game nights.
Craig: What? Yes, when you read that, you were like, “What? Really?” Yes, we play D&D and I do my puzzles. It turns out that some bad things are happening. That said, they aren’t satanic. That’s the whole point, they’re just people being jerks, and a jerk is a very mild term for the things that they were doing. They were being criminals and violent criminals. That’s always been a thing. Maybe people would think like Sean Combs, but he’s in prison now.
John: Sort of by definition, you want the Antichrist to have a lot of sway and power in popular culture and he at the moment does not.
Craig: Who are we all cheering for?
John: Obviously a president feels like a good candidate for an Antichrist because they have so much power. They can literally do a lot of things. They can start wars.
Craig: Donald Trump, it’s too obvious. He’s too clumsy, he’s like Mr. Magoo.
John: Yes, so like Hillary Clinton would be a better choice.
Craig: Well, Bill Clinton, really. The thing is–
John: Oh, he’s charming, yes.
Craig: That’s the thing. The devil is charming. When these charming– Justin Trudeau, there’s so much weird pretty privilege that turns into-
John: Oh, sure.
Craig: -pretty paranoia where we are terrified of these good-looking men, more so than women, it seems. Good-looking men who get a lot of power, you’re like, “Wait a second.”
John: Ryan Reynolds.
Craig: Ryan Reynolds. By the way, Ryan, the thing is, if we are going to have Satan, and it is Ryan Reynolds–
John: Satan or Antichrist, it could be a manifestation. It could be the son of the devil.
Craig: If it were, you want them to be Canadian and you want a nice– A nice Canadian Antichrist is going to be like, okay, it is one world and so we are going to– there are going to be more traffic lights and things. I’ve lived in Canada for a while now. We’re all going to drive the speed limit. We’re all going to drive like we have nowhere to go. This is my impression of a Vancouver driver. Just driving like I don’t need to get somewhere. That would be the worst of it. I think Ryan actually would be okay if he was in charge of the one world government. He does a really good job at the gin.
John: I think part of the challenge with the term Antichrist is that we think of it as being just like a polar opposite of Jesus Christ. Therefore it would have to be like, not humble, but like boasty and caring for only the rich and all this stuff. We can envision that, but it doesn’t actually– it’s unattractive. It doesn’t lead to power in any good way.
Craig: No. No. I wonder if Ryan’s going to hear this and just go, “What? I was just on the show.”
John: “I was just on the show.”
Craig: “I don’t need this. No.” Ryan Reynolds is not the Antichrist.
John: He’s not the Antichrist.
Craig: No, he’s not the Antichrist.
John: It would be, if you were the devil–
Craig: You would want to look like Ryan Reynolds.
John: Most men wouldn’t be upset with you.
Craig: I also want to look like Ryan. I don’t want to be the Antichrist. I just want to be able to do sit-ups.
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Links:
- Rosemary’s Baby – Screenplay
- The Exorcist – Screenplay
- The Omen – Screenplay
- Gifted by Simon Rich
- Say Nothing
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- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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