666 - Satanic Movies
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to episode 666 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to Satan. We will eat your soul.

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. The future of Satan. It's like the worst deadline article ever. Absolutely. Like Satan ankles hell. Totally. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. In our bonus segment with premium members, we will pontificate on our best candidates for the Antichrist. Yeah.

Oh. Yeah. So who would it be? Who should it be? Think of a couple of people. I could think of a few. Yep. But let's start off by talking about Satan. So we don't talk about Satan very much, Craig, at all. I don't think we ever even discuss him. Weirdly, it doesn't come up. It doesn't come up that much. I know that some people in certain parts of our country probably presume that here in Hollywood, we talk about Satan all the time. Yeah. You know, 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. Yeah. So it doesn't come up. Quotidian life just doesn't involve nearly as much Satan as one would guess. No. Also, Satan's not real. That is true. Well, let's talk about Satan, at least the modern conception of Satan. Yes. Because when we talk about Satan as an idea, I think we have kind of an image in our head for who Satan is. So Satan, in modern conception, is an individual. Right.

who was thrown out of heaven. Fallen angel. Fallen angel, yes. Very, very powerful. Yes. The nemesis of God. Right. So Satan occupies a very difficult narrative space. Yes. Because he is the antagonist of,

in the Bible. Or if you, I mean, the Old Testament doesn't really talk much about Satan. And also, we'll get into that. The New Testament doesn't really talk about it. Yeah, the church loved to talk about Satan. So they set up Satan as this kind of rival. Yeah. And 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 turning. But he's gonna come back. Yeah.

through his form as the Antichrist, or I guess that's his avatar. Yeah, that's one of the ways he could do it. So he could be the equivalent of Jesus where he's incarnate through the Antichrist. So 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. Mm-hmm.

That takes place in a place called Armageddon, I believe. Or it's Megidda and it becomes Armageddon, something. And Satan loses. Yeah. Now, the narrative part here that's rough for Satan is that apparently he knows he loses. Yeah. Like, it's already, like... Yeah. What's he getting ready for? That big fight that he's going to lose one day? Well, I would say often in our cinematic stories, we have...

who know they're going to lose and yet they carry on the valiant fight anyway. The heroes do. Yeah, the villains, yeah. The villains never do. But you know what? We've just had Wicked. We've just reformed the Wicked Witch of the West. Yeah, but that's not... That's not what we're talking about here. No, this devil, the Satan doesn't seem to be... He's like he missed those pages and I assume everybody else has read it and then no one wants to tell him. Yeah. It's tough, tough. It's a preordained loss.

Yeah. So that's Satan for you. Yeah. We also have like the South Park incarnation of Satan, which is basically packaging up all these things and then sort of making him a sad, lonely figure. But also a musical theater figure, which is like the best. Absolutely the best. He just wants love. And important, 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. Right.

you know hell on earth he has his minions on earth which is without that there's really no story to tell Satan is constantly using us to try and get his way and there are the versions where we never actually meet Satan yeah 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's gonna take over his throne or something sure

And 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, you know, I'm a fan of man. God is an absentee landlord. That is a great line. It's a great line. Yeah, it's a great line. Well, let's go back into the roots of Satan and Satanism. So this idea of an existential cosmic evil, right?

It makes sense. It's always sort of been there. And so if 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. And you sort of see that across all ancient mythologies. Absolutely. So 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. And then we have Hades who rules over the underworld. So the idea of ruling over the land of the dead. You sort of combine and conflate these things. Hades is a little bit more management than...

the kind of traditional Judeo-Christian sower of evil. And so 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, you know, be freely religious. The problem was the 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. Yeah, as hardcore as we want. As hardcore as we want. So we're going to go. And they really, really had a thing about Satan. They were very much convinced that...

He walks around and today we indeed have churches who refer to Satan all the time. Yeah. Going back to the ancient roots of things too, you have, you know, other religions like Zoroastrianism, which had the sense of there's an evil, there's a balancing force of evil that's out there. So the idea of a duality between the good and the bad makes sense. You can understand sort of why it's naturally there. And so when you have a monotheistic religion like our Abrahamic traditions, it's understandable that they would feel like, okay, well, what's the counter balancing force there?

especially if you start to organize yourself. Yeah. Then you need something to scare people with. Yeah. I mean, 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. But also, you have to give the church your money and you have to follow our rules or you will be sent to hell. And 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. Yeah, heresy. Clearly, Satan is working through you. That's a nice way to dehumanize somebody and burn them alive. Yeah, it's good.

Now, before we get to Christianity, we of course have Judaism and we have the Old Testament. We have all the other things that didn't sort of make it into the official Old Testament. So going back to your Bar Mitzvah days. My Hebrew school days. Your Hebrew school days. So there's not a lot of Satan there. So 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. Yeah. It's not the same thing. 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. Actually pulled from Poseidon is what they're thinking. Yeah. Barb tale. Not sure why.

And I remember him saying, yeah, we don't really, 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 kind of cold and empty and it's a wasteland and you're lonely. But we didn't have that personified guy. Yeah. You know, the guy who sits there and laughs as you burn and burn and burn. It was just more like, you know...

you're going to be disconnected from other people and you'll be miserable. Yeah. Which is enough for me. Yeah. We had bad people and bad forces in the Old Testament. And so like the snake in the Garden of Eden is often, you know, mashed up to Satan, but there's no actual, there's no direct connection there. That was, to you, was not. Yeah, it was just more temptation. Temptation. So 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 as a comic character, like a pathetic kind of character, and Satan,

Just the same way we have

versus the devil, capital D. Like it's sort of a blurry line between the two of them. So 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. And 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. All the time. It's the worst book. And it is referring to specifically the Roman Empire in which it was written. And so even 666 is,

It's actually probably referenced to Nero rather than to any other sort of thing. And likely was written by somebody who was mentally ill. It has all the hallmarks of somebody who experiences schizophrenic breaks. It's hallucinatory. Or, I don't know, it was John of something who was writing Revelations. Yeah.

It may be that he was just snacking on shrooms because it sure feels shroomy to me. It feels altered. The imagery does kind of correspond a lot to the way people experience hallucinatory images when they take drugs.

So it's an incredibly unreliable book, even more so than all the other ones that are also ridiculous in their own way. Well, 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. Yes. And that's- It's not gospel, right? Yeah. A bunch of people kept telling the same story about what happened with Jesus. Yeah. And disagreed slightly from time to time. Sure, just by getting four copies. Yep. And then this guy was like, yeah, yeah, great. Now- Let's say what's gonna come. Yeah. Yeah.

I've seen, you know, yes, I see the horror of Babylon. And then she's riding with a host of lions screaming and I'm like, get off the drugs, buddy. Yeah. So early modern church starts to personify and sees it as increasingly powerful. It's really with John Calvin, Martin Luther, is less of a metaphor of like of temptation or sort of wickedness, but actually an individual thing. And then of course we have John Milton's Paradise Lost, which is sort of,

mapping that out. And so it's important to understand like Paradise Lost is literature. It's not actually canonical Bible anything. No, it's a story. Yeah. But Calvin was definitely, I mean, look, we're all here in the United States. We are all still living in the shadow of,

of John Calvin and his crazy ideas. Yeah. So 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.

Well, the answer is, again, Britain said go away. That's true. 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, you have to believe that devil is real. It seems like such an un...

an unpopular thing to talk about. But also, I mean, British people are also living in popular culture. They're living in a global popular culture that's often dominated by American stuff. So they're seeing the three movies we're going to be talking about. So it's possible that they're influenced. But they're movies. They are movies. They're movies. But Milton's Paradise Lost is a book. I know. Ghostbusters also is a movie. Yeah. Do you think more Americans believe in...

It seems like more Americans probably believe in angels than in Satan. Probably so. I want the polls. I want the polls. People love angels. People love angels. They love angels. They love ghosts. They do. They do. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. So I think we also, as we get into this, there's a weird connection to the Catholic church and the Catholic church, not just, not that we're

Not that the modern Catholic Church has done a lot of talking about Satan or Satanism, but I think there's some sense in the Catholic Church being organized and that it's a secret, a 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... Yes. So 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, but also...

It's the oldest of the traditions, particularly in the United States. It feels like it goes back to the beginning. I mean, the Holy Roman Empire essentially was Catholic. That was what it was. And they speak Latin. So 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. I wonder if there's also an aspect of racism there because you look at sort of 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 like

involved with all this. Yeah, there could be some Catholic phobia going on there. I mean, I'm not sure it's racism per se, because in the United States, there was tremendous fear of white Catholics. I mean, John Kennedy, the big thing about it was like, we can't, no one's going to vote for a Catholic. 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...

more in the shadows. The Protestant Satan, like, comes up to you and offers you a weed. Yeah, absolutely. And so, before we get into our actual movies, let's talk about the Antichrist because that's a thing that's going to 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. Yes. Again, it's sort of like a lowercase Antichrist. It's not sort of an individual. It's like sort of anybody who's, like, standing in the way of the prophecy of Jesus. According to, like, my Wikipedia research, the Antichrist

The first kind of big reference to all this is 400 CE, which is Martin of Tours saying, there is no doubt that the Antichrist, capital A, has already been born, firmly established already in his early years. He will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power. I think there's a running theme. Every generation is like, this is it. This is it.

It's always the end times. What is the, like there has to be a term for generational narcissism. Yeah. Maybe that is the term. Sure. 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. Yeah. Ever. Ever.

Ever. And yet, even as we're saying this, it does feel kind of like it. Yeah, like probably it is happening. Yeah. All right. And 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. And so let's talk about the Faust story, which is really the devil's bargain. It's the idea of a pact with the devil. Selling your soul becomes this big thing. So 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. And 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. Yeah. Like, and this goes to even in the American black tradition, blues. I mean, it was always, you know, thought like this blues man sells his soul to the devil so that he could play this well. And 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 on us every time, every single time, no matter what.

But I can't understand why anyone makes that deal. Bad deal. Bad deal. Bad deal. Yeah, but 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, that sense of like we're going to make a deal and that person is going to come to collect on that deal, always there. Well, what's interesting is like the Rumpelstiltskin story

is a good devil's bargain story, except in the end he loses. You can actually, 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. Oh, that was because she just wanted to stay alive. Yeah, how dare she? Yeah, right? So 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?

And then she figures out a way to beat him. You can't beat the whole point of the devil story is you lose. Yeah. Every time. Yeah. So that is a whole different class of devil stories. So for this episode, I really want to talk about the Satan that is Satanism and sort of like how that all fits together. I need a chorus going while we talk. There's always a chorus. Yeah. Latin you couldn't understand, but it's just creepy because it's there. Exactly. Yeah.

So the three movies I want to talk about are Rosemary's Baby from 1968. So good. The Exorcist from 1973. My favorite. And The Omen from 1976. Also a movie. Also a movie, yeah. And so the commonalities, I should say, we're going to put links to the scripts we found for these three things so you can take a look through those. One thing I'm struck by is they're all about the horror of parenthood. And 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, so parents are kind of a natural thing. But if you were to even take out the Satanism of it all, they're all unified about stories of like how scary it is to be a parent. And 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. But he has his father's eyes. He does. It is the year one. Yeah.

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. It's 70s vibe. 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, we're going to...

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?

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, I mean, you remember when we were kids in the 70s, pollution. Yeah. There were ads that were just basically begging people to stop throwing garbage out of their car window as they grew. Right? So there were also ads that said, it's 10 p.m., do you know where your children are?

What the hell was going on where parents had to be reminded by television? Yeah. Or maybe it was five o'clock. I can't remember what the time was. Like, hey, by the way, remember? Yeah. 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. I agree. Just started, like, they were always there. Mm-hmm.

But I think in the 60s and 70s, we suddenly became very aware of them. I think we were also aware of conspiracies and things happening behind the scenes. And we had investigative journalism that was uncovering things. So the idea that there is a group of people, a cabal who has secret plans, feels like a very natural fit for the time. Nixon. Nixon, yeah. It was happening. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know...

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 into it. The idea of choosing when to become a mother. That's right. Single parenthood was now, I mean, single parenthood prior to the 60s or 70s was, I mean, and you and I both remember how even in the late 80s and early 90s,

Murphy Brown, the sitcom. A woman who chose to have a baby by herself. She was yelled at by a vice presidential candidate. Yeah, she was the Antichrist, though. All right, let's talk about Rosemary's Baby. So, 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. It's a really good book. Yeah. Development-wise, we know that Polanski wrote a 272-page screenplay for the film in approximately three weeks. Okay.

I guess it got cut down. I'm going to go with cocaine on that one. I think it's a safe bet that some cocaine was involved. Yeah. But 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 Casavetes. Yep. Moving into a new apartment in New York City, they meet their neighbors, Ruth Gordon, among them, iconically. The best.

It doesn't start out being about a woman wanting to have a baby. No. And so talk to us about your experience of Rosemary's Baby. So it feels at first like...

a story about a little bit of a fish out of water because Rosemary, as Mia Farrow plays her, is very, she almost has that mid-Atlantic accent. She's very refined and she's very delicate. Her husband feels urbane. Yeah. 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. A young wife. A young wife, which is very metropolitan and

They're the weirdos down the hall. And it's a pretty good start. I mean, we would never be able to get away with it now. But the length of time you have to just feel the discomfort of feeling out of place. Yeah. And it also allows the film to zero in on her perspective. So much of the movie, you're with her feeling how she feels. Yeah.

And then some things start to go wrong. Yeah. Notably, so husband is an actor. So he goes off, he gets cast and things are sort of percolating for him. She's being left alone more and the neighbors are starting to intercede. And so I didn't go back to when we watched this, but at what point does she have like the chocolate mousse that sends her into slumber? The mouse. The mouse. That sends her into slumber. Yeah, I think it's middle-ish because there's someone who dies. I think, I can't remember exactly,

There's like an early death in the movie that's very suspicious. Yeah.

And 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. Yeah. So 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 moose. Yeah. And everybody then begins the gaslighting process. And that is followed by a terrifying, one of the most terrifying sex scenes ever put on. Yeah, it's a rape.

Oh, definitely a rape. Yeah. But also a monster rape. Yeah. And it's done... Now, we should probably talk about Roman Polanski for a second. Because Roman Polanski raped a girl. Yeah. He raped a child and fled the country and has never returned. Is he still alive? Still alive. Still alive. And...

This town only seemed to kind of 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, what the hell is going on here? But Rowan Pulaski definitely falls into the okay, person who did very bad things, person who made very good movies. Yeah. And...

That scene in particular is disturbing because it's oddly restrained. There's not nudity. Yeah. There's just this sudden flash of this thing. And then there's a delirium that follows and paranoia. Yeah. And so the Satanism of the movie comes...

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. And again, we're locked into a very limited POV, which is really helpful for our storytelling here, and it sort of leads to the paranoia here.

And yet the edges of the conspiracy are kind of nebulous, which is actually a case with all these things. You never quite know sort of like, how big is this? Who's behind this? Like whose plan really was this? And how far back did it go? And I think that's one of the hallmarks of these movies is that

By being vague, they're sort of more sinister? Sure. The less you know, the more scared you are. There is this entire genre of, you know, I'll just shorthand and call lifetime movies, where a wife or a girlfriend is being gaslit by her husband. Yep.

And other people join in and then she, but she's like, no, I know it's, and then there are movies like, was it Flight Plan? Was it the one where Jodie Foster's playing 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? So that's this thing that kind of echoes how people treat women in society. We now create this wonderful allegory and then you discover how mundane it all is.

And 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, you know, 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. And you have Ruth Gordon's husband who's just an old goof. Yeah. And then there's like women that look like from the Stenopool. Yeah.

The evil, it says, is everywhere you look. Mm-hmm.

Let's move on to The Exorcist. The Exorcist is 1973, and by that expression, you love The Exorcist. Yes. So my recollection of The Exorcist is having watched it in little small segments when it was broadcast on TV because I was too scared and my parents would be out of town. But The Exorcist, again, is a story of the terror of parenthood and the terror of this child being possessed, literally possessed by the devil. And what are the responsibilities of a parent?

Even worse, she's possessed by a demon. I'm sorry. So it's worse. Because the devil, one of the things that they did that was so smart, I mean, it comes from the book, William Peter Blatty. Yeah, so Blatty wrote the novel and the screenplay. Right. Brilliant. And William Friedrich, of course, directing it. The entity that has occupied her is very powerful and not even close to being the devil. Yeah. Which makes it sort of worse. Yeah. But what you immediately note is

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, you know, so Mia Farrow's got this like, what is happening? I don't believe you. Meanwhile, Reagan is vomiting pea soup and masturbating with a crucifix and

using the most foul language possible and just doing these things. And she's a child. Yes. 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. Yeah. People would be like, we're going to know. And then what are you going to have your intimacy coordinator come in and talk about how this is going to work?

But it also was graphic. Mm-hmm. Deeply graphic. Yeah. In ways that Rosemary's Baby wouldn't have even thought of. Yeah. 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. Yeah. I watched The Exorcist in the most ill-advised fashion. I was...

nine or ten, which is the perfect age to be deeply traumatized by the resources. I was staying at my friend Eric Freeman's house and he had like a basement. This was like 1980. There was a service in...

I was writing in 1988. There was a service in New York called WHT. New York infamously did not have cable for a long time because of like... It was hard to probably wire. It was laws. It was just laws and the mob or something. I don't know. There's some ridiculous reason. So 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 D-scrambled. Yeah, yeah.

And they would run movies. They would also run some like softcore porn after hours. So that's when I also saw porn for the first time. Eric Freeman's basement was like, it was the hottest club in town. Yeah. And I knew nothing about what I was in for. And it was so impactful upon me. And to this day, it still scares me. I know it shouldn't. Yeah. But just seeing her face sometimes scares me. Yeah. Yeah.

jump ahead then to The Omen. We'll talk about all three of them and their financial success and sort of why that cemented their place here. But let's talk about The Omen because I'd never seen The Omen so I watched it last night. So written by David Seltzer, directed by Richard Donner. This is where we get the popular culture knowledge of 666 because they've mentioned it a lot in the course of the movie because it wasn't sort of known at that point. People didn't know Book of Revelation 666 so they had to explain it a

a lot in the movie. The 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 and this is Damien which is such a great name that became iconic in terms of the demon child basically you're like let's take the word demon and change it to Damien perfect yeah that sort of goes to why to me the omen is 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. 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 like an episode that had many of the same beats in terms of a politician sure raising the child who is the Antichrist so this child Damien sinister things happen around them a nanny hangs herself in a really graphic fashion that's the best scene it's the best scene it's all for you it's all for you

there's a photographer who is tracking the family who keeps noticing, like, funny that all these images are showing up in the photos they're taking of you. And then he dies. And then he dies. My frustration in watching it is that I really enjoyed how it started. I loved the filmmaking and sort of that 70s feel. It's this handheld. Real grimy. Yeah, it was great to see.

and then the movie kind of gets dumber as it goes along. Unfortunately, it does because there's nowhere for it to go. Yeah. I mean, in the end, Rosemary's Baby is about Rosemary. It's not about the baby. Yeah. And the ending of Rosemary's Baby is so horrifying because all it is is a mother crying

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 there doesn't matter what happens, you're going to love your child. And The Exorcist is about saving a child. Yes. And 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. Right.

finally being able to do what Jesus did, give his life to save an innocent. Yes. The omen is just sort of, just the kid is, the kid's the problem. The kid is the problem. And Gregory Peck-

ultimately doesn't have to wrestle that much with it. He says like, oh, I can't kill my son, but like, I can take those daggers, he's ready to do it. Yeah, that's the problem is you're just waiting. And then it's a 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. But 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. Yes.

And that movie just sort of got a little goofy. Yeah. I don't like saying bad things about it. No, not a bit. And we should stress that all three of these movies were giant hits. Huge. And 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 sort of establishing what we mean by Satanism. And I would posit that we would not have our understanding of

and Satanism without these movies in the same way like we didn't used to be so afraid of going in the water until Jaws. It created a thing that is actually not really a thing. And so the moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music and all that stuff wouldn't have happened without these three movies. It would not. Just as our understanding of who Santa Claus is is because Coca-Cola drew a picture of a guy. Mm-hmm.

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.

And we think that there's been this concept and it hasn't. It came out of those movies. It came out of that time. And then you're absolutely right. What happened almost immediately in terms of like speed of a nation moving was something called the satanic panic. So these movies presented a situation where there was a kind of, in reality,

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 then do bad things. And very shortly thereafter, people started to say, I think that there's a conspiracy to bring Satan out in our world. And just as they did with Galileo and everybody else, it became a great way to take people that no one liked and accuse them

And it was Salem Witch Trials writ large. Yes. America got so stupid. We think of America now as stupid. No, no. We have been stupider than we are now. So let's jump forward to sort of where we're at now. There were the sequels to these movies. There were other movies that were sort of in their same place. We saw Satanism in our television shows to some degree. Our serial killers that we would put in some of these in our stories might sometimes be satanic.

Right now, we're not actually doing a lot with Satan or Satanism in our movies. So long legs, head nods in that direction. We have...

A movie like Hereditary isn't Satanism, but it's adjacent to it. It's adjacent, but that feels more like possessory. So 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, and there have been...

So many possession movies, all of which ultimately for me, I just wonder, I wouldn't know what to, 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. Yeah. As good as it can be done.

But you're right, like Satan has gotten goofier now because we sort of, again, like the devil's advocate. Yes. It's kind of broad and it's very winky and sort of like Satan. Yeah. I mean, when you see Peter Stormar's depiction of Satan in Constantine, it's fully just, it's sort of almost like they said, all right, you saw a big...

you know, Pacino got go bigger. So Satan becomes kind of 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. Yeah.

It's old-fashioned. It's hokey. It's hokey. And I also wonder whether we're reaching for other forms of cosmic horror. So 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. And so we need to be reaching for other ways of acknowledging the horror of...

Yeah. And it may be that because we're American, our tradition is so steeped in Satanism going back to Salem and all the rest. And so it's hard for us to kind of feel the same things that we would feel about, say, Cthulhu, even though, of course, also a creation of an American. Yeah, 100%.

I think we should also maybe wrap this up by saying like, of course, this is all based on our various Western views of sort of what Satan is just because it comes out of that tradition. I'd love to hear what the Asian equivalent of this is. We have The Ring. We have some of those movies. Again, we're talking about this otherworldly horror that is unknowable and unstoppable. Which, again, draws a lot of it.

it seems to me, from The Exorcist. I mean, we are all people, right? So 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, and Korean cinema does a beautiful job with this as well. But yeah, every culture has its nightmare creatures. Absolutely. A way of showing those primal fears, you know,

in a cinematic form. Yeah. I mean, Lord of the Rings. Yeah. I mean, Sauron. Yeah. That's Sauron, so you turn that on. Yeah, absolutely. I say it as opposed to like a Voldemort who is a character

who has a full, rich backstory and does it. Even though there's a cabal trying to bring him back to life. Right. There's a little of that, but it's not the same thing. No, because Voldemort has not always been. Yeah. 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...

where it's quite clear he's floating above all of us or underneath all of us, I suppose. All right, we have a couple of listener questions that are on topic. Great. 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. But what about movies with tragic endings, in particular horror films, where the

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's father, Damien, as he approaches his tragic ending? Well, that one's pretty easy. Yeah. It is just a straight-up guy who's questioning his faith. He has doubts. Yeah. And...

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 like thrilled about to go help this girl. They send the exorcist is somebody else. So 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. Yeah.

And so it happens. And then he throws himself out the window and goes down those amazing stairs. That is about as clear of a going from anti-theme to, because, you know, in the beginning, he's like, I'm not very good at being a priest. Yeah. I think other sort of horror films, I mean, the first Alien is a horror film. And I mean, Ripley's journey is great. She gets singled out and actually sort of rises to the occasion in ways that embody a lot of the themes we're supposed to be doing here.

But in a lot of other horror films, especially slasher films, you can say that, yeah, it's actually tougher to sort of chart the journey of that character. Like, 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. No, and I'm, myself, I'm not a big student of those films. Sometimes when you look at how people describe themselves

the mechanics of screenwriting, you should also ask, what kind of movies did they make? So 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 Slash. 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. It didn't seem like there was much there other than, I'm not going to let you kill me. Absolutely. The final girl, I will survive. And so I'll see essays that really talk about

The dynamics of that, it's great. I'm so glad you're finding meaning in that. It just doesn't resonate with me. 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. Yeah. I think I...

pretty clearly said, like, this is for kind of mainstream storytelling and of a certain sort. I can imagine a better version of the Omen that has a lot more of that character arc too. It's not hard to, like, the father's, like, desperate for a child and then, like, to have to make the decision to kill the child. It could be better. It could be better. Emily asks...

What's the difference really between thriller and horror? Well, it's whatever we want to say. Yeah, it is. I mean, ultimately, they're just terminology. 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. There's just dark. Thrillers, in my mind, are designed...

to quicken your pulse and get you chewing on your fingernails because you're nervous. Yeah. And horror movies are supposed to make you look away because you're scared. Those are the two. Yeah, sure. I guess it's nervous versus scared. Absolutely. Because they're political thrillers. And I guess there are, you can imagine a political horror movie, but it's like, it's not the, it'd be very different. Michael, our final question.

Does Hollywood hate horror? Hollywood loves horror. That's why they keep making horror films. What you're asking is, do Oscar voters hate horror? Yeah. I don't know if they hate it. They just don't seem to be that into it. But again... But if you look at the films that have incredible quality, they still do get singled out. Silence of the Lambs, horror film. Sure.

Well, it's a horror film thriller, both. Thriller. Yeah, so scary. With scary moments. But 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. But yeah, I mean, 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. No. Because they're genre and the Oscars are snobby. Well, 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. Because they know... Yeah, absolutely. There's a chicken and egg problem. Yeah, I think it would be fair to say like, look, you know...

you make a big comedy and everybody laughs and they have a good time, you also know, like, 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 kind of drama that appeals to a certain age of people. It's time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing, I'm reaching back, 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. And they are so obsessed with getting it into Dalton to get into a really good private school and make sure their son's life is as awesome as it can be. And it is just hilarious. And it's just a great reminder of for all the tropes you set up in a genre, the anti-tropes can be just hilarious. So funny. Yeah. My one cool thing this week is a television series. And you know me, I don't watch a lot of things. Yeah.

Like two thirds of the way through, it's called Say Nothing. Or in the parlance of the show, Say Nothing. And it is a series about a woman named Dolores 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 and

It's also about Jerry Adams, who, and this is fascinating. I've never seen this before. At the end, so Jerry Adams, this is, the show is based on a book and at the, and Jerry Adams runs the IRA. Yeah. He's going through all this stuff and at the end of every episode, it comes up and it says, Jerry Adams, to this day, Jerry Adams denies ever being a member of the IRA or participating in any violent activities. Yeah.

And that disclaimer, I'm sure Jerry Adams' lawyers thought it would be real good for him. It is the most damning disclaimer. And the fact that they repeat it at the end of every episode is so brutal. But I think it's just beautifully done. Great. It's gorgeously performed and filmed. And the writing is excellent. Josh Zettimer is the showrunner here.

Just beautiful work. My kind of show. So 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 now.

Yeah, nice. 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. How good, how good. Where do we see that show? That's on Hulu. Hulu. On Hulu. Hulu. Hulu. Hulu. That is our show for this week. Scribdus is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cilelli, who did our very special outro this week. Matthew, thank you for this. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com.

It's also a 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. The Antichrist. Oh, it was more Antichrist? Yeah. Yeah.

Good. Good. Excellent. Craig, thank you. Thank you.