A few weeks ago, my friends and I embarked on yet another trip upstate for Purple House III: Purple’s Revenge. I shall not do a full account of the retreat because I think that after two recaps, you got it (though I’d be remiss not at least to namecheck the creation of the drag name Vageena Davis, which we now bequeath to the world). But a moment of it has been coming back to me, and I wanted to explore it here, as it is pertinent to the subject of this newsletter.
One night, sitting around what we called “the fire” (a pumpkin spice candle set on a coffee table), the group found itself veering into the topic of religion. I stayed mostly silent while I heard the usual points come up from my agnostic friends, as they tried to empathize with believers: religion comforts people in difficult times; there’s no way to know the truth anyway, so who’s to say; weekly religious rituals provide community and an organizing nucleus (what is called, I learned, a “third space”—the first being home and the second, work). Upon hearing that last point, I finally interjected: I don’t go to church every Sunday because of community, I go because not doing it would be a sin. Once that belief (in God, in commandments, in offending God if those commandments are not followed) is removed, and church becomes primarily a way to connect to one another, then it follows logically that I’d find way more fun ways to use my weekend and still walk away feeling connected (though let’s face it, I’d probably just stay home with my cat and a borrowed streaming login).
The oft-quoted Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,” is usually brought up to support the conception of God as a Bloody Mary-like apparition that sparks from our love of each other, a misinterpretation that ignores that those people are gathered in God’s name, not because they were hoping to catch up and share a few laughs and whoa, there’s God in the middle of the barbecue. Community is a byproduct of the belief, not the other way around. Countless op-eds are being wasted trying to explain the decrease in church attendance across all sections of society, and while I’m sure there’s super complex data to pour over, the simple explanation is right in our faces: people increasingly don’t believe in God (whatever their conception of God is). Maybe they believe in some form of energy that courses through the world, but not one that exists as an entity with agency, let alone one that has a will and commands things of us. And people certainly don’t believe they need this entity—not as much as they need their cats and their streaming logins.
I could write many, many newsletters just off this prompt alone, but in this spooky season, I thought I’d focus on an unexpected byproduct of the loss of belief in God: people don’t believe in Satan either! You wouldn’t know it from the number of projects that currently star him on our screens and stages, though—American Horror Story is doing a Rosemary’s Baby-inspired season, The Exorcist is back for a new trilogy helmed by Halloween reinventor David Gordon Green, and Roundabout Underground is presenting a possession-infused gothic romp, Covenant. And yet… something is off. The projects falter in their execution. The spark just isn’t there. Maybe the Satan I grew up with, like pre-Reputation Taylor, is dead?
Before we go too much further, it might be worth clarifying: who is Satan? What follows is what I remember from Sunday school, which is already shaky ground because that was a long time ago—and on top of that, I’ve read a lot of Goosebumps books that might’ve added stuff to my beliefs that doesn’t belong there. So: fact check (by which I mean check Wikipedia). But, to the best of my knowledge, the Catholic Church tells us Satan was an angel called Lucifer who rebelled against God by stating “I will not serve,” for which he was banished to hell with all the other angels who agreed with him. Later, God created humans, and Satan decided to get his revenge; though the Bible doesn’t explicitly say so, the Church identifies the serpent that tempted Eve to disobey God’s command and eat from the Tree of Knowledge as being Big Bad himself.
The Church does not posit that Satan is the opposite of God; the opposite of God is nothing, as God existed before anything else, and the opposite of existing is not existing. Evil does not exist by itself; it is just a corruption of good, the way that cold is just the absence of heat, or darkness, the absence of light. Therefore, Satan is not the only source of evil in the world; I might be committing heresy by saying this (please Inquisition don’t come for me), but I believe humans could’ve fallen out of grace on their own, since we are created entities and therefore imperfect and corruptible. The Church, in fact, lists the enemies of the soul as being the world, the flesh, and the devil.
That being said, of the three, the devil (a more generic denomination that I usually take to mean Satan and/or other demons) is the most powerful. If the world drives us away from God by promising temporary goods (fame, wealth, success—the ush) and the flesh does it by offering pleasure, the devil can use all of that and more. Even though corrupted, his angelic nature gives him power that, while not able to directly guide our actions (God is super pro-free will that way), can certainly influence us by playing to our fears and desires, which he can know in a deeper way than we can. Notably, the devil is a very good trickster, often leading us to despair or desire by offering us selected parts of the truth. What he said to Eve, “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” was not untrue—Adam and Eve did not in fact know evil, and after they sinned, they very much did; whether that knowledge was in any way useful or empowering is a different story.
Past his memorable supporting role in Genesis, the devil doesn’t show up much in the Old Testament (to the best of my knowledge), besides a stint in the story of Job, in which he challenges God by saying Job only loves Him because he has all he could need. God then authorizes Satan to take away everything Job has; Job, who in no way consented to be the object of this bet, is none too thrilled about it but remains devout to the end and gets everything back. This story also sheds light on how God works regarding evil: while He doesn’t personally will bad things, He allows them to happen because He can derive goodness out of them—a process that can nonetheless be very confusing to us, who are down here playing 2D chess.
Satan and his crew really gain prominence in the New Testament. Before starting His ministry, Jesus goes to the desert to fast for forty days, at the end of which He is hungry. The devil shows up and suggests that Jesus turn some stones into bread to satiate His hunger, which Jesus declines to do. Satan then really escalates things, asking Jesus to throw Himself off a cliff, since angels would surely catch Him (if you’re wondering how we went from bread to attempted suicide, the Church posits that Satan was trying to gauge whether Jesus was indeed the Son of God, a knowledge that had remained hidden to him). Jesus again says no; Satan then takes Him up to some super tall cliff from where they can see the entire world and its kingdoms, which Satan promises he will give Jesus if He bends the knee to him, Daenerys Targaryen style. Jesus has had enough and shoos the devil away, quoting the first commandment, which could not be clearer.
I believe this third temptation is the basis for the concept of “a deal with the devil,” a thing that never really happens in the Bible and was actually popularized by the legend of Faust. Assuming Jesus would’ve taken Satan’s offer (which is theologically impossible, but this is a popular culture newsletter, so we have that license), what would the rest of His life have looked like? Probably something closer to what His people, including His disciples, expected: a Messiah who delivered them from Roman oppression and restored them to the glorious times of King David. Saint Peter even brings this up to Jesus, confused, when He prophesizes His own crucifixion (a fate that none of them thought was possible for the Messiah), and Jesus gets angry and literally calls him “Satan” in rebuke (harsh).
The Jesus who took the deal would’ve probably been a powerful secular leader—though whether He would have still died a horrible death is an open question, since the thing with deals with the devil is that they’re often short-lived, and end poorly. I don’t know where I got this from (it might’ve been Mark Twain’s novel), but I have a vague memory that when Saint Joan of Ark was asked in her trial how she knew whether it was God or the devil who had spoken to her, she responded that when God speaks to you, you’re afraid at first, but then comforted; when it’s the devil speaks, it all starts out great, but ends in tears.
Which brings us to Rosemary’s Baby, one of the most popular entries in the “deal with the devil” genre. Now, Ira Levin himself did not believe in the devil, and he bemoaned the whole slew of satanic stories his novel unleashed, so I’d be twisting the facts à la Hasan Minaj if I said that the original was a work of faith. I have spoken about this at length, so no need to re-thread that ground too extensively, but: the power of Rosemary lies in its uncertainty (at least right up until the end) over what exactly is happening, and in the way it critiques the patriarchy while unspooling its satanic plot. But the critique is most powerful precisely because it’s not in your face; what is in your face is a woman who’s either living in the same building as a coven of witches who are trying to get her to have Satan’s baby in exchange for a successful acting career for her husband, or who is losing her mind. Levin’s allegiance as a writer lies with the story first, message second—and that demands, regardless of his personal beliefs, that he take the devil seriously.
The book was written in 1967, and while that was the time when New York (Babylon by a different name) was starting to lead the world decisively away from religion as a way to understand human existence (in the movie, while waiting for a medical appointment, Rosemary encounters the infamous Time Magazine edition that asked in its cover “Is God dead?”), it was also a time when religion was still a fairly common part of people’s lives. Nowadays, the closest nonbelievers can understand those who have faith is the way my Purple House colleagues did it: imagining that their belief provides comfort, support, community. It’s getting harder and harder to imagine that someone genuinely believes in the existence of forces superior to ours who rule our world, because it’s getting harder and harder to find such people.
Which might explain why Rosemary has remained the apex of the female body horror genre, many times copied but never matched (or, to use a grosser but more apt metaphor, many times inseminated but never impregnated). Its latest incarnation, in season 12 (yes, 12) of American Horror Story, does stand out for namechecking Satan, an aspect of the original that other Rosemary babies, like the disastrous False Positive, either downplayed or eliminated altogether. Delicate, as the season is called, is worth seeing if only to witness Kim K going full Madame Tussauds; it’s not helmed by Ryan Murphy himself, but rather by playwright Halley Feiffer, whose work on the stage has often tackled the impossibility of being happy and a woman at the same time. In Delicate, we get some of that, though unfortunately embodied in the plight of a famous actress who strives to have both a baby and an Oscar—not the most relatable of plots, though reflective of a growing trend from affluent artists that seem intent on convincing us their success does not mean they’ve stopped suffering.
Emma Roberts plays our Rosemary stand-in, though in her case, she’s the successful one—her husband (Cary from The Good Wife) is… there. I think he might be cheating on her? Who cares! Emma’s antagonist is really everyone else on the show her publicist, Kim K, whose face can no longer show emotions but whose Rolodex does include a pair of “genius” PR twins who convince Emma to break the internet with a video in which she defends women’s right to, among others, fart and poop (we’re meant to believe the video does not immediately and mercilessly get memed to death, a suspension of disbelief of which I was incapable). Kim K is also, potentially, Satan’s agent, and it’s suggested that the baby growing in Emma’s belly might—gasp—belong to the devil.
The show flashes back to the sixteenth century (because why not) and shows us how Mary Tudor did have a baby after all, but she gave it to Satan in exchange for a successful reign; in another flashback, we see a fashion designer in the 80s who gives up her baby to creepy antler-rocking Satannettes in exchange for selling her handbag design to Tom Ford (apparently, the value of a baby has decreased with time—it used to get you a throne and now it gets you a licensing deal). I think the show is telling us that being successful as a woman in this world is basically only possible via murky transactions with otherworldly entities, but that’s really just a guess. If Levin’s allegiance was to plot, Feiffer and co’s allegiance is to vibes.
The only somewhat scary thing in the entire show is its opening credits, which follow the usual AHS model: a sequence of disturbing tableaus set to music (and by “music,” I mean the sounds that a wild animal with access to a keyboard might make). Watching it always makes me uncomfortable, not because the things it depicts are truly upsetting (the trademark of the Murphy aesthetic is that it lands short of its target) but because its rapid cutting reminds me of my childhood fear of subliminal messaging. I was first introduced to the concept in the 2001 underrated, overlooked live-action Josie and the Pussycats, which, granted, was not particularly scary (sure, I’d like to buy stuff because I want to and not because I was subconsciously forced to, but there’s a price to pay for living in a capitalist society). However, that was followed by a presentation at school about how Disney movies contain subliminal messages to make kids super horny, which terrified me. I was still twelve or thirteen at the time, and the idea that these movies that I grew up with had pedophiliac vibes made me literally nauseous.
Though (most) of the Disney claims are without merit (no need to shield your baby from that Disney+ login), the idea that I could be controlled without my consent while enjoying things I thought were good for me continues to be upsetting. There’s a betrayal embedded in the concept, a taking advantage of someone’s vulnerability that can be a real trigger for me. So when those AHS credits play, I, a cynic amongst cynics, sometimes find myself looking away. There’s an irrational part of my brain that’s afraid that the rapid cutting is implanting concepts in my brain that don’t belong there. That, by looking at it, I might be opening myself up to being… possessed.
Besides tempting Jesus, the other major way in which the devil stars in the New Testament is by being in people’s bodies uninvited. Jesus drives out a bunch of demons from all kinds of folks—though, most of the time, all He does is say “Your sins are forgiven,” and the crowd is like “We don’t care about that, give us the good stuff!” and Jesus relents and gives the person sight or cures them of their leprosy. I don’t think we’re meant to take from those stories that whoever is sick or disabled is possessed by the devil, but rather that through Adam and Eve’s desire to know evil, humanity opened the door to it, which is why experience suffering—and that our sins are a spiritual sickness that’s much worse than any ailment that befalls our bodies, which is why Jesus went for the forgiveness of sins first.
There is a particular story, however, that is as weird as it is disturbing, in which Jesus encounters a man who’s possessed in a way that’s more familiar to horror fans: he roams in a cemetery, yelling and cutting himself, and when people try to tie him down, he breaks his chains easily. Jesus orders the entity that assails the man to identify itself and is told their name is “Legion,” because there are multiple demons in the man’s body. The demons beg Jesus not to cast them out but instead send them into a herd of nearby pigs; Jesus acquiesces, and the possessed pigs run and throw themselves off a cliff (some poor farmer had a very bad day).
The “exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac,” as Wikipedia says the story is known, provided us with a concept of possession that was used for centuries to label any kind of behavior humans did not understand or agree with, like mental illness, disobeying one’s parents, or periods. And yet, it achieved its apex in a story that came at a time when we had mostly stopped using it to explain stuff: the 1971 novel-turned-film The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty.
Now, I actively avoided The Exorcist for most of my life; having been scared by its mere mention since I was a kid, I never felt the impulse to be scarred by its horrors. But sometime around 2018, when I started working on my own possession story, I steeled myself and bought the book (though I could not stand sleeping next to it, and would often make sure the cover faced down when I set it somewhere after reading. Growing up Catholic: it leaves a mark). It was an intense ride—not least of all because one time I was reading it on the subway and our train hit a person—but the scariest part, to me, was the section in which actress Chris McNeill takes her daughter Reagan to doctor after doctor and cannot get a diagnosis. That not knowing, that powerlessness, scared me much more than the actual exorcism: at least by then, they knew what the problem was and could try to fix it.
The idea of powerlessness came back to my mind when a friend and I saw the movie a few weeks ago at a theater that was celebrating the film’s 50th anniversary. While its special effects are now laughable (literally, people chuckled at every vomit and spinning head), the movie remains scary because of how helpless its protagonists are in the face of the evil that has befallen them. They cling to their modern ideas; Father Karras’ initial response to Chris’ desperate suggestion that her daughter may need an exorcism is a quip about how a time machine might be in order—the Church does not exorcise people anymore, lady. But much like Chris before him, he’s eventually ground down by the horror that he encounters.
Powerlessness, I thought while I watched, might be the thing that truly divides horror from mere suspense. Clarice Starling may witness some truly hideous things in Silence of The Lambs, but she does not think herself powerless to stop them; it’s her job to do so, and in spite of how unprepared she might feel, she sees herself as capable of catching Buffalo Bill—and, by association, so does the audience. Pazuzu? Not so much. Regan is at his mercy, Chris is at her wits’ end, Father Karras is ambivalent at best, and only Father Merrin (who comes in like a total badass in the third act) has hope. His hope, however, rests not on his own power, but on his faith; he knows he can’t do anything other than ask God for help.
After leaving the screening, my date offered that we have perhaps lost our ability to imagine something worse than ourselves. Our sense of powerlessness these days tends to focus on societal issues we don’t feel able to change—but society is still made of humans. “The worst we can fathom is like, some AI gone rogue,” my friend quipped. “And who made the AI?” Their insight was proved painfully correct when I watched the new Exorcist this weekend, whose spirit the New York Times review captured perfectly in its headline: “Double the Possession, Half the Fun.” But the movie’s issues (lack of plot or characters or even cohesive editing) notwithstanding, its biggest contrast to the original is its lack of imagination. The devil isn’t really an entity but rather an expression of… hardship? The exorcism that’s performed is not a specific religious ritual, but an interfaith expression of our love for each other—the only thing, we’re told, that can expel the bad spirits. The movie caps the whole shebang with a monologue about not giving up when things get hard.
It reminded me of a play I saw recently, (pray), in which its creator tried to resignify the rituals of the church they had grown up with, taking away the religion that spawned them. It was a gorgeous production; its jokes made me laugh out loud several times and I was very impressed with its beautiful music (and one stunning rap number I wished had lasted longer). But it did not manage to move me (and here I speak singularly, as I saw other people crying). I could not get on board with its conclusion, in which each character listed what they believed in, forming an anodyne creed about positive energy and uplifting one another. The show billed itself as a “sacred offering,” but the definition of “sacred” is “dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity.” The deity, it seems, is us.
Church, nowadays, is an Off-Broadway show whose tickets start at $5 + fees. God is good energy. Satan is Elon Musk hate.
And we’re all alone in this huge universe.
It probably matters little to Satan that he is dead. If you believe in such things, you know this probably makes his job easier — the greatest trick he ever pulled and so on.
But it should matter to us that we’ve lost our curiosity, that we can’t see beyond our own existence. It makes me think of the origins of theater: what the Greeks saw as a perfectly natural ending to a play, we now call “deus ex machina,” a convenient and ill-fitting resolution. We have no room for goods, angels, or demons. Our innate need for spirituality is channeled into stanning celebrities, worshipping at the altar of stadium concerts and dressing up for Barbie screenings. And, as I’ve noted these past few weeks, it’s affecting our storytelling, particularly when it comes to horror. Initially, our lack of imagination was replaced by a willingness to put characters (especially, of course, women) through all manner of mutilation. But once torture porn cleaved every organ of the human body, we had nowhere to turn. The scariest thing imaginable to the horror filmmaker now is ourselves—our racism, our consumerism, our insistence on exploiting one another. We have no use for monsters. To use a horror trope: the call is coming from inside the house. And honestly, I can think of very few things as scary as finding myself trapped in a theater, having to endure a boring story that has nothing to say and no interesting way of saying it. The headlines in the real world are scary enough.
Maybe not all is lost, though. There was a recent horror movie that harkened back to the good days, even if in a very 2023 way: the sleeper hit Talk To Me. The story does not provide much context, which I appreciated; basically, there’s a mummified hand going around that you can use to communicate with spirits, and it has become a social media sensation as the youth stream their seances in the Tiks and the Toks. Our protagonist, Mia, is still grieving her mother, so when she stumbles upon one of these spirit parties, she takes it less as a game and more as a way to reconnect—which, turns out, is a very bad idea, because the spirits are fuckers and will gladly lie and trick you. The movie is not revolutionary in its concept, but I appreciated its clear-eyed execution, refusing to budge on its concept regardless of the audience’s possible need to ground it to something mortal (“the spirits are just a manifestation of her isolation” or something like that). The ending is super depressing and terrifying—and more effective than any high-concept horror film that has made waves recently.
Perhaps Satan, like evermore Taylor, can come back stronger than a 90s trend?