Episode Details

American pop culture in the 1920s and 1930s was on the verge of a new sort of entertainment. Cultural shifts and breakthroughs in technology had led to a steady stream of new kinds of books, comics, music, and magazines, but it would be film that transformed popular culture forever. The ghostly images watched with strangers in the dark proved powerful enough to incite as well as to entertain. Soon after films gained popularity, Americans began to use them to frame their history and their identity, as well as to literally project their fears and anxieties.

And among those fears were the fears of the Devil.

When the Devil first began to appear in early American movies, his story was part of a heavily Christianized moral lesson. European filmmakers tended to take a far less religious approach to the Devil, using satanic lore as material for fantastic and uncanny imagery, but in America, silent films tended to avoid explicitly supernatural subjects, preferring to use the theater as a fire and brimstone pulpit – at first anyway.

But darker days for the cinema were on the way. 

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