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 to be 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. The same couldn’t be said for Europe – where filmmakers were using satanic lore to create fantastic and uncanny imagery, but American films were much tamer and much more puritanical. They steered mostly clear of explicitly supernatural subjects and used theaters as fire and brimstone pulpits instead.

At first anyway… because as the imagery onscreen eventually began to reflect satanic themes, audiences responded and darker days for the cinema were soon on the way.