Hollywood has spent a lot of energy (and hired a ton of fashion designers) to make Satan look cool. Luring people into your circle with promises of wealth and power doesn’t make sense if you don’t look the part. In today’s world, Satan had best be sophisticated with a keen sense of fashion. Unless he’s an amorphous glob of foul, swirling, neon-green juice. Leave it to director John Carpenter to make the Devil look like a kale smoothie.
In Carpenter’s 1987 cult favorite, Prince of Darkness, the essence of pure evil has been hidden in the basement of a Los Angeles Catholic church for decades. Trapped inside an ornate cylinder of metal and glass, this unholy fluid spins and churns like the rinse cycle is about to start. When the protector of that Satanic secret passes away, the key to the underground prison passes to a priest (Donald Pleasence). The priest calls his old friend, quantum physics professor Dr. Howard Birack (Victor Wong), and a team of graduate students to investigate the demonic activity. Skeptics by nature, the scientists are shocked to discover that the liquid could be conscious.
The revelation that the stuff in the cylinder is evil and not a mixture of the Ooze mutagen and a couple of Tide Pods is a little wonky. After translating some ancient texts, the ragtag team of aspiring quantum physicists learn that the green stuff isn’t Satan. It’s the Son of Satan. On a scientific or mathematical scale, the liquid is the opposite of God, the Anti-God. What it wants is to regain contact with its father, the actual Satan, to bring the Ultimate Evil Being to Earth. That creature could, in effect, cancel out God in a hazy matter/anti-matter fashion.
[Also: the texts say Jesus was an alien, but that’s neither here nor there.]
If that weren’t intriguing enough, the cylinder begins to leak aggressively. The Anti-God begins to direct streams of itself at people’s faces, a bukkake of badness. Once someone gets throat-blasted by Satan’s son, they become possessed. Evil influence radiates outward from the church, affected the disenfranchised and unhoused, calling them to become mindless murderous followers.
Why do people become demonically possessed? According to Hollywood logic, there are usually two reasons. One, the demon wants to establish dominion. They inhabit the weakest of people, challenging the faith of the exorcists and refuting God by proxy. That, or Satan wants a baby. The Devil is so jealous of that whole “immaculate conception” thing, he needs to pervert it and have his own kid created not only in sin, but by sin.
Prince of Darkness hurls an interesting kink into that backstory. Big Daddy Satan is trapped not in hell, but in a floaty watery limbo that exists behind every mirror. Only a human inhabited by the Anti-God can reach through any mirror without breaking it and pull Satan out of his prison and into the Earthly plane. Prince of Darkness is the story of a sad kid trying to bust his father out of jail.
With his Super Satan Soaker abilities, the Anti-God doesn’t possess people as much as he abducts them. He infects their minds, controls their actions, and turns them into his weird little evil puppets. Those attacked by the Anti-God weren’t bad people, not heretics or blasphemers. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Viewers never see Satan. We see his hand, reaching towards the other side of the mirror, but never his face. The Anti-God doesn’t have a visage, either. He can’t pop around a corner and yell “boogah-boogah!” He’s a giant bottle of mouthwash. That lack of humanity, the foreign nature of the enemy, shows that Satan can take any form. He doesn’t have to be the cool guy in a white linen suit sashaying down the streets of Los Angeles. Flesh is the Devil’s final goal, to wear the skin suit and burn it all down.
While Donald Pleasence exudes enough tortured Catholic guilt in Prince of Darkness to power all the mood slime in Ghostbusters II, that’s not the source of the terror. The characters are people who not only don’t believe that Satan is real, they have actively tried to debunk his existence with the scientific method. He’s nothing but a concept, an equation, something to be disproven and discarded. In this movie, the Devil is not familiar. He can’t sit down to dinner or hold a grimoire. Satan is a form that cannot be imagined.
In Prince of Darkness, where science and faith collide head on and both sides raise their hands in despair, it doesn’t matter if you believe in Satan. He believes in you.
