Count Gorgann: We are not the crying sheep of God, we are the mighty goat.
Heidi LaRoc: Why the goat? Why not the pig?**
—The Lords of Salem
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Goats don’t seem like a threat. Children scritch goats on the head at petting zoos and hand-feed them grain pellets. Some goats scream and faint like film festival audiences at a Coralie Fargeat movie. Goats are adorable, even while they’re pooping. And yet, these lovable farm animals have come to represent foulness. Evil. The Devil himself.
That’s a massive denotation for a critter that may be best known for eating grass and producing milk. Cows do the same things but nobody looks at a cow and thinks, “Oh, that’s Satan.”
Maybe it’s the goat’s horns or their weird cloven hooves that draw comparisons with images of the Devil. It could be the goat’s inherent lack of self-control. Goats are gluttons. They’ll consume whatever they can find. Goats also do things for sexual gratification that some humans would find odd. When it’s time to mate, male goats will pee on themselves, all over their legs and up into their scraggly goat beard. Chicks dig it. [No, they really do. Female goats are attracted to the aroma of the urine.]
I don’t know if that pee-sniffing thing works on humans, but in the movies, one of the best ways to prove your allegiance to Satan is to have sex with a goat. Either the Devil is comfortable taking the form of a goat because of their similarities, or the goat acts as Satan’s sex surrogate. In the 1982 movie Black Candles, one of the leading ladies gets goated in a barn while a man in black mumbles unintelligible words from a leather-bound tome. He has a cocaine pinky nail and a red ruby ring, so you know he’s up to no good. By the way, the goat is completely uninterested in the proceedings. The woman does all the work, rolling her eyes back in her head and licking the goat’s furry face while she gyrates.
Perhaps the most impressive of the goat-devil-man combinations is in Michele Soavi’s The Church (1989). Church historian Evan (Tomas Arana), finally gets his shot with a beautiful art restoration expert named Lisa (Barbara Cupisti), by becoming possessed by demonic forces that live in the bowels of a Gothic cathedral. By the time Lisa shows up in the basement, naked and in a catatonic fugue state, Evan has become a freakishly evil winged creature with horns and gigantic teeth. What girl wouldn’t want to lie down on a stone slab, let strangers paint arcane symbols on her goosebump skin, and give Devil Evan the best 12 seconds of his life? They don’t call Satan “The Great Tempter” for nothin’.
Satan, regardless of his physical form, offers his potential mendicants things they’ve never experienced or tasted before. In Robert Eggers’ modern classic The Witch (2015), the Devil takes the form of an aggressive goat named Black Phillip. He is the property of a New England farm family in the 1600s who left the Puritan belief system because they weren’t strict enough. It’s a poor idea. Lust and rage rear their heads. Crops fail. Children die. In the middle of it all is Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), teetering on the edge of womanhood, and the everpresent Black Phillip.
He knows that what she truly wants is freedom. When Black Phillip has Thomasin all to himself, he becomes a tall dark human figure. He offers her the taste of butter. A pretty dress. All she has to do is sign his book. When Thomasin discovers a group of witches living in the woods, she joins them. It’s hard not to feel glad for her when she escapes her family, her oppressive faith, but the price paid for those things is unfathomable.
Perhaps that’s the answer to the initial question. Besides the shared physical features between goats and common depictions of the Devil, the goat represents a lack of restraint. Goats jump and dance and frolic about in mossy glens. They follow no rules, no commandments. Greeks revered those qualities when they described the horned god, Pan. Eliphas Levi’s famous drawing of the Baphomet depicted the deity with goat horns. Israelites would symbolically lay the sins of their tribe onto the back of a goat, known as the scapegoat, and send it off into the wilderness never to be seen again.
From a film standpoint, goats are smaller than horses and bigger than dogs, making them somewhat easy to handle (except for Black Phillip, who was a real dick). There’s a hint of mischief in their eyes, the sense that something weird could happen at any time to set them off. Goats represent the chaos that many Christians not only avoid, but detest. Why shouldn’t goats be the Devil in disguise?
**Ew. Pigs are gross.