Occult & satanic panic

Films about satanic conspiracy, possession and witchcraft, made during and feeding a real public anxiety.

The prestige wave

Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) were major studio productions with major casts, and they made enormous money. The Exorcist is the highest-grossing R-rated horror film for a reason: it plays entirely straight, takes its theology seriously, and is hard to sit through.

The imitators

Every industry with a camera responded. Italy produced Beyond the Door and a long line of Exorcist variants, several of which were sued. Turkey produced Şeytan, which is The Exorcist shot for shot with the same score. Britain produced To the Devil a Daughter, which finished Hammer off.

The panic

By the early 1980s the fiction had escaped into real life. American police departments ran seminars on satanic ritual abuse, day-care prosecutions ruined lives, and the evidence for an organised satanic conspiracy turned out to be nothing at all. The films did not cause that, but they were the vocabulary it used.

Where to start

Rosemary's Baby, then The Wicker Man, which inverts the whole thing by making the pagans the ones in charge.