Gems of the Occult Cinema II
2026-11-09
Hans Poelzig’s yellow-and-black poster for The Golem, with a small clay figure beneath a pointed arch among distorted buildings.
Hans Poelzig, poster for The Golem: How He Came into the World, 1920. Museum of Modern Art, gift of UFA; reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Ten more films in which the occult is more than set decoration: Jewish creation legends, Faustian bargains, ceremonial magic, alchemical mountains, Estonian household spirits, and the long, uncomfortable afterlife of the witch. A second cabinet of cinematic curiosities, with the history kept separate from the special effects.
…Abracadabra
— Quintus Serenus, Liber Medicinalis
At the end of the first installment, I said I might write about five more films. Apparently, five was an optimistic estimate of my ability to leave the subject alone.
the first installment
So here are ten.
Again, this is not a ranking. It is a walk through several very different rooms: German silent cinema, British ceremonial panic, Mexican alchemical spectacle, Japanese animation, Italian nightmare architecture, and an Estonian village where supernatural labour has not noticeably improved anyone’s morals. What interests me is not whether a film has drawn its pentagram correctly. It is what the film thinks magic is: knowledge, temptation, resistance, exploitation, a language of transformation, or an expensive way of avoiding an honest conversation.
One distinction matters throughout. A film can reproduce a historical belief with extraordinary care without showing something that historically happened. Witch-trial records document accusations, coercion, testimony, and fear. They do not become proof of a flying witch because a director has read them attentively. Equally, a modern filmmaker’s mixture of Tarot, alchemy, and Christian symbolism is not automatically an ancient tradition rediscovered between takes.
The history is often stranger than the fiction. It is also less obliging about staying inside one genre.
[](#i-the-golem "Jump to this heading")I — The Golem
1920 · Germany · Directors: Paul Wegener and Carl Boese
Full title: The Golem: How He Came into the World.
In a stylized sixteenth-century Prague, Rabbi Loew fashions a protector from clay as his community faces expulsion. The creature acquires life, strength, and eventually a dangerous independence. It is an obvious ancestor of the cinematic artificial human, but treating it simply as an early monster movie misses its more troubling question: what happens when a persecuted community’s defence becomes a power that its maker cannot fully govern?
The background belongs to Jewish traditions about artificial creation and sacred language, not to a generic European cult of Satan. Those traditions are older than the familiar Prague story. The association with the historical Judah Loew, however, developed much later than his lifetime; the National Endowment for the Humanities’ account of the legend discusses its nineteenth-century literary development and Yudl Rosenberg’s influential 1909 version. We should not turn a compelling legend into a documented episode in a rabbi’s biography. Nor should the film’s theatrical demonology be mistaken for a transparent window into Jewish religious practice.
National Endowment for the Humanities’ account of the legend
Wegener also plays the creature, a useful reminder that the man directing the monster could literally be the man inside it. Hans Poelzig’s architecture makes the city look organic, compressed, almost grown rather than built. The setting is doing as much psychological work as the makeup: this is a world in which stone, clay, and human anxiety seem to share a nervous system. Watch it for the weight of the body, the fragility of its supposed masters, and the uneasy movement between protection and possession.
The monster is not the only thing that has been manufactured.
[](#ii-faust "Jump to this heading")II — Faust
1926 · Germany · Director: F. W. Murnau
Murnau gives us a scholar whose learning becomes intolerable when it cannot answer suffering. Plague overwhelms his world; Mephisto offers power, restored youth, and the familiar contractual catastrophe. It is a film of vast shadows and very intimate failures, moving from cosmic competition to the vulnerability of people who must live with the consequences. The enormous demonic figure looming over the town is a remarkably economical public-health announcement: something has gone wrong, and the management is not trustworthy.
The historical background is not one secret book but a long chain of retellings. Stories clustered around the early modern figure of Johann Georg Faust; the German Faustbuch appeared in 1587, and the legend passed through Marlowe, Goethe, popular theatre, and many other hands. Murnau’s version draws on the legend and its literary afterlives rather than faithfully filming one text. Its alchemy and forbidden learning belong to that inherited cultural image of the scholar who wants more than permitted knowledge, not to a documentary reconstruction of laboratory practice.
What makes it particularly valuable beside more recent occult films is its refusal to separate the spectacular from the moral. Youth is not an upgrade installed without consequences. Knowledge does not make the seeker immune to vanity. The film’s transformations ask who benefits from a miraculous appearance and who pays for it afterwards. There is a direct line from this bargain to later cinematic contracts with charming strangers, but Murnau gives the transaction an almost physical scale: temptation seems capable of changing the weather.
An excellent film about getting everything you requested and discovering that your request was badly written.
[](#iii-night-of-the-demon "Jump to this heading")III — Night of the Demon
1957 · United Kingdom · Director: Jacques Tourneur
A sceptical American psychologist comes to Britain and encounters an occultist whose domestic respectability does not make him any less dangerous. There are manuscripts, scholarly disputes, a threatened death, and the unsettling possibility that a man can be childish, ridiculous, and genuinely powerful at the same time. Tourneur makes the occult feel contemporary without giving up the texture of an old ghost story. Evil can attend a children’s party. It need not live permanently under a thunderstorm.
The source is M. R. James’s Casting the Runes. That matters because James’s world is one in which curiosity, scholarship, and the handling of old objects can open a door that education does not necessarily teach you to close. The runic curse belongs to literary supernatural invention; it is not evidence for a surviving, standardized ancient operation. The film stages the confrontation between modern investigation and an older imaginative world, then makes both sides rather less comfortable than their representatives expected.
The great curiosity is how much personality it gives its magician. Karswell is not simply a solemn black robe. He is vain, petulant, sociable, and disturbingly ordinary. In his appreciation for the BFI, curator Vic Pratt emphasizes precisely that mixture of dry humour, modern witchcraft, and impending disaster. Even the much-debated visible demon is worth considering as an aesthetic choice rather than reducing the whole film to production gossip: we may know more than the sceptic, but knowledge does not release us from watching him approach the danger.
his appreciation for the BFI
The occult menace has a country house. Naturally, the atmosphere is worse.
[](#iv-the-devil-rides-out "Jump to this heading")IV — The Devil Rides Out
1968 · United Kingdom · Director: Terence Fisher
Here Christopher Lee is the man trying to save people from the occult catastrophe rather than presiding over it. His Duc de Richleau recognizes that a friend has fallen under the influence of Mocata, a cultivated leader whose manners do not improve his intentions. The result is one of Hammer’s most committed excursions into ceremonial magic: protective symbolism, psychic domination, ominous gatherings, and a struggle that assumes spiritual forces have rules, even if the protagonists would very much prefer not to test them.
Richard Matheson adapted Dennis Wheatley’s novel, bringing a hugely influential strand of popular occult fiction to the screen. Wheatley’s attraction is partly his mixture of apparent specialist knowledge and absolute moral certainty. That mixture needs handling carefully. The film is not an ethnographic record of a real occult society, and its Satanists do not stand in for all modern esotericism. Mocata draws on the sinister public image of Aleister Crowley; the Miskatonic Institute’s discussion of Crowley and Wheatley usefully considers that transformation from historical person to glamorous fictional evil. Thelema and Wheatley’s fictional Satanism are not interchangeable categories.
Miskatonic Institute’s discussion of Crowley and Wheatley
The curiosity here is also the pleasure: Lee makes expertise dramatic. The frightening element is not merely that something arrives, but that someone understands enough to recognize just how bad the situation has become. Fisher gives an invisible conflict the urgency of a siege. I would watch it for that conviction, while keeping a historian’s distance from its taxonomy of good and evil. Fiction can borrow occult vocabulary very seriously without borrowing an occult tradition accurately.
A drawing-room emergency, with considerably worse consequences than a broken teacup.
[](#v-the-holy-mountain "Jump to this heading")V — The Holy Mountain
1973 · Mexico · Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
A hand-coloured alchemical laboratory engraving, with a prayer enclosure, musical instruments, furnaces, and a circular border of Latin text.
Alchemist’s Laboratory, from Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, 1595; design by Hans Vredeman de Vries, engraving by Paullus von der Doort. Duveen Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Public-domain historical plate, not a still from The Holy Mountain.
A thief encounters an alchemist, played by Jodorowsky himself, and enters a spiritual expedition involving planetary figures, purification, grotesque social satire, and a promised ascent beyond ordinary mortality. The images do not merely illustrate the story. They interrupt it, argue with it, and occasionally appear to be threatening the furniture. Tarot, astrology, Christian imagery, and alchemical transformation become the vocabulary of a film that wants to rearrange the viewer’s habits of perception.
It is tempting to identify a symbol and announce that its meaning has therefore been solved. I think the film is more interesting when we resist that. This is a modern artistic synthesis, not a recovered initiatory document. Nor should every sacred mountain be filed automatically under Gurdjieff. The frequently repeated description of the film as an adaptation of René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, with an accompanying direct Gurdjieffian lineage, has been challenged in the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion. The comparison can illuminate; an unqualified genealogy can mislead. The visible alchemical and Tarot imagery is a firmer starting point than claims that one esoteric system explains everything.
_Journal for the Academic Study of Religion_
The most revealing curiosity is Jodorowsky’s casting of himself as the authority who directs the seekers. That makes the film’s interest in surrender, spectacle, manipulation, and spiritual ambition unusually self-conscious. The question is not only whether the disciples can be transformed. It is what we, sitting obediently before a succession of extraordinary images, have agreed to let the director do to us. I will leave its final gesture intact for anyone who has not seen it.
Sometimes the veil conceals a mystery. Sometimes it conceals the person selling the veil.
[](#vi-belladonna-of-sadness "Jump to this heading")VI — Belladonna of Sadness
1973 · Japan · Director: Eiichi Yamamoto
First, a warning: this is an adult animated film containing sexual violence and disturbing sexual imagery. Animation is not functioning here as a guarantee of safety, and the film’s beauty does not soften its cruelty. A young woman brutalized by feudal authority moves toward a demonic alliance, healing, exclusion, and rebellion. Much of the film unfolds through flowing illustrations rather than continuous conventional movement, so that the experience can resemble turning the pages of a beautiful book whose owner should probably be questioned.
Its central historical curiosity is a French source: Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière, published in 1862. Michelet helped make the witch into a sympathetic figure of popular knowledge, healing, and resistance to oppression. That was enormously important to the modern imagination of witchcraft. It is not, however, reliable proof that the women prosecuted in Europe belonged to the unified underground religion his romantic reconstruction suggests. Contemporary discussion of the film rightly places that nineteenth-century mythology beside its twentieth-century politics. Here the witch reaches Japan through a French historian’s rebellion against his own world.
Contemporary discussion of the film
This double distance is exactly why the film belongs on this list. It shows occult history being rewritten as a language of liberation, then rewritten again through psychedelic visual culture and the tensions of sexual politics. I would not describe it as straightforwardly emancipatory: the representation of women’s suffering is too troubling, and too entangled with spectacle, for an easy congratulation. Its power comes partly from that discomfort. It wants the witch to become more than the monster named by authority, while forcing us to ask who controls her image even during her supposed liberation.
The sympathy is real. So is the unease.
[](#vii-inferno "Jump to this heading")VII — Inferno
1980 · Italy · Director: Dario Argento
A book points toward three malign mothers and the buildings associated with them. A New York apartment house becomes less a place where occult events occur than an occult organism in its own right. Rooms, passages, water, colour, and fire acquire a logic that the people entering them do not possess. Argento is not particularly interested in rewarding the viewer who wants every corridor measured and every supernatural rule printed on a card.
His mythology grows from Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis, especially Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow. De Quincey’s figures are literary personifications; they are not documentary evidence for an ancient worldwide witch organization. Argento transforms them into a cinematic cosmology. Inferno occupies the second position in the Three Mothers cycle, but its particular achievement is architectural: hidden power has an address, a material structure, and an atmosphere capable of swallowing ordinary explanations. The book within the story behaves like an occult source while remaining part of the fiction.
Alchemy offers a productive way to read the film’s transformations, enclosed spaces, and encounters with water and fire, provided we call that a reading rather than an established technical code. Scholarship on the trilogy has explored precisely those Gothic and esoteric connections. There is no need to pretend every coloured lamp translates into one fixed doctrine. The curiosity is that a film can feel extraordinarily systematic while refusing a tidy explanatory system. It gives us the experience of having entered someone else’s cosmology without the reassuring tourist leaflet.
I recommend it to anyone who has ever suspected that the building itself was the problem.
[](#viii-the-ninth-gate "Jump to this heading")VIII — The Ninth Gate
1999 · European co-production · Director: Roman Polanski
A rare-book dealer is paid to compare surviving copies of an exceptionally dangerous volume. The investigation proceeds through bindings, illustrations, ownership, discrepancy, and the peculiar social world of people who can afford to regard an irreplaceable book as a personal accessory. This is occult cinema with bibliographical habits. The book is an object before it is a symbol, and the attention paid to its physical details makes the supernatural temptation much more persuasive.
The source is Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, although the film concentrates on the diabolical-book strand rather than reproducing the novel’s whole literary construction. The volume at the centre of the story is invented. Its engravings are not newly discovered evidence that an authentic historical grimoire has been smuggled into popular cinema. What is historically recognizable is the culture of dangerous books: learned authority, forbidden knowledge, collectors’ prestige, and the seductive idea that the correct reading could give one person power denied to everyone else.
That is the curiosity worth holding onto. Comparing copies, checking images, and scrutinizing provenance are ordinary scholarly activities; the film turns them into suspense without abandoning their material specificity. Occult authority becomes a problem of interpretation and possession. Does the collector want understanding, or merely the satisfaction of being the only person who owns the answer? I find that question considerably more interesting than attempting to decode the fictional illustrations into a usable system. The dealer’s professional detachment, meanwhile, is not quite the protection he imagines it to be.
A reminder that expensive taste and good judgment are entirely separate qualifications.
[](#ix-the-witch "Jump to this heading")IX — The Witch
2015 festival premiere; 2016 theatrical release · United States/Canada · Director: Robert Eggers
Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of a witch riding backward on a goat above four putti.
Albrecht Dürer, Witch Riding on a Goat, c. 1500–1501. National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.3556; via Wikimedia Commons, CC0/public domain. Historical witch imagery, not a still from Eggers’s film.
An isolated Puritan family begins to disintegrate at the edge of a New England forest. Labour, hunger, religious conviction, sexuality, and the need to identify a guilty person become inseparable. The historical setting is the seventeenth century before Salem, not Salem itself. Eggers makes that distinction matter: this is a household attempting to inhabit an entire religious universe, not a modern family temporarily inconvenienced by old-fashioned clothes.
The production’s research into trial testimony, possession accounts, and period language is well documented. Eggers discussed his approach in interviews around its release; Criterion’s conversation with him is especially good on the family, visual restraint, and his attachment to the past. But meticulous research must not be confused with historical endorsement. The film makes the supernatural reality of its imagined world available to the audience. Historians cannot make the same move when reading accusations against actual people. The source material preserves what people said, feared, imposed, or were forced to confess.
Criterion’s conversation with him
The curiosity is that the film’s witch is simultaneously an inherited terror and a possible exit from an intolerable household. Those meanings do not sit together comfortably, which is why the final movement remains more disturbing than a simple victory over repression. Is freedom being offered, or another form of submission? The film allows the question to remain poisonous. And because this is sometimes confused in catalogues: its festival life began in 2015, while TMDB gives the 2016 theatrical release date. Both years have an explanation; neither requires a conspiracy.
The goat has already caused enough trouble.
[](#x-november "Jump to this heading")X — November
2017 · Estonia/Netherlands/Poland · Director: Rainer Sarnet
If some occult films imagine magic as the property of exceptional individuals, November imagines a village where everyone has supernatural complications and most people remain unpleasantly practical. Peasants contend with poverty, desire, the dead, and the Devil, while strange servants called kratts perform work and theft. The creatures look assembled from agricultural leftovers because, in this imaginative world, transcendence has apparently been forced to use whatever was in the shed.
Sarnet adapted Andrus Kivirähk’s Rehepapp, itself woven from Estonian folklore and social satire. The kratt belongs to a specific regional tradition of supernatural helpers; it should not be renamed a golem merely because both are artificial servants. Their histories, religious settings, and narrative purposes differ. In an interview about the film, Sarnet explained his interest in moving beyond the novel’s emphasis on greed toward questions of the soul. That helps account for the strange tenderness beneath the film’s dirt, deception, and black humour.
interview about the film
The curiosity is how little the presence of magic changes basic human wanting. A world full of supernatural possibilities still cannot guarantee that the person you love will love you back. Its luminous black-and-white photography grants the same seriousness to a face, a landscape, and an improbable creature. Christian and local folk imagery coexist without becoming a universal esoteric doctrine. I would finish the list here because it returns magic to the ordinary anxieties that so often generate it: food, work, jealousy, weather, and the desperate hope that life might become bearable.
Even the Devil must negotiate with people who would rather not pay.
[](#before-the-lights-return "Jump to this heading")Before the lights return
There is no single occult tradition running unchanged through these films. Jewish creation legends are not Faustian demonology; Michelet’s romantic witch is not a Puritan accusation; Jodorowsky’s personal synthesis is not Estonian folklore. Keeping those distinctions does not diminish the films. It lets us see how much work each one does when it borrows, transforms, misunderstands, or deliberately reinvents an inherited image.
That is what I keep returning to. Cinema does not simply show us the occult. It shows us what different times and places wanted hidden knowledge to promise, whom they feared might possess it, and what they were willing to sacrifice for the possibility of having it themselves.
The screen goes dark. The questions, rather inconsiderately, remain.
See you soon.
--
Chamber of Reflections
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