By Danny Anderson

The year is 1968 and two attractive young people find themselves seduced by a Devil-worshiping cult. The cult seeks the vitality of their youth and will stop at nothing in a plot to indoctrinate them as servants of Satan.

This plot summary surely rings a bell for horror aficionados, but the fact is, it should ring two. 1968 saw the release of two major films that fit this description.

Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby is undoubtedly the first of these films to spring to mind, but the plot also describes Terrence Fisher’s great Hammer film The Devil Rides Out (released in the U.S. as The Devil’s Bride). Though emerging from considerably different cinematic traditions (Polanski was an emergent figure in an auteur-driven new Hollywood, while Fisher worked brilliantly inside the confines of the British studio system), the films have much in common.

Both use the figure of Satan and various conventions of folk-horror to examine the seminal tensions of the 1960s. In short, both movies have a finger on the pulse of a society in upheaval. Here is where the similarities end, however. The Devil Rides Out and Rosemary’s Baby may both be examining the health of society, but they offer completely opposite diagnoses.

Rosemary’s Baby portrays a society that is consuming its youth for the decadent preservation of the old. The Devil Rides Out reverses those poles; its heroes are bastions of the Old Guard, protecting society from a youthful counterculture run amok. The dichotomy between these two legitimately great films opens a window to a generational conflict that reverberates to this day.

Fifty-five years after these two films took aim in the culture war of their time, might their ideological battle offer some wisdom for us, living in the 2020s, mired as we are in our own version of these conflicts?

As we watch the flames rise in the world around us today, it’s worth considering the chaos of 1968. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The opening of the Tet Offensive. The Civil Rights Act. A wild and unruly Democratic National Convention. Protests and riots across many American cities as well as from the Olympic podium. And Altamont, the symbolic end of the Peace and Love era, still on the horizon. This is the cultural environment of 1968 and these two folk-horror films provide a wide-angle view of the anxieties of the moment.

A Contrast in Style

However similar the two movies are in subject matter, their styles starkly contrast. Much of the difference stems from the films’ gene pools; Fisher’s film is a luscious artifact of a studio system, while Polanski’s points forward to a burgeoning era of independent cinema. Rosemary’s Baby just feels more modern as it is shot on location, with naturalistic performances by Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and so many classic performers from Old Hollywood, like Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer (who play the aging cultists, the Castevets) as well as Ralph Bellamy and the beloved character actor Elisha Cook Jr. In its very casting, Rosemary’s Baby serves as a bridge between two eras of cinema. And the film’s historic importance can’t be over-stated. In many ways, Polanski establishes with this film a template, an inspiration for modern A24 horror films, and other so-called “elevated horror” films, which have found helped usher in a new golden age of horror, one that’s taken seriously by critics.

The Devil Rides Out, however, is a remnant of horror made for niche audiences, reliably churned out by artists and artisans working in a film factory. The performances are stylized for such a time and will, of course, feel less contemporary than those of Polanski’s actors. Yet the performances are no less impressive (just aimed at the tastes of a different era). The great Christopher Lee is, well, great. And this time he gets to play the hero, the Duc de Richleau. His nemesis, the Satanist Mocata, is played with intensity and menace by Charles Gray, the highly decorated British actor whose career spanned Shakespeare to Hammer Films to Bond villains. And it’s a film which finds the legendary Terence Fisher at the top of his game. It remains my favorite Hammer film (just ahead of Twins of Evil) and, though its ideology is backward-looking and out-of-step, I still find it fascinating.

In short, both films still work (in their own contexts) and the tension between tradition and the new is built into the fabric of each.

Ideological Tension

Perhaps I myself am out of step, but I do believe that it’s important to approach art on its own terms. This does not necessarily mean giving up political and aesthetic principles, but there is moral value in developing the capability to have a set of convictions and still appreciate a film or book that challenges your assumptions and beliefs.

This is, frankly, the only way to approach a film like The Devil Rides Out today. The film begs for any number of Post-Colonial critiques as it trots out a series of images and narrative choices that offend contemporary social mores. Dennis Wheatley’s book, upon which the film is closely based, is wildly and overtly racist and xenophobic in its characterizations of minorities and religions other than Christianity. The film, believe it or not, mutes much of Wheatley’s bile. Still, it’s there.

Devil Rides Out lays the blame for society’s immanent collapse on the new, the young, and the people who exist outside the old aristocratic power structures. The film constructs a cult that is practically a parody of youthful multiculturalism. The Duc’s young friend, Simon (Patrick Mower), has been seduced into a satanic cult led by Gray’s Mocata. The other members of the cult all subvert the aristocratic English ideal. They are either from the European continent, or from the Indian subcontinent, or from Africa, or, if they are white, they dress in the style of a cartoonish counterculture, much like what hippies look like on old episodes of The Monkees. In a creepy highlight of the film, when an actual demon appears, he is black, of course. Even the leader of the cult is subversive to the traditionalist ideal. Yes, he is older and white, but his name, Mocata, is definitively not. The social rot at the heart of the film’s conflict is aimed at what we might broadly define as “progressive.” The film’s ideology is, as some would put it today, problematic.

You Say Mocata, I’ll Say Marcato

It is difficult to not see a kind of mirror image of The Devil Rides Out in Rosemary’s Baby. It’s hard to imagine that Wheatley’s book did not inspire in some way Ira Levin, the author of the book that Polanski’s film adapted. There, too, is a great similarity between the name of Wheatley’s villain, Mocata, and the Big Bad of Rosemary’s Baby, Steven Marcato (an anagram of Roman Castevet’s name), who turns out to the be the son of a famous, wicked witch who once lived in Rosemary’s apartment building.

In that mirror image, we see the tensions of the era in reverse. The evil springs not from the progressive and the young, but from the aged and the economically privileged. Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband, up-and-coming actor Guy, move into a historic and spacious apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York (represented by the famous Dakota, where John Lennon was later shot). It is a building filled with old, wealthy people, led by Roman and Minnie Castavet. It turns out these scions of old money are preying on the young and need Rosemary to give birth to Satan’s baby. In contradiction to The Devil Rides Out, it is the well-heeled, old bastions of aristocracy that are the cult here. They isolate Rosemary from her young friends and send her to a doctor of their choosing, fellow cult member Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy). Guy is seduced into complicity by his desire for artistic success, and the cult uses their magic to provide him success in the stage and film industries.

And the young are portrayed in a far more sympathetic light in Rosemary’s Baby than in Devil Rides Out. Fisher’s film features the young and hip as perverse members of a pagan cult, bent on ushering evil into the world. In Polanski’s film, we see the young in essentially one scene. To cheer herself up in her troubled pregnancy, Rosemary invites her old group of friends over to a party and explicitly excludes her elderly neighbors. The young people we see in this scene are bright, friendly, healthy, and above all, kind, caring, and competent. As a collective, this group of young people represent a hopeful ideal for a bright American future. In turn, the evil, aged cult of witches work to isolate Rosemary from their benevolent influence.

Intellectual Humility in the War for the Future

These two films from 1968 offer competing views about who wore the white hats and who wore the black hats in the culture wars of their time. One clings to the certainties of the past to stave off the horrors of the future. The other struggles to break into a bright future, free of the past’s oppressive grip.

It’s all too easy for the enlightened viewer of today to identify Rosemary’s Baby as having been on the “right side of history,” despite the fact that, to most people who would employ that phrase, Roman Polanski himself is now persona non grata. The colonial and racist assumptions of Devil Rides Out have aged to be cringe-inducing at times (though far less so than Wheatley’s original novel, for whatever that’s worth). And the gender politics of Rosemary’s Baby, which center around a woman’s control of her own biological reproduction, seem somehow timelier than ever.

Ultimately, watching the films in 2023 offers a useful perspective. Today, we are all compelled to quickly separate the sheep from the goats, the good from the bad, just as these two films did from their differing ideological perspectives. If we were just to apply that metric to these movies today and move on, we would rob ourselves of an opportunity for introspection.

For instance, there is a delicious irony sitting in broad daylight in this story. Of these two, the film with what we would undoubtedly call the “correct” politics is Rosemary’s Baby. It also happens to be the movie that emerged from the Utopian ideas of the Boomers (the generation that represents today’s reactionary trouble-making for many) and was directed by Roman Polanski, he whose name shall not be mentioned in polite society these days. And Christopher Lee? The old aristocrat lived long enough to become universally beloved. Being right gives no one a lifetime pass. Perhaps Harvey Dent was right about dying a hero and living long enough to see yourself become the villain.

How quickly the visionary heroes of today devolve into the reactionary monsters of tomorrow. Let us not judge The Devil Rides Out too harshly then. Today, let us focus on the fascinating tension illuminated by the conflicting worldviews of these two great devil movies.

Danny Anderson lives in Pennsylvania. He teaches at Mount Aloysius College and writes cultural criticism and a lot of fiction these days. You can keep up with him at his newsletter, UnTaking: https://untaking.substack.com/.