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The Devil Rides Out (AKA: The Devil's Bride) is a 1968 Hammer Horror film. That was a studio interested in horror films about "gentlemen" heroes. The protagonists are men of learning and class, who have huge libraries and servants. They're middle-aged bachelors in fine suits, of whom questions of income and especially sexuality are not to be answered. Basically, this is a Dracula movie. Only with Baphomet filling in for the Count, and Christopher Lee has jumped sides to play the Van Helsing figure.
This also feels like the last gasp for the Squares before the end. The Devil Rides Out is based on a 1934 novel by Charles Wheatley, an old-school God-King-and-Empire conservative of the dustiest sort. This film released the same year as Rosemary's Baby but feels decades older. Rosemary's Baby has uncomfortable questions about the social structure and the place of women in it. The Devil Rides Out is so proud of this universe for older fine gentry it can't imagine anyone would have a problem. It sees the social revolutions of the 1960s and is horrified. 'Gasp, you believe in... equality? People of different races, dancing together? I say!' This is a movie that definitely wears a monocle, and it has popped.
Christopher Lee is going to star in The Wicker Man just five years later this; he will gleefully burn to death the very kind of hopelessly backwards conservative man he's playing here.
The Devil Rides Out is a movie about two magicians finding themselves at war in the English countryside. On the side of Satan, we have Mocata (Charles Gray), a wicked hypnotist stealing supple young men and women to join his coven. Standing against him is the Duc de Richleau (Lee), the classic Hammer protagonist, employing his knowledge to perform counter-magic. The Devil Rides Out is a battle for the life of the Duc's young friend, Simon (Patrick Mower) and a young woman with the powers of a medium, Tanith (Nike Arrighi). Simon seems to have willingly joined this cult, but his older gentlemen friends are constantly kidnapping him to return him to side of good ol' Englishness. The rampant paternalism is never commented upon.
There are a lot of occult terms and images thrown around The Devil Rides Out, so let's talk about Western Esotericism. This stuff has been hiding the shadows of our movies for a week now, we need to figure out what it is. Esotericism or occultism is a wide branch of various kinds of philosophies, magics, (psuedo)sciences, and maybe even religion. It's hard to define it as either magic or religion, black magic or white, since it all stands at the nexus between those various forces. It's a big pot of Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Neo-Paganism, alchemy, and a dozen other strands of though. It's weird, it's spooky, and it's prone to being total bullshit. But it is great to see books of supposed magic, like the Lesser Key of Solomon casually thrown around.
But while The Devil Rides Out imagines all this stuff as devilry, it really wasn't. The reality was not as sexy as seen here, with Bond Villain summoning Baphomet in the woods. (Or a shirtless black man that is a genie of some kind? What weird probably racist thing is happening there?) The reality of the occult was that it involved mostly a lot of nerds hunched over in cellars reeking of sulfur. Or people like John Dee summoning an angel to teach them nonsense languages and then start a wife-swapping polycule.
What freaks out The Devil Rides Out is that by the mid-20th century, there was nothing forbidden anymore. Nobody wants to be their parents, there's a sexual revolution going on, there's rock'n'roll, there's the Manson Family. The entire conservative establishment of society was in question. So why not a New Age of open occultism as well? In 1966, we have a Church of Satan running openly in San Francisco. Even the hippies who will end up back in Churches want a more fiery and more living form of faith than what the stuck-up sexless protestants at Hammer have to offer. The Devil Rides Out depicts a small rave in a basement and panics, but more extreme stuff was already happening at every club in America.
Besides its rather hysterical place in history, The Devil Rides Out looks old too. The camera is always static, the car chase is all unconvincing rear projection, and technicolor is too lurid. There's a charm to all that, but it's a retro charm. The charm of an antique. It does not help that every character is driving 1930s Bentleys or Rolls-Royces and wearing full suits to bed.
Not all of it is negative. I love the campy effects of Baphomet and a giant spider. Charles Gray and Christopher Lee make a great rivalry and their charisma carries a lot of slow scenes in well-appointed parlors. There's a great scene involving the Angel of Death. I also love how the movie rapidly evolves from an interrupted dinner party to suddenly wild SciFi with God's Hand somehow turning back the hands of time.
But charm alone will not keep your studio open. Nobody makes movies like this anymore, this style is never coming back. Within ten years, Hammer Horror will be defunct. It was already far behind what thrills New Hollywood could supply in 1968, so it was laughably ancient by the Seventies. The Exorcist is coming (I promise you, we will get there) and it will burn away the world made The Devil Rides Out forever.
Next Time! That was a little tame, a little dry. Let's check out a movie so extreme it's still almost impossible to find fifty years later, Ken Russell's The Devils.
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