POP CULTURE: The Devil You Know

Talk about a fallen angel! In the mid-1970s, Satan may not have been running for president, but he certainly ruled at the box office. Thanks to The Exorcist, which depicted the Prince of Projectile Vomiting in such terrifying fashion that some moviegoers reportedly suffered heart attacks during screenings, Satan emerged as a persistent if shadowy fixture in American culture for the next two decades. During the early 1980s, it sometimes seemed as if every preschool teacher in America was allegedly serving Principal Beelzebub. So many rock bands were running with the devil on the highway to hell that the California State Assembly actually held an investigation into backward-masking and determined that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" contained this hidden message: "I sing because I live with Satan. The Lord turns me off—there's no escaping it. Here's to my sweet Satan, whose power is Satan."

In 1987, sweet Geraldo Rivera, whose power is Geraldo Rivera, excreted a sulfurous pile of syndicated muck entitled Satanic Cults and Children. Wielding his suspiciously Mephistophelean lip broom against the forces of evil, the world's most gratuitously outraged demon-slayer claimed that a "highly organized, very secretive network" of up to one million devil-worshippers was at work in the U.S., eating babies on Main Street. "The odds are that this is happening in your town," Rivera advised, and the ensuing panic lasted long enough to net Marilyn Manson a date with Rose McGowan nearly a decade later.

Ah, but superstardom's tough to maintain, even for Antichrists. When the Dark Lord's loyal brain-slaves proved harder to find than the talk-show hosts who were so eager to expose them, Satanic ritual abuse was demoted from shocking threat to kitschy myth. After an endless maelstrom of heavy-metal album covers and hipster T-shirt designs, Beelzebub's once-frightening visage seems as friendly as the Pillsbury Doughboy's. When The Exorcist was re-released on its 25th anniversary six years ago, audiences laughed where they once screamed in terror. And now even Jerry Falwell's playing him for laughs.

But who's really to blame for such developments? Certainly it's not as if America's gotten less religious in the last two decades, or, as numerous high-school science teachers can attest, less literal-minded in its interpretation of the Bible. Concerned men of God do still believe in a real, tangible Satan—just last week, in fact, Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope's preferred exorcist, called Harry Potter the "king of darkness" during a Vatican radio interview.

But as long as a mop-topped English cherub is the most frightening demon pop culture can produce, is it any wonder that Falwell's faithful acolytes are more afraid of universal health-care than the devil? Concerned Christians often knock the entertainment industry for its aversion to Godly fare, but is its failure to produce truly scary depictions of Lucifer even more damning in the long run? Or maybe even some kind of secret plot hatched by Hollywood Satanists to lull decent Americans into a false sense of complacency? Geraldo, please! Start investigating before it's too late!