The trailer for the horror film Devil from Universal Pictures is now available. This supernatural thriller is based upon a story by M. Night Shyamalan as part of a Night Chronicles series. It tells the story of a small group of people trapped in a stalled elevator in a high rise who come to learn through this crisis that one of them is Satan.
Satan has long been a popular theological and pop cultural figure of interest. Two previous posts at TheoFantastique are particularly relevant to this topic and as background to Devil. Readers may recall my previous interview with W. Scott Poole, author of Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) where we discussed this topic. Moving from cultural considerations to cinematic, readers may also want to review my discussion of Nicholas Schreck’s book The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema (Creation Books, 2001).
It will be interesting to see how Satan is presented in this forthcoming film, how it contributes to the pop cultural representations of the Devil, and whether this film does better than many of Shyamalan’s recent films.
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