The Devil Rides Out (also known as The Devil’s Bride) has often been called the best film ever released by Hammer. Given the prestigious history of that studio, that is some compliment. Released in the turbulent year of 1968, The Devil Rides Out is a strange bit of aristocratic adventure set in the English countryside of the 1920s. In this film, the art deco-designed cars are always free of dirt, the manners are impeccable, and the central battle is the classic one between absolute good and absolute evil.
In many ways, The Devil Rides Out seems outdated, and even in 1968 it was an anachronism. Much of this has to do with the fact that the film is an adaptation of an older novel - Dennis Wheatley’s 1934 potboiler of the same name. In a January 2010 article for the Fortean Times, Wheatley biographer Phil Baker claims that Wheatley “virtually invented the popular image of Satanism in 20th-century Britain.” Wheatley’s reach stretches across Dover too, for his popular depictions of Satanic orgies, secret societies, and high class debauchery lay at the heart of most occult and black magic thrillers. In a sense, without Wheatley there would be no Doomsters At the Drive-In.
When Wheatley was writing and being read, few could have imagined his eventual legacy. For the most part, Wheatley was considered a hack who popularized a very surface-level understanding of the occult. For the more politically-minded, Wheatley was a reactionary wordsmith whose political and black magic thrillers blatantly expressed far right-wing views. In The Devil Rides Out, the Duke De Richleau - Wheatley’s urbane Franco-Russian aristocrat with a deep knowledge of the black and white arts - claims that “Germany did not make the war [World War I]. It came out of Russia.” Later on, Wheatley’s strong anti-Communism and his inveterate hatred of radical causes would only grow stronger, and in most cases Wheatley linked Satanism and Satanic cabals to the causes of Communism and even trade unionism.
While his later works mostly approached the Left from the perspective of the conservative right (i.e., the philosophy that champions private property, free market enterprise, and a strong national defense), The Devil Rides Out contains disturbing ties to the revolutionary right of the interwar period. For starters, the novel was serialized in the Daily Mail on Halloween. Nowadays, the Daily Mail mostly represents the standard opinions and attitudes of the Conservative Party, but in the 1930s, the newspaper then owned by Lord Rothermere was extraordinarily sympathetic to the fascists in both Europe and the U.K. Rothermere even went so far as to publish his own editorial entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts.”
For a time, Wheatley was also sympathetic to the far right, and some of this sympathy found its way into The Devil Rides Out. Besides De Richleau’s exoneration of Germany, the book also gives the Aleister Crowley-like Mocata and his followers an end goal of a worldwide war. Wheatley, the Daily Mail, and Mosley’s blackshirts were against another war with Germany, so it is only fitting that only the Devil worshippers want war. In an odd moment in the novel, after De Richleau and Rex van Ryn have saved their Jewish friend Simon Aron from the clutches of the “Goat of Mendes,” De Richleau places a golden swastika around the neck of Aron for protection. The Duke calls it “the oldest symbol of wisdom and right thinking in the world...”
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| “Blackshirts” were the colloquial term for the Italian followers of Benito Mussolini and the British followers of Oswald Mosley |
Obviously, being a post-World War II production, Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out contains none of the original novel’s allusions to fascism or Nazi mysticism. In fact, although the film has the same spirit and moral force as Wheatley’s novel, it nevertheless presents a far more sensitized and whitewashed retelling of the battle between the Duke and Mocata.
This of course is one of the very few mistakes made by the film’s producers. On the whole, The Devil Rides Out is a near-perfect blockbuster that has in its credits more than a few heavyweight names. First of all, the film was directed by Terence Fisher - the man behind such classics as Horror of Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Fisher was not only the greatest director to ever work with Hammer, but his iconic style and flair for visual storytelling helped to give the famed British studio its own trademark aesthetic.
Fisher’s Christian iconography is also incredibly important, and almost all of the films that he directed for Hammer somehow involve the triumph of the Christian (and Protestant) cross over diabolism. The Devil Rides Out is no different, and in some ways it is the most bluntly pro-Christian film in Fisher’s entire oeuvre.
Fisher alone is not responsible for this, for the film’s script also contains numerous references to the power of God over the Devil. Oddly enough, the man who wrote this script was Richard Matheson - the legendary horror author who wrote I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes, Hell House, and some of the more famous Twilight Zone episodes. With The Devil Rides Out, Matheson’s typically sparse prose style is dispensed with in favor of a melodramatic style that at times feels ripped from a comic strip. One has to stop from cringing a little when Christopher Lee’s De Richleau ends the film by claiming that it is indeed God who must be thanked.
Casting wise, The Devil Rides Out is almost flawless. Not only does Christopher Lee excel as De Richleau, but Charles Gray plays with the slimy Mocata with a steel-eyed coldness that serves to heighten the character’s infernal intentions. Other great casting picks include Patrick Mower as a far less Semitic Simon Aron and Leone Greene as a far less American Rex van Ryn. The only hiccup in the film’s casting is the French actress Niké Arrighi, who plays the tormented Tanith Carlisle. In the film, Arrighi does somewhat convince the audience of her interior war with Mocata and his Satanic influence, while at the same time her troubled performance turns icy and unbelievable when she tries to show her love for van Ryn. By the film’s end, Tanith becomes God-like, and thus the script’s attempt at humanizing her fizzles out.
Besides the film’s big names, The Devil Rides Out is also well-known because of its visual effects. In particular, during the scene when an off-screen Mocata attempts to retrieve Tanith and Simon from the home of De Richleau’s niece, the spectral figures of a giant Tarantula and even the Angle of Death appear. Only a salt circle full of white magic incantations keeps these creatures at bay, and so too does a special prayer which not only sends black magic and death back to the original practitioner, but it also can change the course of time.
In another famous scene, De Richleau and van Ryn, after following a small squad of high-priced cars, stumble upon the major sabbath that occurs every year on the eve of May Day. There, on the same Salisbury Plain that is home to Stonehenge, Mocata and his wine-fueled followers conjure up “the Devil himself” in order to re-baptize Tanith and Simon. The film’s rendering of Satan, which looks quite similar to Baphomet (the horned idol of the Left Hand Path which the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping), has become an underground icon of sorts, and the image can be found in connection with such bands as Electric Wizard and the Canadian hardcore outfit Cursed.
Frankly, after watching the film again for eighth time or so, I can now fully understand why The Devil Rides Out holds such a sway over the popular imagination. Not only is the film (and the novel) a primer on all the pop beliefs about Satanism, but it is also an almost carefree yarn about high adventure and high stakes. More importantly, the film is about friendship and the lengths to which De Richleau and van Ryn will go to save their friend and former colleague in the Lafayette Escadrille from losing his immortal soul. And although some metalhead viewers will object to the overt Christian imagery in The Devil Rides Out, the film’s charm and stunning visuals cannot be denied. In short, The Devil Rides Out continues the legacy of Dennis Wheatley in that it perpetuates popular conceptions about Satanism and practitioners of the occult. Right or wrong, it is also undeniable that a large segment of the heavy metal community does this as well, and therefore heavy metal and The Devil Rides Out are spiritually linked.
Words: Benjamin Welton