Connaissez-vous quelque chose de plus outrageusement fécal que l'histoire de dieu et de son être: Satan [...]? Do you know anything more insultingly fecal than the history of god and of his being: Satan? - Antonin Artaud, Théâtre de la cruauté

Whether he is ha-Sataan (הַשָׂטָן) the accuser, or el-Shaytan (الشيطان) the adversary, Satan is a figure or construct that embodies an infamous opposition: the grand antagonism not between man and God (for God permits Satan's deeds) but between man and himself, man and his own mettle, man and his own passion, wants, dreams and temptations.

And as man's passions change, along with his wants, dreams and temptations, so does Satan artistically, for just as God created man in his image, so do we—us humans, us actors in a constant drama of becoming—create Satan. Our Dark Prince is a being in a constant state of [re]birth, a being always in a phase of creation, destruction and reinterpretation, creation, destruction, and reinterpretation.

The history of Satan in film, then, is a history in flux, a history of man—and partaking in an archeology of Satan's depictions in film entails excavating man and his fears, man and his passions, wants, dreams and temptations. The freeze-frames and digital clips complied here, showing Satan the powerful, Satan the sexy, Satan the crafty, intend to serve as excavations of just that.

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Be he depicted as the black-clad, bat-like man of Murnau's Faust and Bergman's The Seventh Seal; the sexy femme fatale of Buñuel's Simón del desierto and the kitschy Bedazzled; the powerful politico of The Devil's Advocate and The Omen series; or the odd androgynous temptress of The Passion of the Christ, Satan, in all his film forms, serves as an ironic rhetorical figure —a bringer of a certain light, a certain capitalist gospel now almost too cliché and paradoxical for strategic moral utility. As he advertises Hurley's bedazzling bouncing parts, essentially that which his 'lesson' intended to shun, he constitutes biblical Jobs sans lack—full of fetishized want: want of flesh, of wealth, of power.

But it is the want that is wanted now. In the end, Faust's and even Brenden Fraiser's tests have become the consumer's ultimate seductive dream, however transient the contractual indulgence—the reality TV show fame, the televised exploit, the sex tape, the scandal, etc. Satan's accusal in the age of the culture industry is the televised commodity ever-so-sweet.

Faust (1926)

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The Seventh Seal (1957)

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Simón del desierto (1965)

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The Omen (1976)

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The Devil's Advocate (1997)

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Bedazzled (2000)

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Passion of the Christ (2004)