Consider the arrangement. A group of people enter a darkened room and sit facing the same way. They fall silent. A beam of light passes over their heads, and on the wall before them appear figures that are not there: the dead, the distant, the imaginary, larger than life and moving. When the light stops the figures vanish, and the people go out blinking into the street, a little changed.
It is hard to describe a cinema without describing a ritual, and the resemblance was noticed early. Some of the first theorists of film compared the editing of images to the working of a spell, and the projector to a magic lantern, which is what it descended from. This essay follows the moment, in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the resemblance stopped being a metaphor, and the occult revival of the period found its natural home on the screen.
Why the sixties
The conditions are easy to list. Confidence in established authority, religious and political, collapsed with unusual speed. A generation in revolt went looking for older and stranger sources of meaning, in Eastern religion, in psychedelic experience and in the Western esoteric traditions that respectable culture had dismissed as superstition. The modern witchcraft movement, which had gone public in England in the 1950s after the repeal of the last law against witchcraft, spread rapidly. Astrology columns multiplied. Paperback grimoires sold in railway stations.
A notorious English occultist, dead since 1947 in obscurity and some poverty, was rediscovered as a prophet of the new age. His motto that one should do what one wills was read, not quite accurately, as a charter for personal liberation. His face appeared among the crowd of heroes on the cover of the most famous record of 1967. He had spent his life trying to found a religion and failed. Twenty years after his death he became a style.
The magus with a camera
The figure who did most to bring that occultist's ideas to the screen was an American maker of short underground films, a lifelong devotee, who regarded the camera as a magical instrument and each film as an act of invocation. His films have almost no dialogue. They are dense with symbols drawn from ceremonial magic and Egyptian religion, cut against pop songs, bikers, sailors and the glittering debris of Hollywood. Several bear titles that announce a summoning or a rising.
The films were shown in tiny rooms and passed from hand to hand, and their influence was out of all proportion to their audience. They taught a generation of directors, and later of music video makers, that a film could be organized like a ritual rather than a story: by rhythm, repetition and the accumulation of charged images. The technique of building meaning from rapid montage of loaded fragments is so common now that it is hard to remember that someone had to treat it as magic first. Readers of Chaos Magic and the Do-It-Yourself Occult will recognize the method; the cut-up and the sigil belong to the same family.
He had spent his life trying to found a religion and failed. Twenty years after his death he became a style.
Witches in the country house
The mainstream took a little longer, and when it arrived it came by way of genre. British studios had revived the gothic horror film in the late 1950s, and by the late 1960s their villains were often occult: Satanic circles meeting in the drawing rooms of the respectable, black masses in the cellars of country houses. Italian directors made witches the heroines and victims of lavish, morbid fantasies in saturated color, beginning with a 1960 film in which a witch executed centuries earlier returns for revenge on the family that killed her.
In America the decisive moment came in 1968, with a film about a young wife in a Manhattan apartment building whose kindly elderly neighbors turn out to be a coven. It moved the occult from the Carpathians to the Upper West Side, and its success taught the studios that Satan sold. Within five years a film about the demonic possession of a young girl had become one of the most profitable ever made. The Satanism of the screen bore little resemblance to anything practiced by actual Satanists, but it supplied much of the imagery for the moral panic of the following decade.
The old religion in the fields
In Britain a different strand emerged, now called folk horror. Three films made between 1968 and 1973 set their terrors not in castles but in the countryside: a witch-hunter in the civil war, a village of children reverting to a devilish cult, an island community whose harvest rites require a sacrifice. In each, the old religion is not dead but dormant, waiting in the landscape for the modern outsider to blunder in.
These films were made by people who did not believe in witchcraft, for audiences who did not either, and they are disturbing precisely because they take the pagan past seriously as a different moral world. They also captured something real about their moment: the suspicion that beneath the modern state lay older loyalties, to place, to season and to blood, that had never been properly buried.
The midnight congregation
The most ritual development of all was not a film but a way of showing one. In December 1970 a small cinema in New York began screening a violent, mystical western by a Chilean-born director at midnight. It drew on the tarot, Zen, the Gospels and the theater of cruelty, and nobody could say exactly what it meant. It ran at midnight, seven nights a week, for about six months, and it sold out on word of mouth.
So began the midnight movie. Within a few years certain films had become fixtures of the late-night circuit, shown weekly for years to audiences who came again and again, knew the dialogue by heart, dressed as the characters and answered the screen aloud. The phrase "cult film" is usually used loosely. In these rooms it was nearly exact. There was a canon, a calendar, a liturgy of responses, a costume and a congregation that recognized its own.
The midnight showing borrowed the structure of initiation. One went the first time not knowing what to expect, on the recommendation of someone who would not explain. One came out marked, and went back, and brought someone else. A taste for dread was often part of it, but the deeper pleasure was belonging: being one of the people who stayed up for this.
The temple dispersed
Most of the films discussed here can now be watched alone, at any hour, on a screen held in the hand. Something has been gained by this and something lost. The images remain, and the symbols still work on anyone who looks long enough. What has gone is the room: the dark, the crowd, the beam overhead, the shared silence broken by a shared response.
The occult revival of the 1960s understood that a ritual needs a place and a people as well as a text. It found both in the cinema, for a while. The question left by its passing is whether the solitary screen can serve as a temple at all, or whether, like the private reading of a grimoire, it can only ever supply the words of a ceremony that nobody performs.