American Nightmares 16: "The Devil Goes to the Movies"
American Hauntings Podcast
Cody Beck and Troy Taylor
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
American pop culture in the 1920s and 1930s was on the verge of a new sort of entertainment. Cultural shifts and breakthroughs in technology had led to a steady stream of new kinds of books, comics, music, and magazines, but it would be film that transformed popular culture forever. The ghostly images watched with strangers in the dark proved to be powerful enough to incite as well as to entertain.
Soon after films gained popularity, Americans began to use them to frame their history and their identity, as well as to literally project their fears and anxieties.
And among those fears were the fears of the Devil.
When the Devil first began to appear in early American movies, his story was part of a heavily Christianized moral lesson. The same couldn’t be said for Europe – where filmmakers were using satanic lore to create fantastic and uncanny imagery, but American films were much tamer and much more puritanical. They steered mostly clear of explicitly supernatural subjects and used theaters as fire and brimstone pulpits instead.
At first anyway… because as the imagery onscreen eventually began to reflect satanic themes, audiences responded and darker days for the cinema were soon on the way.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before we get started with this week's episode, I wanted to offer all of you an apology for not posting a new episode until now. I actually did post this episode two weeks ago on my way to Los Angeles to do some more filming for the History Channel, but there was a technical glitch of some kind and we had to take it down and I was on my way |
| 0:23.2 | out the door. So I'm just now getting back into town, getting caught up and have finally been |
| 0:28.6 | able to update the episode. So I'm sorry about that, but I hope you like this first part of what |
| 0:34.7 | will be a recurring number of episodes about the devil in the movies. |
| 0:39.3 | Oh, and one last thing. |
| 0:41.3 | If you like my stories about devil's demons and sinister events, you're going to like my latest book, |
| 0:47.3 | which is called In a Dark Place. |
| 0:49.3 | It's a collection of sinister hauntings, possessions, and poltergeists, and it's one of those books |
| 0:56.2 | you don't want to read alone. Pre-orders for the book start this Monday, April 6th, so |
| 1:02.2 | keep an eye out for that. All right, thanks, and now on with the show. |
| 1:22.1 | American pop culture in the 1920s and 30s was on the verge of a new sort of entertainment. |
| 1:29.6 | Cultural ships and breakthroughs and technology led to a steady stream of new kinds of books, comics, |
| 1:36.1 | music, and magazines, but it would be film that transformed popular culture forever. |
| 1:42.4 | The ghostly images watched with strangers in the dark soon proved to be powerful enough to incite as well as to entertain. |
| 1:46.1 | Soon after films gained popularity, Americans began to use them to frame their history and their identity, |
| 1:51.6 | as well as to literally project their fears and anxieties. |
| 1:56.4 | And among those fears were the fear of the devil. |
| 2:00.1 | When the devil first began to appear in early American movies, his story was part of a heavily |
| 2:05.6 | Christianized moral lesson. |
| 2:08.5 | The same couldn't be said for Europe, where filmmakers were using satanic lore to create |
| 2:13.5 | fantastic and uncanny imagery. |
| 2:16.7 | In the United States, even though the new silent films were |
... |
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