American Nightmares Episode 16: "The Devil Goes to the Movies, Part One

American Hauntings Podcast

Cody Beck and Troy Taylor

True Crime, Film Reviews, Spirituality, Tv & Film, History, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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 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. European filmmakers tended to take a far less religious approach to the Devil, using satanic lore as material for fantastic and uncanny imagery, but in America, silent films tended to avoid explicitly supernatural subjects, preferring to use the theater as a fire and brimstone pulpit – at first anyway.

But darker days for the cinema were on the way.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Americans who were coming of age in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s knew many faces of the devil.
0:11.2	He was a central figure in many Americans' religious faiths, but he was also in the comic books
0:18.4	that some of them hid under their beds. After the depression and the celebratory period after World War II,
0:25.6	a new sense of American purpose and identity emerged,
0:29.6	and much more of white middle-class America came to believe in a devil that threatened this new sense of identity. But just as it had been in
0:39.6	the 19th century, there were loud voices claiming they saw the devil in places where most Americans
0:46.1	were afraid to look, in the books, the comics, and especially in the films the nation loved.
0:55.0	As we've noted before, the early 20th century gave rise to a radical Christian nationalism
1:01.0	in America. The country had been moving in that direction for years, but during the 1920s,
1:07.0	it reared its ugly head and gained a foothold on the nation that's never really gone away.
1:12.6	Today, we remember this era as the Roaring 20s, an era of bathtub gin, new-fashioned styles,
1:19.9	and a time of unbridled prosperity on the brink of the ruin of the Depression.
1:25.1	The reality is, though, those weren't the only things happening.
1:29.5	In addition to gangsters and illegal booze, the nation was also swept up in a wave of
1:34.9	conservatism that strayed into the ugly world of racism and hate. The Ku Klux Klan came back to
1:41.6	life during this time and used violence against Jews, blacks,
1:45.6	Catholics and immigrants of every kind to defend the white American identity.
1:51.5	Racial tensions seeed in cities and resulted in a number of race riots and lynchings.
1:58.1	For many white Americans, these social upheavals meant that the boundaries of the national
2:02.5	identity needed to be defended. The widespread membership and the new clan and the newfound
2:08.4	respectability for the group bears witness to this need. And many of those same people believe the
2:14.9	struggle to maintain the white national identity took place not only in the physical world, but in the equally real spiritual battlefield too.
	...

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