Satanis: The Devil's Mass

When Time magazine caused a major stir throughout the U.S. on April 8, 1966 with its cover story asking "Is God Dead?". The theoretical question kicked off a wave of public fascination with non-Christian religions that dovetailed eerily with the official founding of the Church of Satan a mere 22 days later at San Francisco's Black House by Anton LaVey. The following year LaVey, the High Priest of the organization until his passing in 1997, published The Satanic Bible, the religion's official scripture laying out the tenets centered around individualism and a reliance on ingrained human instinct. A fixture on the San Francisco scene since the 1950s thanks to his occult lectures (and his trademark house painted pitch black), LaVey became a pop culture fixture who mingled with numerous celebrities and served as a consultant on multiple motion pictures, including The Devil's Rain (1975) and The Car (1977). He also became a celebrated figure in the underground film movement and turned up in an uncredited Satanic cameo in Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), a ritualistic short film by fellow occultist Kenneth Anger. LaVey's presence was so omnipresent that he was even falsely rumored to have served in a technical capacity on Roman Polanski's groundbreaking hit film Rosemary's Baby (1968), which also made memorable use of that Time cover. Intrepid moviegoers, who didn't mind going to the shadier theaters in town, had a chance to really see LaVey and his followers in action at the turn of the decade when Satanis: The Devil's Mass was given a small rollout in 1970 by the counterculture distributor Sherpix, who also handled such edgy fare as Lonesome Cowboys (1968), Quiet Days in Clichy (1970) and Pink Narcissus (1971). Shot in 1969, the documentary is most memorable for showing LaVey conducting black masses in a horned-devil outfit but also aims to be an even debate on modern Satanism with members of the church and opponents being interviewed about the pros and cons. The subject matter turned out to be ideal for the softcore erotic market at the time given the tendency for Satanic rituals to require its participants to disrobe, a practice highlighted in numerous sexploitation films of the era like Zoltan G. Spencer's crazed The Satanist (1968). Not to be outdone, the United Kingdom chimed in with its own staged skin flick documentaries about Satanism, Malcolm Leigh's Legend of the Witches (1970) and Derek Ford's Secret Rites (1971), which conflate the religion with witchcraft, paganism and voodoo, and both tout the participation of the infamous Alex Sanders, self-proclaimed "King of the Witches." Sanders never achieved the international prominence of LaVey, who remained a prominent figure throughout the Satanic panic wave of the 1980s with considerable news coverage trying (and failing) to tie the Church of Satan to a variety of criminal activities. Footage from this film was also repurposed for a string of later documentaries and news reports, perhaps most prominently in the popular The Occult Experience (1985). Today Satanis: The Devil's Mass stands as a crucial historical record of the Black House (demolished in 2001), which remained LaVey's home until his death in 1997 but ceased public rituals in 1972. LaVey would also participate in one subsequent documentary, Speak of the Devil: The Canon of Anton LaVey (1995), essentially a counterpoint to a 1991 Rolling Stone article by Lawrence Wright debunking many of LaVey's more colorful claims about his life including his supposed early days in a circus. After LaVey's death in 1997, the Church of Satan (now headed by Peter H. Gilmore) has since been followed by other organizations, most prominently The Satanic Temple founded in 2013, and devoted to a more public, satirical campaign for the separation of church and state. Though we are now decades removed from the sensationalistic reception that greeted the new Church of Satan in the late '60s and found itself captured on film in Satanis: The Devil's Mass, the legacy of LaVey and his initiates remains a fascinating and still unique one in the history of American religious practices and the often hysterical response by the public. By Nathaniel Thompson