And yet despite its place in the ancestry of so many purely mercenary films, it was obviously made completely in earnest, representing a conscious effort to expand the boundaries of what a movie could do and be. It anticipates everything from the roadshow social-issues pictures of the 30’s and 40’s to the post- Conqueror Worm witch-burners, from nunsploitation to the Mondo movie. Theoretically educational in character, it is in reality a bizarre hodgepodge of styles and genres- part documentary, part drama part narrative, part didactic. The flipside of Dreyer’s and Murnau’s pious epics, this Swedish-Danish co-production looks at the black arts from a perspective distinctly favorable to the artists. Benjamin Christensen’s Witchcraft Through the Ages is something else again, however. Satanas is believed lost, but what descriptions have survived make it sound not a lot more edifying, despite the tantalizing prospect of getting to see Conrad Veidt assay the role of the Author of Evil. ![]() Leaves from Satan’s Book is so cloddish and hectoring that I could not force myself to watch much beyond the opening reel. Murnau did much the same thing with Satanas. Carl Theodor Dreyer, later the director of Vampyr, sank a good two years into producing Leaves from Satan’s Book, a sprawling and episodic examination of cosmic evil’s supposed role in shaping human history, while F. The Devil and his disciples were a major background presence in German Expressionist horror films like The Golem and Nosferatu, of course, but there were also a handful of movies made in northern Europe at the time in which Lucifer took center stage. The filmmakers of the Germanic world seemed to have Satan on the brain during the years immediately following World War I.
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