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Another man’s memories: Masculine trauma and Satanic Panic in The Believers (1987) and Angel Heart (1987)
- Source: Horror Studies, Volume 13, Issue 1980s Horror Film Culture, Oct 2022, p. 193 - 208
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- 01 Jul 2022
- 01 Sep 2022
- 01 Oct 2022
Abstract
Focusing on The Believers (1987) and Angel Heart (1987), this article examines how occult crime is framed through the central male protagonists’ fragmented subjectivity in the respective investigation narratives. Through close analysis of the films’ shared cinematic languages of horror and neo-noir, I present how these texts are in direct dialogue with the ‘Satanic Panic’, the contemporary phenomenon of religious hysteria propagated by Reaganite conservatism and the New Christian Right. I argue that post-Vietnam masculine identity anxieties are intimately tied, and interrogated in these films, as part of a traumatic national history of white, patriarchal Satanic scapegoating and theocratic hegemony in the United States.