Separating Hollywood Satanism from the Bone Fide?

[darkdevotion1]

Does Hollywood get it all wrong in its representations of Satanism and other path? Are there elements of truth in it?

 

[KjEno186]

This topic isn't really an occult question as it is written, so it's in the wrong sub-forum. You would need to provide some additional context, and that in itself would provide at least part of the answer to your query:

Who practices Satanism? Are there different kinds of Satanism? Provide some examples from "Hollywood" for comparison and contrast. As the creator of the post, a bit more is expected than a low effort question.

 

[HoldAll]

Also see:

Wich are your favorite movies about the Occult?

Occult in cinema is very wide, sometimes they come with a very Christian point of view, but there are good movies about spirits, pacts with the devil, sorceries and witchcraft. I personally like Dracula the adaptation from Bram Stoker.

wizardforums.com

There are a couple of documentaries about Szandor LaVey but I guess they don't count here.

What Hollywood does with any given subject is extract the exciting and sensational bits of any subject that lend themselves to spectacular visual effects and leaves out the boring ones, so if they were to do a biopic about Marcel Duchamp, they'd focus on his short artistic period as a young man and only show how he did nothing but playing chess in later life in passing. The same goes for Satanism - you'd have to weave theist/atheist/acosmic/whathaveyou Satanist philosophy into a short impassioned dialogue because nobody wants to be bored to tears by long-ass lectures in a film. The main focus would be on rituals (= atmospheric, Gothic and dramatic, with nobody forgetting their lines, of course) as well as on dastardly deeds because after all, everybody knows that Satanists are EVIL. Real-life Satanists probably just want to be left alone but in a movie, there always has to be some sort struggle necessitating the appearance of a Good Guy who naturally triumphs in the end.

I have a journal about martial arts here, and Hollywood does the same to them as to it does to occultism: real-life subjects are milked for their perceived drama, suspense is added by means of nifty editing, a nice score and clever camera angles, anything important but boring for the average moviegoer gets left out. Even fair and realistic documentaries aren't entirely immune to artificially inserted drama and distortions, and I don't see any filmakers making it their mission to dispel misconceptions about Satanism any time soon; it's just too good a plot device.

 

[Ziran]

Does Hollywood get it all wrong in its representations of Satanism and other path? Are there elements of truth in it?

Satanism is "devotion to Freedom". Depictions of it in Hollywood which represent it in this way possess at least this one element of truth.