IN SEARCH OF HOLLYWOOD PAGAN
19th Century cultural movements — Decadence, Symbolism, Pictorialism in photography, Orientalism, Art Nouveau, etc. — on early cinema & show how those influences wound serpentine throughout film history to eventually create the Hollywood Gothic (as limned by Kenneth Anger, Billy Wilder, Horace McCoy, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Henry Farrell, Robert Aldrich, Curtis Harrington, David Lynch, etc.). As for the 1920s/30s European tangos, they are the sound of lost worlds & I adore them. They’ve been a major inspiration for the puce velvet curtain mood of the book & kept me company when no other soul would talk to me for fear of being drawn into a conversation about Joris-Karl Huysmans’ influence on silent movie serials.
Female sexual power destroys an entire town. I don’t think Hitchcock is judging her either. He’s just saying, “This is what happens.” Melanie’s aggressive. She’s pursuing a man. She goes to his apartment and then drives out of town and she sneaks up on him in a boat. As she’s rowing towards him, she gets the attack from the gull and it’s brilliant because you’re almost fearful for her because she’s so sexually aggressive for that time! I think the movie is on her side. It’s about women who socially transgress, so it’s similar to The Love Witch. It’s like when Elaine is attacked in the bar. In bringing out this mythos of the feminine, you don’t have to have a negative or positive judgment about it, you just have to be aware of it. [Some critics] don’t acknowledge the mythos of the feminine as being a serious thing to explore in films, so they call it parody
“celebrity Pagans.” I’ve noticed over the years that if a celebrity makes any reference at all to anything outside of the Mainstream Religions, they’re automatically tagged as Pagan. For years, rumors have floated around about singer Stevie Nicks being Wiccan, despite the fact that she has in fact repeatedly denied it.
I think many of the rumors stem from the elaborate Pagan imagery in her videos. Illuminati has always been a big conspiracy of the film industry and especially in Hollywood. However even inBollywood, actresses like Rekha have been suspected of using witchcraft to keep herself looking young, which isn’t a big shock to many of us!.
Are you human at all?” — Florence Marly in Krakatit (Otakar Vávra, 1948)
Frank Lloyd Wright, One of the beloved architect’s most famous quotes is, “I believe in God, only I spell it, ‘Nature.’”
We don’t know if Wright would consider himself Pagan, but that sentiment is at the heart of what it is to be Pagan or Wiccan. First and foremost, Paganism is a nature spirituality because Pagans regard nature as the physical manifestation of Spirit (God, Goddess, or both).
In another instance, Fairuza Balk is a pretty iconic actress correlated with the Dark Arts don’t you think?. Balk has become somewhat of a Wiccan urban legend.While largely known for her witchy role in The Craft as well as her goth looks, Balk has starred in many not-so-dark films (hello, she played Dorothy Gale in Return to Oz. OK, that was admittedly a pretty dark tale, too).
Balk actually became so intrigued by Wicca that she bought an occult store in Hollywood called Panpipes (which claims to be the nation’s oldest occult store). While there is wide speculation about her own actual practice, Balk has, at the very least, led folks to believe that she practices Wicca IRL, even if she has just become a keen supporter following her big-screen character’s affiliation with the religion.
