Scott Cummings’s Realm of Satan isn’t designed to challenge what you think you know about the Church of Satan. Unfolding like a cheeky promotional video, the documentary reveals little about the organization and says even less, offering all the insight of something that might play on loop in the gift shop of an occult museum.
Cummings structures his feature directorial debut as a series of disconnected scenes depicting Satanists going about their lives, from dancing to singing to doing card tricks. The camera is often static, viewing its subjects at a slight distance in centered, unbroken shots whose fussy compositions attest to the Church of Satan’s obsession with showmanship above all else. At every moment, we’re aware that these individuals know that they’re being recorded, as when one member puts on KISS-esque makeup while staring into the camera as if it were a mirror.
These scenes, in other words, are how the Satanists, whose members don’t believe that Satan literally exists, choose to present themselves to the world. To further underscore that point, there are even a few effects-driven sequences, such as one depicting a man clomping around his kitchen atop computer-generated goat legs and another showing a person’s red, astral form getting up to walk around in the night. The film thus become upholds the transgressive antics of the Church of Satan—namely, its opposition to other forms of organized religion. It’s a trickster parallel that openly indulges in cinematic fiction to cultivate the church’s self-image.
But the Church of Satan’s performance of transgression isn’t one that Cummings bothers to contextualize. What the Satanists want from life goes unasked, and what they truly believe is unspoken. We get no sense of who they are beneath the artifice of their pointy facial hair, pentagram tattoos, and brand of skull-centric interior decor. The only time it engages with the Satanists’ place in society is a news story that depicts the “Halloween House” in Poughkeepsie, New York, being burnt down in an act of arson, and even then it’s mostly fuel for a sight gag where a sign promises a dollar reward of $6,666 for any information about the crime.
Though billed as an “experiential portrait,” Realm of Satan fails to convey what appeal Satanism holds for its practitioners. The religion appears to offer little in the way of structure or community since many of the scenes are devoted to personal pursuits, with only cursory attention to rituals or the spoken prayers that constitute much of the documentary’s dialogue. All of it feels dated, perhaps edgy once but now totally banal, an extension of an aesthetic cultivated from comfortable houses by people who are overwhelmingly white and middle-aged.
The film’s extended opening scene is of a goat giving birth—a basic animal function whose graphic depiction is more transgressive than anything that follows. Yet neither does the toothless quality of Realm of Satan seem to be the point when it so intently indulges the whims of its subjects by gifting them the spotlight. The documentary offers nothing more than a glimpse at a curated surface, fatally overestimating how much meaning constructed images have on their own. The result is a film that would make one hell of a coffee-table book.
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Thank god (haha) – a real review of this frustrating moving collage ! If a purpose was to be assigned to this non-doc, it would be “Satanists are just normal people (who drive expensive cars)”. But beyond that, it tells us nothing, including not telling us the good work Church of Satan does. I was hoping to learn more about the organization but alas. If I was a Satanist, I’d be irritated that the film only exacerbated the stereotypes of my people as velvet-wearing weirdos. Complete waste of access and opportunity.
The “good work” phrase makes me think you’ve got the Church of Satan and the Cevin Soling “cash grab disguised as an advocacy group” known as TST confused.