The Devil Rides Out (dir. Terrence Fisher, 1968)
Christopher Lee made a career out of playing the villain. You can’t have cheekbones and a voice like that and not be the bad guy most of the time. Lee maintained throughout his career his frustration with this typecasting. There are only so many times you can play Dracula before it becomes a burden. It’s no surprise that one of Lee’s favorite roles was a rare turn as the hero of The Devil Rides Out: the Duc de Richleau, the gentleman adventurer of nearly a dozen novels by Dennis Wheatley. His contemporary and fellow pigeonholed actor Charles Gray would take up the slack, portraying the film’s antagonist, a leader of a Satanic cult and ersatz Aleister Crowley named Mocata.
Plotwise, The Devil Rides Out is standard Hammer horror fare, albeit well done. De Richleau rescues a friend’s son from Mocata and his fellow Satanists. They decamp to the estate of the Eaton family, who then become targets of the cult. De Richleau must use his knowledge of the occult gained from his worldly travels to counter their dark magic.
Wheatley’s politics and worldview were conservative to the core, and it’s not difficult to see how his fictional work aligns with his arch-Tory beliefs. Terrence Fisher doesn’t do much to modify them for the 1960s, retaining both the 1930s setting of Wheatley’s novel and the upper class background of all the characters. Even Mocata as a Crowley knockoff is coded as an aristocrat, albeit one corrupted by his allegiance to Baphomet. De Richleau’s inevitable victory over Mocata is as much as affirmation of a particular idea of British landed gentry as it one of traditional Christianity over Satanism.
Horrendous politics aside, the movie’s pretty fun. Lee and Gray give characteristically committed performances and you get to see a giant tarantula menace our protagonists. And really, isn’t that what you want out of something like The Devil Rides Out?
oliveresque 