There were few faces as recognizable to anyone with an interest in the occult as his was in the twentieth century. His clean-shaven head and piercing eyes got the attention of everyone from would-be disciples in the 1920s to rock stars in the 1960s.

Musicians like the Beatles put him on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper album and Ozzy Osborne used his name as the title of one of his songs. Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin was an ardent collector of his books, relics, and artifacts and he even bought the man’s home on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland – yes, that Loch Ness, where the monster lives.

But the former owner of that home was a monster of another kind. His name was Aleister Crowley, and he not only was a man closely linked to the Devil and the occult, but he also helped to shape the rabid interest in the occult that exploded in America decades after his death.

A family is slaughtered in their beds. No forced entry. No warning. The only timeline comes from what three children ate for dinner.

David Hendricks said he left town. Police said the clock told a different story.

Convicted. Overturned. Acquitted.

Four victims. No answers.

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American pop culture in the 1920s and 1930s was on the verge of a new sort of entertainment. Cultural shifts and breakthroughs in technology had led to a steady stream of new kinds of books, comics, music, and magazines, but it would be film that transformed popular culture forever. The ghostly images watched with strangers in the dark proved to be powerful enough to incite as well as to entertain.

Soon after films gained popularity, Americans began to use them to frame their history and their identity, as well as to literally project their fears and anxieties.

And among those fears were the fears of the Devil.

When the Devil first began to appear in early American movies, his story was part of a heavily Christianized moral lesson. The same couldn’t be said for Europe – where filmmakers were using satanic lore to create fantastic and uncanny imagery, but American films were much tamer and much more puritanical. They steered mostly clear of explicitly supernatural subjects and used theaters as fire and brimstone pulpits instead.

At first anyway… because as the imagery onscreen eventually began to reflect satanic themes, audiences responded and darker days for the cinema were soon on the way.