Butter and a pretty dress. Apparently, that’s all it took for young Puritan Thomasin to sell her soul to the devil. Even if we just isolated the scene of Black Phillip’s arrival from the rest of Robert Eggers‘ 2016 debut The Witch and read it just at face value, it would be powerful. The combination of vulnerability and desire that Anya Taylor-Joy plays as Thomasin, the sound design that sends Black Phillip’s whispered echoes across the room, thick shadows that fill the screen: all of that would be enough to make The Witch a memorable film.But within the context of the rest of the movie, Thomasin’s encounter with Black Phillip transcends the merely spooky and becomes sublimely terrifying. In the 10 years since Eggers released his movie, no other filmmaker has matched his depiction of the devil. Furthermore, no movie released in the more than 100 years of motion pictures that preceded The Witch had a more terrifying or more tempting look at Lucifer.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});The Eyes of Black PhillipThomasin conjures the devil 84 minutes into The Witch, with only nine minutes of runtime remaining. But Black Phillip makes his presence known throughout the entirety of the film. Most obviously, Black Phillip is the name of the ebony goat that lives on the farm with Thomasin and her family: father William (Ralph Ineson), mother Katherine (Kate Dickie), younger brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and the newborn Samuel. Banished for somehow being more judgmental than their Puritan peers, Thomasin’s family must settle outside of the community, at the edge of the woods in 1630s New England.hdFandango At Home$ 14.99sdFandango At Home$ 12.99sdFandango At Home$ 2.99hdFandango At Home$ 3.99Source: The goat Black Phillip stalks about the family camp and the twins taunt their sister about her name appearing in his book. But it’s the way the family treats one another that truly embodies the spirit of Satan, literally “the accuser.” Whether it’s Samuel’s disappearance at the start of the movie or the lust that Caleb feels when looking at his sister, Thomasin gets charged with all manner of wrong doing. As things grow worse, the family intensifies its blame towards Thomasin, claiming that she is a witch in league with Satan, and therefore she—not the arrogance of William and Katherine that got them expelled from the village—is the source of all their problems.Thus, when Thomas finally breaks and walks into the barn to summon Black Phillip, he is a welcome presence in her life. And that’s what sets Black Phillip apart from other cinematic Satans.Hell in HollywoodThe devil is certainly nothing new to cinema. Even before the popularization of synchronized sound, Satan appeared in the 1922 psuedo-documentary Häxan and in F. W. Murnau’s adaptation of Faust. The devil has manifested as everything from the folksy Mr. Scratch in 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster to primordial space ooze in John Carpenter‘s inexplicable Prince of Darkness (1987) to an exhausted Peter Stormare in Constantine (2005).In most cases, movies portray the devil as some ultimate, almost impersonal evil. Such is the case with the winged figure that ascends in the “Night on Bald Mountain Segment” from Fantasia (1940) or the unconvincing CGI that Al Simmons faces at the climax of Spawn (1997). However, the devil is most interesting when he appears as a tempting trickster, something that wants to enter into a bargain with the protagonist. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino played sweaty versions of this Satan in Angel Heart (1987) and The Devil’s Advocate (1997), respectively, and Max von Sydow puts a playful spin on it for 1993’s Needful Things.Perhaps the most well-known cinematic Satan combines both of these qualities. Jack Nicholson portrays Daryl Van Horne in George Miller‘s 1987 comedy The Witches of Eastwick. Miller and screenwriter Michael Cristofer amp up the sensuality and Protestant guilt of the John Updike novel, making Nicholson’s devil into a crazed schmoozer who injects some excitement into the lives of three banal women. In fact, it was that very banality, the fact that these very ordinary women would join up with Satan that made The Witches of Eastwick compelling, even if the combination of Nicholson, Miller, and Updike proved to be less than the sum of its parts.While all of these depictions have their strong points, none of them are as insidious as Black Philip in The Witch.Many Hands Doing the Devil’s WorkThe arrival of Black Phillip (Daniel Malik as a human, Charlie as a goat) is marked not by fire or brimstone or anything so dramatic. Rather, it is marked by questions. “What dost thou want?” he asks first, before offering two suggestions: “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress?” And then he sums up all his offers with the final question, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”To a certain degree, anyone who has sold their souls to Satan onscreen has done so for a delicious life. Faust gains youth, the Eastwick women an ideal man, Tommy Johnson of O Brother Where Art Thou? learns to play guitar. Next to these rewards, butter seems boring.But that’s the point. Black Phillip offers Thomasin not things, but something deeper, something that she’s been lacking throughout the entire film. For the first time, her desires and actions receive acknowledgment. For the first time, she feels as if she has a choice in a matter. And if the devil is the one person who will accept her choices, then she’ll take the devil.Of course, Black Phillip didn’t put Thomasin in this position. It was her mother and father, her siblings, everyone else who told Thomasin that she was evil. They did the devil’s work by denouncing her from the start of the film.But that’s the power of Eggers’s depiction. Black Phillip isn’t just a single big bad who must be resisted. Rather, he’s only the manifestation of a hatefulness running all through the family. The evil spreads wider and deeper than any one person or thing could contain. It lives inside each of Thomasin’s family members, it lives inside the goat that watches her on the farm, and it lives inside of Thomasin herself, waiting for when the accusations and mistrust finally break her. Then, the devil is ready with butter, a pretty dress, and so much more.The post Ten Years Ago, The Witch Gave Us the Best Cinematic Satan appeared first on Den of Geek.