When you look at the original 'Paradise Lost' film, you see three kids who can't defend themselves, being persecuted in a medieval way - witchcraft, satanic worship. It was kind of primitive.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'd read 'Paradise Lost' as an undergrad at university but remembered little about it. No, not true: I remembered few details, but carried with me with the persuasive arguments and pitiable dilemma of its arguable protagonist, Satan.
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
Is it not a grotesque civilization which sends missionaries across the sea to save the souls of the heathen, and yet permits conditions at home that debauch the children at our very doors?
The plain truth is that the period I study is the 16th century, and they were absolutely obsessed with witches and spiritual beings.
You can be precious about something like 'Blair Witch' and say, 'How dare you approach it as a sequel or remake' or whatever, but its legacy was so tarnished by 'Book of Shadows' that someone had to come in and do something in the spirit of the original.
Europe is so much the home of Horror, with its myths of vampires, werewolves, witchcraft and the undead, yet it's like those myths were exported to Hollywood, leaving Europe the room to develop a new tradition as a way of processing its traumas, particularly the two world wars.
Hollywood has done some of these films, and some of them are ginormous biblical movies, but you can tell the people making these are not invested in the truth of what those stories are biblically. It shows in the work.
The evil within the fantasy genre tends to be threatening to the heroes within the story, but not to the reader - or not to the viewer, in the case of cinema - and that's why I think it's more palatable and something that is more easily embraced for a lot of people.
Children are the keys of paradise.
Imagine: in the medieval ages, there was no evidence of how the history of mankind has been affected by witchcraft. But there is significant factual history of how brutality and sadism of mankind have been displayed in the most obscene manner in the name of witch-hunt.