Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - September 19, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ● C3 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2025 For centuries, selling souls to Satan has been an irresistible metaphor Deal with the devil a compelling device L OS ANGELES — Since it first premièred in 1926, F.W. Murnau’s Faust has been lauded as one of the greatest silent films ever made. And in the century that’s followed, striking a deal with the devil has been one of cinema’s most enduring tropes. Him, the Jordan Peele-produced horror film in theatres now, is the latest testament to the fact that, in Hollywood at least, the devil’s offer never goes out of style. It tells the story of an aspiring professional football player, Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), who gets invited to train at a secluded compound under famed quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). But Cade eventually realizes what is meant by the question he keeps getting asked: “What are you willing to sacrifice?” “People are so fixated with the whole selling your soul to the devil and they really think that it’s a man in a suit who’s like, ‘Sign the dot- ted line,’” said Julia Fox, who plays White’s wife. “I think that selling your soul to the devil is a metaphor for sell- ing out and doing things that you don’t want to do, compromising your morals and values for a paycheque.” Like Him, Faustian stories in cin- ema are often billed as horror. Much like the literary and artistic retellings of the German fable, from Marlowe and Goethe to The Devil Went Down to Georgia, film adaptations span place, decade and genre — from the cult Keanu Reeves’ DC Comics adaptation, Constantine, to Brendan Fraser’s 2000 rom-com Bedazzled, a remake of the 1967 film of the same name that starred Raquel Welch. The devil can promise money — as in The Devil and Daniel Webster, the 1941 post-Great Depression takedown of greed — or fame, a la Jack Black’s 2006 musical comedy, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. “It’s pretty much everywhere once you start looking,” said Kirsten Thompson, a professor of film studies at Seattle University. “We all want to have eternal life or youth or power or status. And the various iterations of the myth sometimes emphasize differ- ent things.” Him isn’t even the first Faustian film set against the backdrop of sports. Damn Yankees, the 1958 adap- tation of the Bob Fosse-choreographed Broadway show, tells the story of a diehard baseball fan who makes a devilish pact to help his team. Murnau’s Faust legacy Although the 1926 Faust isn’t the oldest cinematic retelling of the legend — French filmmaker Georges Méliès made a handful of adaptations beginning in the 1890s — Murnau’s movie has the greatest legacy. “The film has these very striking set pieces that are, visually, enor- mously iconographic and influential on subsequent silent cinema, including American cinema,” Thompson said. Speaking with The Associated Press last year to promote his adaptation of Nosferatu (the original vampire tale was also made by Murnau, in 1922), Robert Eggers testified to the ways in which Faust has influenced him as a director. “Filmmaking — it didn’t really get better than that,” he said. Murnau’s Faust follows its titular protagonist, a faithful alchemist who despairs over a deadly, seemingly un- stoppable plague. He eventually meets the demon Mephisto — legend often refers to him as Mephistopheles — who convinces Faust to do a trial-run pact to renounce God in exchange for the power to help the infirm village. But Faust’s demonic deal is found out when a crowd realizes he cannot look upon a cross. Despondent, Faust plans to kill himself, but is stopped by Mephisto, who comes back with another offer: The demon will give the elderly alchemist back his youth. The quest for eternal youth was an important theme for Him director Jus- tin Tipping, who believes it is particu- larly apropos for a story about sports. “Essentially, what’s behind all these athletes’ actions is they’re trying to stop time,” he said. The devil you know Between the bargain for youth, blood rituals and a contract to sign, the Faustian and demonic allusions in Him aren’t exactly subtle, something Tipping saw as a storytelling tool. “There are a lot of references. Maybe too —” he stopped himself, laughing. “There’s a lot. But they all served, I think, the emotional arc for our characters and the themes that I was going after.” Tipping isn’t alone in forgoing subtlety in Faustian stories, which often opt for almost humorous literary callbacks. In the 1997 horror drama, The Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino plays John Milton — a lawyer, not the author of Paradise Lost. And in Angel Heart, the 1987 neo-noir thriller starring Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke, De Niro’s Satan goes by Louis Cyphre. “Even your name is a dime-store joke,” Rourke’s character scoffs when he realizes it’s a play on “Lucifer.” “‘Mephistopheles’ is such a mouthful in Manhattan,” Cyphre retorts taunt- ingly. Origins of the devil’s offer It’s unclear when exactly the idea that humans could strike a deal with the demonic materialized, according to Joseph Laycock, a professor of religion who studies Satanism and de- monic belief at Texas State University. The idea that a powerful supernat- ural being could grant wishes or help humans exists in pre-Islamic Arabic traditions, but most Western depic- tions of this kind of myth borrow from Christian theology. “Humans and demons each have something the other wants. We want this power. We want control over the natural world. The demons have it and we don’t. But the demons want our souls,” Laycock said. “The Faust legend is kind of ready to be told as soon as this Christian demonology emerges.” One clue into the origins of a Sa- tanic bargain lies within the Malleus Maleficarum, often translated as the Hammer of Witches, a 15th century German Catholic theological text on demonology. In it, God has limited Satan’s power, Laycock explained. But, “there’s this loophole. And the loophole is, if a demon makes a pact with a human, the demon gets to do all the stuff it couldn’t normally do.” This period around the Reformation was a “golden age” for possession, ex- orcism and witch-hunting in Europe, Laycock said, which sets the stage for the Faust legend to materialize. In the 1800s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe adapted the Faust story into a two- part tragic play, converting the Ger- man legend into a literary giant that would have tremendous influence on the Western world, Thompson argues. She compares Goethe’s cinematic influence to works from Shakespeare and stories such as Sherlock Holmes, which have also been repeatedly re- told. “Canonical works of literature in different languages are adapted over and over again,” she said. What’s in a name? The title of Tipping’s film is an obvi- ous ode to modern sports slang. Used by professional athletes includ- ing LeBron James and Joe Burrow, the phrase “I’m Him” is meant to connote a level of greatness. The G.O.A.T. — or “greatest of all time” — is another phrase exploited in Him, a fitting allusion given a goat’s some- times demonic associations. But Tipping won’t say if the film’s title is also pulling double duty for another acronym periodically used in pop culture as a euphemism for Satan — “His Infernal Majesty.” “I’ll plead the Fifth,” he laughed. — The Associated Press KRYSTA FAURIA KINO LORBER / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Gösta Ekman (left) plays the titular Faust and Emil Jennings the devil in the 1926 German film Faust. HIM ● FROM C1 Cameron (Cam) Cade grew up idolizing Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). As a boy, he watches White win a game on a highlight-reel play that also leaves the QB with a career-threatening injury. “That’s what real men do,” his father (Don Benjamin) tells him. “They make sacrifices.” Fourteen years later, Cam (Tyriq Withers) is on the cusp of entering the pros as a top draft pick. Just before the combine, though, Cam, while practising alone at night, is struck in the head by a strange pagan spir- it-slash-mascot that emerges out of the shadows. The trauma to the head adds a new risk to Cam’s football playing. But if you’re ex- pecting a horror version of 2015’s Concussion, that’s a small part of what Him aspires to be about. The Saviors reach out to Cam’s agent (Tim Heidecker) and offer a unique opportunity: Come to Isa- iah’s Texas desert compound to train with him for a week. Isaiah is still in the league and by now, despite the long-ago injury, has gone on to win a Tom Brady-like haul of championships. After a week, the Saviors will decided if they’ll draft Cam. But what follows over seven days is less a boot camp than a disorienting psychodrama — a kind of football ayahuasca — in which the very intense Isaiah pushes Cam to extremes to test whether he has it in him to be the GOAT. The atmosphere is surreal and the editing hallucinatory. Cam is injected with unknown se- rums, blood gets transfused and pocket-passing drills turn grisly. This is not a game, Cam is told more than once. To paraphrase Ted Lasso’s Dani Rojas, football is life (and maybe death, too). By settling the movie into Isa- iah’s Brutalist estate, Him takes what could have been something grander and turns it into effec- tively a battle for QB1 — albeit one with more primal underpin- nings than your average depth- chart contest. But it’s probably a bad sign for your satire if you have to take reality completely out of it and instead hole up inside a haunt- ed house. There are a few folks around, including Isaiah’s influ- encer wife (Julia Fox), but some- where far outside of the frame of Him is an enormous football world of arenas, screaming fans and broadcasters — the world that a movie like Any Given Sunday rushed to capture, not evade. Him ends up feeling like a gladiator movie that forgot the Colosseum. — The Associated Press UNIVERSAL PICTURES QB Isaiah White (Wayans) may owe his winning seasons to a deal with the devil. ‘We all want to have eternal life or youth or power or status. And the various iterations of the myth sometimes emphasize different things’ — Kirsten Thompson, a professor of film studies at Seattle University ARTS ● LIFE I MOVIES Japanese anime an amusement park ride from hell SIX years ago, a boy in a checkered green and black cloak found the dead bodies of most of his family mem- bers, murdered by the demon Muzan Kibutsuji (voiced by Toshihiko Seki). His sister Nezuko (Akari Kito), the sole survivor of the massacre, was turned into a demon. That boy, Tanjiro Kama- do (Natsuki Hanae), vowed to turn his sister human again. That first 2019 episode of the anime Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, based on the 23-volume sh nen manga by Koyoharu Gotouge and available to stream on Netflix and Crunchyroll, was the first cog that led to the events of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle. The film is the first of three high- ly anticipated blockbusters that will conclude the five-arc, 63-episode, 27-hour Japanese anime franchise about the battle for survival between humans and demons. Since Tanjiro lost his family, he’s joined and risen in the elite ranks of Demon Slayers, most of whom share similarly tragic backsto- ries that motivated them to train and fight through bruises, lacerations and broken bones. Infinity Castle starts off where the 2024 eight-episode Hashira Training Arc ends: Muzan is captured in an elaborate trap. But just as Tanjiro and the most powerful demon slayers pre- pare to strike Muzan, the demon sends all of the Demon Slayer Corps mem- bers to another underground realm through trap doors that lead inside a bottomless demon hideout. Whereas Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Mugen Train (2020), the previous movie in the fran- chise, animated a train that murdered people as they slept, Infinity Castle is a roller coaster, an animated amusement park ride from hell. It’s the elevator in Tower of Terror, suddenly dropping characters through a dizzying array of floors, lights and pulsating buildings into endless battles with demon swarms (which sometimes happen in midair). It’s a visual spec- tacle, a 155-minute fight-to-the-death battle anime held together by a series of emotional lows told in flashbacks covering the worst demons in each hero and villain’s past. This ride has three main floors: On one floor, you have the demon slayer Shinobu Kocho (Saori Hayami) facing Doma (Mamoru Miyano), the powerful demon who killed Shinobu’s sister. On another floor, you have unexpectedly serious demon slayer Zenitsu Agatsu- ma (Hiro Shimono), who seems more sombre and out of character since receiving a mysterious letter; he fights an upper rank human-turned-demon he once respected as an older brother. The main attraction, however, is Tanjiro and Giyu Tomioka’s (Takahiro Sakurai) hour-and-a-half-long battle with the demon Akaza (Akira Ishida), who killed one of Tanjiro’s mentors in the Mugen Train movie. While animation studio Ufotable’s colourful gladiator fight sequences are the main draw of Infinity Castle, the real emotional engine of this roller coaster are the flashbacks, which hu- manize both monster and men. Hikaru Kondo’s screenplay excels at highlight- ing each character’s motivations. Can they surpass their heroes in power and character and succeed in a way their role models could not? What promises would make a human persevere past the point of debilitating pain and enter an arena they know they are unlikely to survive? Infinity Castle isn’t an entirely satisfying movie. It throws you in the middle of action and then leaves you at the precipice of another drop. You know that not everyone will leave this adrenaline-filled thrill ride alive. Then the speed of the back-to-back battles doesn’t allow you enough time to grieve, mourn and process. But despite that, you still believe in the Davids among the impossible battle against immortal, regenerating, bloodsucking Goliaths. That’s what Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle excels at: capturing the undying hu- man spirit and its ability to persevere against adversity — to float instead of fall if only for a moment. — The Seattle Times QINA LIU MOVIE REVIEW DEMON SLAYER: KIMETSU NO YAIBA INFINITY CASTLE Starring: Saori Hayami and Takahiro Sakurai ● Grant Park, McGillivray, Regent, St. Vital ● 155 minutes ★★★★ out of five ANIPLEX/UFOTABL Tanjiro Kamado and Giyu Tomioka (right) face off against the demon Akaza. ;