< chamber GEMS OF THE OCCULT CINEMA ========================= 2026-06-26 > …Abracadabra > Liber Medicinalis [1] from Quintus Serenus The other day, I saw a friend post on a very interesting forum asking about esoteric and occult films. Since we had only known each other for a short while, I thought it was better not to dive too deeply into the subject at the time. But today I felt like writing about it. So I’m going to list five films in which the theme of the occult is not merely decorative, but deeply rooted. A quick note: this is not a best-to-worst ranking. It is just the order in which I remembered them as I was writing. I - A DARK SONG A Dark Song’s movie poster This is probably one of the most serious modern films when it comes to occult ritual. The story revolves around a woman who hires an occultist to conduct a long, isolated, and exhausting magical operation. Its central reference is the so-called Abramelin Operation, associated with The Book of Abramelin, whose aim, in certain Western magical traditions, is to attain knowledge and conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. The IMDb FAQ for A Dark Song also identifies the ritual this way, as coming from the real Book of Abramelin the Mage. The film understands something that a lot of horror does not: ritual is not just candles, Latin, and pentagrams. It is repetition, deprivation, discipline, cleansing, paranoia, obedience, and psychological erosion. It is slow because, within its own logic, a ritual of this kind should be slow. Anyone looking for easy scares will probably find it dragging. Anyone looking for actual occult cinema will find plenty to sink their teeth into. IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/ [2] II - The Wicker Man The Wicker Man’s movie poster Although it is very well known within cult horror circles, it is not a blockbuster, and it remains an essential piece of cinema. The film is basically a dramatic study of the clash between puritanical Christianity and communal paganism. What makes it interesting is that the horror does not come from the night, from shadows, or from the classical idea of the demon. It comes from the sun, music, dance, harvest, and the religious logic of an entire community. The fertility rites, the seasonal references, the obsession with agricultural renewal, and the final human sacrifice make the film one of the pillars of folk horror. It is not “realistic” in a documentary sense, but it draws from real European traditions, especially spring festivals and rural pagan imagery. The Wicker Man is directly built around May Day celebrations, pagan worship, crop failure, fertility rites, and human sacrifice, which is exactly why it became such a central reference for folk horror. NOTE: the remake is a karmic punishment. IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/ [3] III - Häxan Häxan’s movie poster Häxan is a strange one: part documentary, part visual essay, part expressionist nightmare. The film stages medieval beliefs about witches, demonic pacts, sabbaths, possession, and inquisitorial torture, while also trying to explain some of those accusations as the product of ignorance, fear, repression, and social pathologizing. For 1922, it is absurdly bold. IMDb describes it as a fictionalized documentary about the evolution of witchcraft, from pagan roots to its later confusion with hysteria, which is pretty much the point of its whole structure. The occult value here is not in “real rituals” being reproduced with precision, but in the way the film visually organizes the European demonological imagination: cauldrons, demons, night flights, pacts, obscene kisses, forced confessions, and the whole symbolic machinery of Christian fear. Criterion also notes that Christensen built the film from long research into witchcraft and the persecution of accused witches in Western culture, and that is exactly why it still feels less like a simple horror film and more like a cursed illustrated thesis. IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013257/ [4] IV - The Devils The Devils movie poster The film dramatizes the Loudun possessions in seventeenth-century France, involving Father Urbain Grandier and accusations of witchcraft. It is not “romantic” occultism. It is occultism used as a political, sexual, and institutional weapon. Ken Russell turns exorcism, religious repression, and demonological accusation into a grotesque opera about power. The British Council describes The Devils as a dramatized account of Grandier’s fall after the supposed possessions in Loudun, with Sister Jeanne des Anges helping ignite the accusations. The ritual here is less “magical” than social: the Church, the State, and the crowd perform a belief until it becomes a sentence. IMDb’s plot summary also frames the story around Grandier’s political conflict and the witchcraft accusation that destroys him, which is exactly why the film feels less like a supernatural horror story and more like a public execution staged as theology. It is brutal, hysterical, and still deeply uncomfortable. IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066993/ [5] V - Lucifer Rising Lucifer Rising movie poster Kenneth Anger does not use occultism as a subject; he makes cinema as ritual. Lucifer Rising is short, but it is probably more genuinely “occult” than most feature-length horror films. The film is tied to Aleister Crowley, Thelema, Egyptian iconography, Luciferian invocation, and magical symbolism. IMDb’s own plot summary describes it as Egyptian gods summoning Lucifer in order to usher in a new occult age, which is blunt, but accurate. The film does not work like a conventional narrative. It works more like a sequence of initiatory images. Anger’s broader work was openly shaped by Thelema and by Crowley’s idea of the Aeon of Horus, and Lucifer Rising sits right inside that symbolic universe. The presence of people like Marianne Faithfull, Jimmy Page, and Bobby Beausoleil only reinforces its character as a countercultural and occult artifact from the late 1960s and 1970s. Beausoleil’s soundtrack history alone is practically its own cursed footnote. IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066019/ [6] I was tempted to maybe write five more, but so this post doesn’t get too long, I’ll leave them for a next part. Hehe. See you soon. Links: [1] https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/quintus-serenus-liber-medicinalis/fAGBmLhWW99n0g?hl=en [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/ [3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/ [4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013257/ [5] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066993/ [6] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066019/ < chamber < the skull