The Great Beast - Legacy and Influence - in Popular Culture - in Cinema

In Cinema

Crowley has also had an influence in cinema. Photographs showing him on-set now in the Princeton University library confirm Crowley was hired in 1916 by Theodore and Leo Wharton, early filmmakers with a studio in Ithaca, New York, as a consultant on their film serial "The Mysteries of Myra" which featured a Crowley-like figure as the serial's occult-magician villain, initially depicted in a near-exact duplicate of a "Golden Dawn" costume including black triangular hat with golden triangle symbol. In the film series, members of the "Master's" cult perform occult rituals and spells wearing the triangle symbol and identify themselves to each other with the "thumbs-up" gesture depicted in the photograph attached to the top of this article. Crowley was also a major influence and inspiration to the work on the radical avant garde underground film-maker Kenneth Anger, especially his Magick Lantern Cycle series of works. One of Anger's works is a film of Crowley's paintings, and in 2009 he gave a lecture on the subject of Crowley. Bruce Dickinson, singer with Iron Maiden, wrote the screenplay of Chemical Wedding (released in America on DVD as Crowley), which features Simon Callow as Oliver Haddo, the name taken from the Magician-villain character in the Somerset Maugham book "The Magician", who was in turn inspired by Maugham's meeting with Crowley Spanish underground filmmaker Carlos Atanes started to shoot three feature films about Crowley unsuccessfully and finally he has published the screenplay Aleister Crowley in the Mouth of Hell in 2013. The Italian historian of esotericism Giordano Berti, in his book Tarocchi di Aleister Crowley (1998) quotes a number of films inspired by Crowley's life and legends. Some of the films are The Magician (1926) by Rex Ingram, based upon the eponymous book written by William Somerset Maugham (1908); Night of the Demon (1957) by Jacques Tourneur, based on the story "Casting the Runes" by M. R. James; and The Devil Rides Out (1968) by Terence Fisher, from the eponymous thriller by Dennis Wheatley. ref>Berti, Giordano; Negrini, Roberto; Tebani, Rodrigo (1998). I Tarocchi di Aleister Crowley (in Italian). Torino: Lo Scarabeo.

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