Satanic Verses

I failed to watch the remake of the Omen, but last time I saw it I think I was about to enter high school, when Betamax still raged across the nation like wildfire and VHS was only starting to creep in like a thief in the night. Prior to that, my family patronized practically all the Amtyville Horror series. We usually invited our cousins along and scared ourselves silly. You know, blood dripping from the walls and the ceiling, demonic possessions, doppelgangers and poltergeists, we rented them all.

You see, when all your movie viewing habits were restricted to RPN 9’s Sunday’s Big Event or the weekend screening of awful Tony Ferrer-Vic Vargas starrers, as well as charity screenings of black-and-white cowboy movies provided by US soldiers at the community social hall, you’d understand our hankering for big-time Hollywood flicks.

Anyway, only my brother and I watched the Omen at home, at night as my parents and sister went to bed early. Considering that The Exorcist remained fresh in our minds, this one made me quite uneasy as well. The possibility of the Son of Satan walking the earth sent jitters down my spine and made the hair on my skin stand on its end. Worse part is, the tape had a double feature, a documentary about Satanic worship in the US. We couldn’t put it away, out of curiousity, and watched the grim feature about devil worshippers inside a dimly-lit make-shift church chanting Satanic verses and hugging cadavers. Awful, I couldn’t sleep at all.

Anyway all this talk about the devil apparently influenced the morality police to ensure kids’ or teen-agers’ musical choices were devil-free. Back masking, or playing records or cassette tapes on the other direction supposedly reveals the devil’s subliminal message on the listener, and thus, the pernicious influence could perhaps provide some light on the listener’s bad behavior and sinful lifestyle.

We were forced to listen to awful, grating sounds, very much like how a monster like Godzilla sounds in the movies, supposedly mouthing words with obvious references to the devil like Beelzebub, Satanic Prince, etc., in between gibberish and non-sense. In fact, Hotel California was a favorite target. The logic was that if you listened to it, then the devil’s message must have entered your sub-conscious.

I found it extremely stupid.

But since this period also saw the rise in popularity of the Spirit of the Glass (in the absence of an ouija board, you use an upturned empty glass over the cut-out alphabets spread on the table to communicate with spirits, and maybe even with demonic beings), and with Froilan providing the details about the mechanics, claiming he once participated in one session and thus personally attesting to its authenticity, my impressionable young mind simply believed just about anything.

In high school, we all thought a group of really brash and abrasive punks who listened to rock music like Hotel California, wore hi-cut boots, applied a little dark make-up for a gothic look and sported frizzy and spiky hair, were Satanists. They certainly fit the bill because they listened to devil-inspired music, had a fashion sense nobody appreciated except Satan himself and they belonged in the general section, meaning they weren’t particularly doing well in school. They must have neglected their homework in the service of Satan.

In addition, we assumed they must be congregating somewhere on a regular basis to worship Satan. Our imagination, especially Froilan’s, went wild. We thought that aside from doing drugs and booze and listening to rock music, they probably engaged in wild orgies at the cemetery, sort of like a tribute to Satan. Why the cemetery, well I don’t really know--the ditches in the pineapple fields were clearly out of the question-- but I guess they couldn’t possibly do it at home with their parents around.