*NEW!* On this episodes annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999). A slow and cozy burn of paranoia through warm-lit and dusty streets, The Ninth Gate tells that classic tale of a bored and bitter book dealing mercenary who happens upon an ancient esoteric puzzle concealed in the pages of the text — a one shot, all-consuming mystery that many a mad man has tried to solve for centuries — but that Johnny Depp’s Robert/Dean/Lucas Corso might happen to solve instead through sheer divine apathy. (Albeit with a heavy green-eyed stalker assist). Curiously based on only half of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel, The Dumas Club, (and on the B plot of the novel at that), Polanski’s adaptation transforms Reverte’s postmodern parable about the dangers of of looking too closely at a text, into a modernist love letter to the practice of… looking too closely at a text.

Topics Include: Comparisons to The Dumas Club and the details from the novel that help shape the more esoteric parts of the film; the book market value of all those old tomes; the abstract tradition of Grimoires; the occult golden age of Prague; fallen angels, The Grigori , and other lesser diablos; the paradox of making a modernist film out of a postmodern source, and a (somewhat brief) history of the devil, or how satan(s) became Satan.

Episode Safeword: Salvation