I decided to watch The Ninth Gate (1999) last night for Halloween. I’ve been interested in satanism and how elites use it for a while now, and this movie is all about that—and it’s directed by Roman Polanski, the guy who made Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the best movie about elite satanism ever. I view Polanski’s movies about satanism as in part just straightforward information about what really goes on in elite circles—these people often like to reveal their evil to the masses. They get off on it. Polanski is, I think, a satanist, an elite, a demonic force, and a shameless one who is proud of his evil. Rosemary’s Baby is an excellent movie—very grounded and subtle yet dealing with the most metaphysical themes. The Ninth Gate is nowhere near as good—he had lost much of his talent in the 30 years since Rosemary’s Baby (although he did make The Pianist a few years after The Ninth Gate, which was a very praised film, but I digress).

The Ninth Gate is interesting in a few different ways. Just on the level of form and style, it’s very odd—it feels like a 1970s movie, even though it came out in 1999. It’s very slow paced, a meandering detective story, much like Polanski’s acclaimed 1974 Chinatown. It almost feels deliberately slow and not intended to mesh with how fast movies have become to satisfy decreasing modern attention spans. Johnny Depp stars, and basically does a Jack Nicholson from Chinatown impression (which is not a bad thing). He’s cool and aloof and just about business but ends up getting sucked into the case and caring about it deeply. He thinks satanism is a bunch of bullshit at first, but that changes by the end.

One issue with The Ninth Gate is that it feels very chintzy and cheap—not like a real Hollywood production. Polanski is banned from entering the United States, as most people know, because of a rape conviction in 1977 (the crime occurred at Jack Nicholson’s house, though Jack wasn’t there at the time). So, he can’t make his movies in Hollywood anymore, and it shows. The Ninth Gate is set mostly in Paris where Polanski has lived in exile since the 1970s. (Early scenes are set in New York, but it doesn’t feel like New York at all). Europe in general to me feels very dilapidated, small, and cheap—even the roads are puny, the cars are tiny, the hotels look like crap. There are some fight scenes that are insanely bad, and some blood effects that look like ketchup. It’s just no fun to look at.

One of the worst things about the film is the music—it is laughably bad. There are lots of moments where Polanski tries to ramp up tension and suspense with jangling, nerve-wracking music, but it sounds so wildly amateurish, like some midi crap that you’d make as a joke. The other glaring issue with the movie is the female lead—who has no name and is just called The Girl—is played by an actress, Emmanuelle Seigner, who is so amateurish it was kind of unbelievable. I couldn’t understand why she was in the movie—then I looked her up and sure enough she married Polanski in 1989, so that’s why she’s in his movie. She must be some kind of model who turned into an actress—her line delivery is beyond wooden. Yet on some level she works, because she has this very cold, demonic sort of beauty to her, which is fitting for her character.

The movie was received lukewarmly—critics praised the atmosphere and craft of the filmmaking, and Depp’s performance, but they felt it was meandering and lacked much of a payoff. I think they missed a lot of what’s really going on.

I want to talk about the nature of elite satanism that the movie depicts, which is valuable because, since it’s a Polanski movie, it’s coming from someone who has close ties to that world. Depp plays Dean Corso, a book detective (apparently that used to be a job). He has a reputation amongst the elite book collector world for being effective and for crossing any lines for the right price. A wealthy Manhattan satanist named Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) hires Corso to track down a book from the year 1666 called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. It was written by author Aristide Torchia, and allegedly dictated to him by Satan himself. (Torchia was burned at the stake for writing the book). According to legend, the book contains the power to summon Satan himself—and give its owner the power to unleash Hell on earth. Balkan recently acquired one copy of the book, and there are two others out there in the world. He wants Corso to find those other two copies, so he can verify that his own copy is authentic, by checking it against them. (Spoilers from here on).

So Corso tracks down the other two copies. The owner of one of them, Baroness Kessler, gives Corso some background about the copy that Balkan owns. He had just bought it from Andrew Telfer, a wealthy book collector, shortly before Telfer killed himself. Telfer’s widow, a much younger, mysterious woman named Liana Telfer, wants the book back. She is part of a Satanic cult filled with the most elite people in the world, and they need the book to use it in their sex rituals. The Baroness has no respect for those people—she says that they don’t really understand the power of satanic rituals, and they just use it as an excuse to indulge their “jaded sexual appetites.” When she learns that Corso has been hired by Balkan, she immediately stops talking to him and orders him out. She knows that Balkan is bad news. She respects him more than the dilettantes who just want to have orgies, but he is too serious. The Baroness is serious about satanism, but she uses her knowledge, as she says, to make millions writing books about it—not actually trying to summon Satan’s power.

And she’s right! Turns out that Balkan was using Corso to track down the other copies of the books, not so that he could cross check the authenticity of his own copy against them, but so that he could steal images from them, to add to his own, and complete his set—he needs nine images that are spread across the three books to unlock the power of Satan. The secret of Satan was spread across three books, not just contained in one. Once Corso found the owners of the two other books, Balkan (or one of his henchmen), would kill them and take what he needed.

But Liana Telfer used her feminine wiles to sneak into Corso’s hotel room while he was out, and steal his copy of the book. Since it’s Paris, she just charmed the concierge and went right up. When Corso realizes the book is gone, he asks the concierge if anyone went up to his room, and the concierge says: “just your wife, very chic, very elegant.” Corso yells: “I don’t have a wife!” (He did fuck Liana earlier in the movie though).

So Liana has the book and brings it to her aristocratic manor in the French countryside, where her elite satanist friends are gathered. They begin their cult ritual and do some chanting of passages from the book—all just as a pretext to do some weird orgy shit. Corso tracks them down (The Girl has been helping him whenever he needs it, and she has preternatural abilities to fight, steal cars, whatever he needs in a given situation). Corso is about to confront them, when Balkan storms in, accuses them all of just saying mumbo jumbo and not understanding the power of the book. He chokes Liana to death in front of all the cultists, and they run away, cowardly. Then Balkan goes off to a secluded ancient castle, with all nine engravings, to begin the final ritual to unlock Satan’s power.

This part is interesting to me because it feels like it illustrates a realistic division among the elites who practice satanism—most of them don’t really understand it or care about it, they just like the secrecy of it, and view it as a way to have weird orgies. But then there are the true believers, like Balkan, who believe in the true power of satanism, and want to wield it. Those types would have little patience for the scenesters who just want to do sex stuff. The way that this scene unfolded has an aura of authenticity to it that was striking to me—like Polanski was drawing on his own insights and experiences with the real life world of elite satanic sex cults.

Okay—the conclusion: Corso follows Balkan to his castle hideout, where he summons Satan. At this point, Balkan feels like he is already omnipotent, so he allows Corso to watch the ritual. It feeds his ego. He feels it working, he feels the power of Satan flowing through him.

In his lust for power, he douses himself in gasoline and lights himself on fire—believing that the flames won’t hurt him, because he is one with Satan. This seems to work for a moment…but then he begins howling in pain. Something is wrong. He burns to death. Corso escapes. It turns out that one of Balkan’s engravings was a forgery—not the real thing—so the ritual failed.

Some more scenes of detective work go by, and Corso finds the correct final engraving. Now he has all nine. He ends up going back to the castle…to summon Satan. That’s how it ends. Corso had never been a satanist, but his involvement in the occult led him to have this power. He could have just destroyed all the engravings and that would be that. But it’s not likely he did that. The movie ends with him going into the castle…he might just destroy the engravings instead of using them. But that’s not really suggested by the final image:

To paraphrase Nietzsche: He gazed into the abyss for too long, and he became the abyss—he wrestled with monsters and he became one. Even though his intentions were not to summon Satan, it seems that is what is going to happen. And perhaps this is precisely what made him succeed where others had failed—he didn’t want the power, and so he got it.

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