In this peerless early 14th-century description of life after death, the final one of the concentric spheres of hell is presided over by the devil. But he is impotent, encased up to chest height in ice, with one head but three faces, all of them weeping as he chews in each of his jaws a notorious sinner – Judas Iscariot, Jesus’s betrayer, and Brutus and Cassius, conspirators against Caesar. In contrast to depictions of the devil in Dante’s day as a cunning foe ready to prey on human weakness, his Lucifer is strikingly modern, a metaphor for nothingness, all hype and menace but no delivery Photograph: Public Domain
It was the 17th-century Puritan poet John Milton who produced the first psychologically compelling portrait of the devil, no longer the sly predator but (initially, at least) an edgy seductive hero. With his fine words, theatricality and swagger, the only physical sign of the evil within is the lightning scar on his face. In a device that is now all too familiar, the devil is first built up by Milton – “he above the rest/In shape and gesture proudly eminent/Stood like a tow’r” - and then debunked as a washed-up idealist turned cynical and out for revenge: “dismay mixt with obdurate pride and steadfast hate” Photograph: Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis
The mainstream churches may have made the devil all but redundant in the 20th century, but he found an alternative role in horror books and films. The cult novelist Dennis Wheatley was a regular employer, and his The Devil Rides Out was brought to the big screen by Hammer Films in 1967. A rich young man (Patrick Mower) is sucked into a Satanic ring and has to be rescued by Christopher Lee from a devil figure bedecked with every Christian cliche from the past 2000 years. Blood sacrifices, nocturnal orgies and witchcraft combine to dress/camp up an otherwise routine thriller Photograph: Public Domain
Child actress Linda Blair played a possessed 12-year-old in The Exorcist, but it was Hollywood veteran Mercedes McCambridge who provided the voice of the devil within the young girl’s body (though she was missed off the credits). The combination of looks and sound deeply disturbed cinemagoers in 1973. A tale of good versus evil, science versus religion, it was purportedly based on a true story, and is the biggest grossing horror film of all time. It came as part of a run of “demonic child” movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the others being Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen Photograph: Allstar
Depictions of the devil were everywhere in medieval times, but the early 13th-century Codex Gigas – the largest medieval manuscript in existence – stands out. The story goes that a Czech monk, challenged to copy out a whole Bible in one night or spend the rest of his life walled in his cell, supposedly sold his soul to the devil to accomplish the task. The almost two-foot-tall picture of Satan, said to have been completed by the grateful monk, has a peculiar menace down not only to its sheer size, but also to its piercing eyes and claw-like hands, stretching out as if to drag you in Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Mikhail Bulgakov began his novel The Master and Margherita in 1928 but it wasn’t published until 1966 because the authorities in the Soviet Union regarded it as an attack on their whole political system. Bulgakov’s sinister and distinctly satanic Woland ponders the need for evil in the world to prompt goodness and conclude that evil is part of the human condition. The devil in modern disguise, Woland asks “where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?” A memorable part of his retinue is a fast-talking black cat called Behemoth, named after one of the Old Testament monsters Photograph: PR
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky pictured a memorable and modern version of the devil as the high-born gentleman, fallen on hard times, who appears to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. His trick is to present no obvious sign of being the evil one, yet to carry with him an unsettling air. “This was a person… of a particular kind, no longer young… with rather long, still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with grey and a pointed beard… He had no watch, but he had a tortoiseshell lorgnette on a black ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand was a massive gold ring with a cheap opal stone in it” Photograph: PR
For those slow to spot the Lucifer in Robert De Niro’s character Louis Cyphre in this 1987 film, the sight of the great man munching raw eggs and looking out impassively from behind his pointy beard should have given them the extra nudge to make the connection. A supernatural thriller, it pits the devil against Mickey Rourke’s seedy PI, Harry Angel, as the latter searches out someone who has sold his soul but reneged on the deal. In the final scene, Angel descends to hell in an ancient lift. Voodoo, contemporary satanism and even cannibalism all embellish the devil legend in Alan Parker’s bleak moral fable Photograph: SNAP/Rex Features
Donald Pleasence’s portrait of the Devil as the apparently amiable, slippery and ultimately sinister “dark hermit” was judged one of the few successes among a bevy of star-name cameos in George Stevens’s much-derided 1965 big-budget religious epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. Pleasence took liberties with the gospels to have the Devil in human disguise egging on the crowd to call for Max von Sydow’s Jesus to be crucified. Pleasance’s ready association in cinemagoers’ mind with the Devil may have helped land him the part of Bond villain Blofeld two years later in You Only Live Twice Photograph: PR
Medieval mystery plays often treated the devil as a comic character rather than God’s terrifying cosmic adversary, and Jack Nicholson’s film-stealing performance as Daryl Van Horne in the 1987 screen adaptation of John Updike’s novel was heavy on the humorous side of being the personification of evil in small town America. As he beds, impregnates and then brings out the witch in three local single women - Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer – Nicholson is so clearly loving every minute of it, all wicked grins and comedy menace, that it is hard to take seriously the trio’s fightback against their seducer Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
