The Great Satan

The Great Satan is an experimental film directed by the internet collective, Everything Is Terrible!. Known for their signature style of repurposing vintage VHS footage into new narratives, Everything Is Terrible! pushes the boundaries of video remixing most ambitiously with this unique project. The film delves into the more obscure crevices of American pop-culture, conjuring up a bizarre, hellish and frequently hilarious retelling of history and media through collage of discarded materials.

Comprised almost entirely of found footage, the Great Satan revels in the monumental task of stitching together over 2,000 satanic panic, religious, and grade-Z horror movies into a narrative that spans centuries, if not millennia. The story starts from the beginning of time and continues to the end of humanity, providing unusual and comic links between past, present, and future. Utilizing clips that are darkly funny, shockingly gruesome, and deeply perplexing, this film at once tells a story of our world while leaving the audience to ponder our collective cultural consciousness.

In true Everything Is Terrible! style, the recycled footage in the Great Satan is meticulously selected and cleverly aligned to paint the devil's portrait on a grand scale. The movie uses vintage clips from educational training videos, religious propaganda films, cheesy horror flicks, and home videos to manifest an impending apocalyptic world decoded from media archives. This experimental film is no typical horror comedy flick; it's an avant-garde cinematic piece that treads art, social commentary, and satire with an audacious charm.

The Great Satan's main triumph lies in its ability to blur the lines between mockery and tribute, condemnation and celebration. The clips are curated and rearranged in such a way that the film satirizes the very fear and fascination that society has with the idea of Satan, which permeates American pop culture, politics, and religion. At the same time, it unearths the treasure trove of forgotten and overlooked cinema, literature, and public consciousness horde, offering them a peculiar form of admiration.

At its core, the Great Satan provides commentary on the absurdity of moral panics and contextualizes the socio-cultural obsession with demonic themes. It exposes perceived fears as an innate part of human imagination, turning them into a unique spectacle. The film’s humorous and sometimes horrifying montage explores the origin of evil across religious and mythological frameworks, transgressing into societal fears of satanic influences. Presenting these sequences in rapid-fire montage, the collective functionality of these genres and formats becomes not just telling a narrative, but creating a symphony of chaos and laughter.

Everything Is Terrible! in no uncertain terms, pushes the boundaries of filmmaking and scriptwriting, crafting a narrative structure out of chaos. The Great Satan is their magnum opus of the avant-garde art that pushes the envelope of storytelling, subverting common perceptions, and challenging the viewer’s ideas of normalcy. The film particularly resonates with audiences who have a fascination for retro dread, a penchant for dark humor, and an appreciation for crazy, quick cut pastiche of eccentric, often disturbing, clips.

The Great Satan is unquestionably one-of-a-kind, a radiant testament to the influence of media and cinema on societal norms and beliefs. It's a film that ought to be celebrated not just for its humor and outlandishness, but for its apt articulation of mass anxieties and panics, repackaged in a way so engaging and funny, one cannot help but laugh along.

Beneath its ephemeral madness and seemingly absurd offering tossed at the viewer, lies an intuitive understanding of our cultural curiosities and paranoia. This is a film that requires multiple viewing to extract the layers of socio-cultural commentary camouflaged as chaotic mash-up videos. The Great Satan is not just a movie; it’s an experience thrown at you straight from the deepest pit of cultural obscurity. From the awkward '80s hair metal videos to crude amateur horror flicks, the film is a feast of weird, wonderful, and sometimes disturbing finds, which reminds us of the treasure troves that lay in the forgotten corners of media archives, waiting to be reinterpreted, remixed, and recycled.