Critical anthology on the films and cinematic philosophy of Kenneth Anger, published as part of the Cult Movie Files series.
Category: Curated
File Under: #AvantGardeCinema, #OccultFilm, #CultPublishing, #UndergroundHollywood
Description
Black Leather Lucifer is a critical reader devoted to the films of Kenneth Anger, compiled and edited by Jack Hunter and published by Glitter Books in 2012. The volume brings together essays, archival writing, and critical analysis situating Anger’s work within 20th-century underground cinema, occult practice, and Hollywood myth.
Anger’s films—Scorpio Rising, Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising—operate outside narrative cinema. They treat montage as structure, projection as event, and popular imagery as charged material rather than entertainment. Hollywood functions throughout his work as both source and adversary: its star system stripped of glamour and redeployed to expose the unstable relationship between audience, image, and power.
The book traces Anger’s position as a figure moving between worlds: author of Hollywood Babylon, associate of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, and a formative influence on later filmmakers, musicians, and artists. Rather than framing the work as provocation, the writing documents a consistent logic—cinema used deliberately, with belief in its consequences.
Softcover and text-dense, the book functions as reference material and companion object to Anger’s films, preserving how his work circulated through cult publishing and physical media rather than institutional film history.
Image credit: Photograph of Kenneth Anger by Mark Berry. Originally published in Interview Magazine, “Dream Dialogue: Gaspar Noé & Kenneth Anger,” October 19, 2010.
Critical anthology on the films and cinematic philosophy of Kenneth Anger, published as part of the Cult Movie Files series.
Category: Curated
File Under: #AvantGardeCinema, #OccultFilm, #CultPublishing, #UndergroundHollywood
Description
Black Leather Lucifer is a critical reader devoted to the films of Kenneth Anger, compiled and edited by Jack Hunter and published by Glitter Books in 2012. The volume brings together essays, archival writing, and critical analysis situating Anger’s work within 20th-century underground cinema, occult practice, and Hollywood myth.
Anger’s films—Scorpio Rising, Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising—operate outside narrative cinema. They treat montage as structure, projection as event, and popular imagery as charged material rather than entertainment. Hollywood functions throughout his work as both source and adversary: its star system stripped of glamour and redeployed to expose the unstable relationship between audience, image, and power.
The book traces Anger’s position as a figure moving between worlds: author of Hollywood Babylon, associate of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, and a formative influence on later filmmakers, musicians, and artists. Rather than framing the work as provocation, the writing documents a consistent logic—cinema used deliberately, with belief in its consequences.
Softcover and text-dense, the book functions as reference material and companion object to Anger’s films, preserving how his work circulated through cult publishing and physical media rather than institutional film history.
Image credit: Photograph of Kenneth Anger by Mark Berry. Originally published in Interview Magazine, “Dream Dialogue: Gaspar Noé & Kenneth Anger,” October 19, 2010.
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