I finally watched Ready or Not 2, and (it was great) but in the middle of it it got my brain churning about this horror book I read in the 80s but possibly written in the 70s about a woman who falls in love with a guy who claims to be the reincarnation of Gilles de Rais, and they're like on this secluded island and she has to escape, or anyway that's what my childhood memory was.
There was nothing really remarkable about the story, just that it was where I first learned about Gilles de Rais and so there was a lot of satanic references from what I remember, anddd anyway over the years I've occasionally reached out to all the major horror book forums and collectors and no one ever did know what book I was talking about which was frustrating because I wanted to count it on my goodreads lol, anyway.
So back to the movie, sort of, while I was watching it, I also remembered this not bad satanic movie I'd seen as a teenager, that had that chick from the "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" commercials, Rachael Leigh Cook, and I mean I know people knew her from a lot of other stuff, but for me, it was those commercials with smashing the egg with the pan lol, ok so anyway..
I had to go hunt about it, because I remembered it was about this pretty interesting concept surrounding a prophecy concerning genetics and so I found it and rewatched it, btw it's called The Eighteenth Angel, and oh I really didn't realise how much this movie influenced what kind of stories I want to tell lol, it's from 1997 but if you're interested and you need to go down a satanic spiral, it has young Stanley Tucci, and it's written by the dude who wrote The Omen, and you see a lot of parallels but really it's pretty good! Except that the prophecy is supposed to be from the Etruscans which is kind of silly to link Etruscans with satanism since while they had a deeply chthonic religion centered on the afterlife, featuring an extensive pantheon of underworld deities and psychopomps (soul guides), their worship wasn't satanic centered, but alas...
Also you might have a hard time watching Christopher McDonald as a horror lead but it works and there's a lot of really interesting concepts in it, the part that was the hardest for me to believe was satanic cats (but hey it's not their fault they've been mutated, so), but it's got that plus some cultist monks doing genetic experiments with children's bodies, and they need 18 children (because 6+6+6 = 18) to fulfill their prophecy. So I took a break from watching Ready or Not 2, to watch it, lol, because my brain, then I went back to watching Ready or Not 2.
And remembered that the book I was thinking about that was eluding me I think had the word "Rite" in it, so I stopped Ready or Not 2 to go spend several hours trying again to hunt the book down, because I hate that no one knows what fucking stupid book I'm talking about, welllllll so it turns out, wait hold on, I also wanted to say about The Eighteenth Angel movie that Rachael Leigh Cook levitates above her hospital bed, just like Linda Blair does in The Exorcist, haha.
Okay back to the book search, soo, many hours later because I was relentless, it turns out that there were TWO highly obscure 1970s/1980s paperbacks that match the "woman trapped on a horror island for sacrifice" trope, though they blend the Gilles de Rais lore slightly differently, while I was thinking about the book with the possible word "rite" in it, I remembered how much I enjoyed Anthony Hopkin's 2011 movie, "The Rite", if you never saw it, Anthony Hopkins plays Father Lucas, an unconventional, veteran exorcist in Rome who takes a skeptical young seminarian under his wing, forcing the student to confront the dark realities of demonic possession, and so I had to stop everything to rewatch that.
Oh btw the skeptical young seminarian reminds me of Simon from Firefly, but I digress, oh and in Anthony Hopkin's memoir, We Did Okay, Kid, he mentions that he adopted one of the cats that was in the movie and how much he loved that cat. Sorta made me cry right there. I think Anthony Hopkins might be autistic, actually. Anyway so I finished that and went back to the book hunt.
Okay what I discovered was that there was a book that really matched what I remembered but it had a different title, "The Unholy something", and so at first I was like no no wait no I don't remember that, but it turns out it was originally called "The Rite" in 1979 but it was later changed in 1984, and the guy who wrote it was writing under a pen name and then right out of the pulp era, "The Rite" gets turned into "The Unholy Smile" by a different author's name! So I finally found it! I was so relieved when I discovered it matched what I remembered about the wealthy sadist obsessed with historical alchemy and the blood rituals of Gilles de Rais, and could finally mark it read in Goodreads.
But anyway I loved Ready or Not 2.
