Feature Writer: William Hjortsberg
Feature Title: The Black Mass in “Falling Angel”
Link #1: Fallen Angel by William Hjortsberg
Link #2: Angel Heart
Note from XP: I am thinking about doing an adaption of this story — I need to read the book Falling Angel and re-watch the movie Angel Heart first — but I think it has a lot of potential? What do you think?
The Black Mass in “Falling Angel”
The novel Falling Angel (1978) by William Hjortsberg (later made into a motion picture directed by Alan Parker titled Angel Heart), outlines a Black Mass held in an abandoned New York City Subway stop with all of the basic ritual elements intact: a virgin, led onto a stage by two male acolytes clad only in loose loincloths is spreadeagled on an altar holding two black candles (made of the human fat of sacrificed babies) in out stretched hands. At the outset of the ceremony she is kissed on vagina and/or anus by the priest. The Catholic, Latin Roman mass is commenced and read backwards and mockingly in unspecified order throughout. A human baby, naked, is delivered by the acolytes and held aloft by the priest, its throat is slit with a ceremonial knife as the sacrifice and the blood is shaken out to an assembled crowd. Consecrated host wafers are flung out to the crowd to be stomped and urinated upon. The virgin/altar is then violated by the priest and a sexual frenzy among the congregation ensues in response.
Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg (1978)
Hard-boiled crime writers like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler were vastly influential on a whole range of twentieth century literature, except, I think, horror fiction. With their post-Hemingway style of terseness and understatement they seem to be the antithesis of horror writing. While these authors got their start in the pulp magazines of the pre-WW2 era just like HP Lovecraft, it’s only been within the last ten or fifteen years that Lovecraft has been taken seriously by more mainstream academics, literary critics, and taste-makers, while those crime novelists have been lauded for decades.
But I don’t think it was until Falling Angel (Fawcett Popular Library 1982 edition above) that the genres of hard-boiled crime and horror met, thanks to author William Hjortsberg. He has said he came up with the idea when in high school, winning an award for a short story whose first lines were “Once upon a time, the devil hired a private detective.” Brilliant.
Set in a wonderfully-depicted New York City 1959, Falling Angel is the story of hard-boozing private detective Harry Angel (“I always buy myself a drink after finding a body. It’s an old family custom”), hired by the mysterious Mr Cyphre to find the missing ’40s crooner Johnny Favorite, a big band star very much like Sinatra. Horribly injured physically and psychologically while serving as an entertainer in the war, Johnny ends up in a VA hospital, but then disappears one night…
Angel tracks down Johnny’s former doctor, who then turns up dead; next Angel speaks to an old band member of Johnny’s, “Toots” Sweet (but of course) who tells him Johnny was mixed up in voodoo and the black arts, can you dig it, and crossed ethnic barriers no one dared cross in the 1940s when he became the lover of a voodoo priestess. Toots ends up dead too. Horribly dead. You get the picture. Angel ends up involved with the priestess’s daughter, Epiphany Proudfoot, a carnally-driven young woman who believes acrobatic sex is how we speak to the voodoo gods. Awesome.
There’s more; much more. Falling Angel is, in a word, spectacular. It’s inventive while playing by the “rules” of detective fiction; it’s appropriately bloody and violent; its unholy climax in an abandoned subway station is effectively unsettling and graphic. Hjortsberg knows his hard-boiled lingo and the New York of the time and makes it all believable. This is no humorous pastiche or parody; it’s a stunning crime novel bled through with visceral horrors of the most personal and, in the end, damning kind.
Plot and adaption to the 1987 movie — Angel Heart
Johnny Favorite, a popular crooner before and during the Second World War, has not been seen or heard of since he was critically wounded during a 1943 Luftwaffe raid on Allied forces in Tunisia. In 1959, private investigator Harry Angel is hired to locate him on behalf of a mysterious client who calls himself Louis Cyphre. During his investigation, Angel finds himself enmeshed in a disturbing occult milieu.
The book was adapted into a 1987 mystery-thriller film entitled Angel Heart starring Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, and Lisa Bonet. It was also adapted into an opera by J. Mark Scearce to a libretto by Lucy Thurber. Titled Falling Angel, it premiered at the Brevard Music Center on June 30, 2016, after having initially been commissioned by the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York.
Angel Heart is a 1987 American neo-noir psychological horror film and an adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel. Written and directed by Alan Parker, the film stars Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet and Charlotte Rampling. Harry Angel (Rourke), a New York City private investigator, is hired to solve the disappearance of a man known as Johnny Favorite. Angel’s investigation takes him to New Orleans, where he becomes embroiled in a series of brutal murders.
Following publication of the novel, Hjortsberg began developing a screenplay for a film adaptation, but found that no film studio was willing to produce his script. The project resurfaced in 1985, when producer Elliott Kastner brought the book to Parker’s attention. Parker began work on a new script and in doing so made several changes from Hjortsberg’s novel. He also met with Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna, who agreed to finance the $18 million production through their independent film studio Carolco Pictures. Filming took place on location in New York and New Orleans, with principal photography lasting from March 1986 to June of that year.
Before its release, Angel Heart faced censorship issues from the Motion Picture Association of America for one scene of sexual content. Weeks before its theatrical release, Parker was forced to remove ten seconds of footage to avoid an X rating and secure the R rating that the film’s distributor Tri-Star Pictures wanted. An unrated version featuring the removed footage was later released on home video. Angel Heart received positive reviews but under-performed at the North American box office, grossing seventeen million dollars during its theatrical run.