Why Angel Heart still haunts us 30 years on

“No mat­ter how clev­er­ly you sneak up on a mir­ror, your reflec­tion always looks you straight in the eye.” This is one of the many philo­soph­i­cal sound bites offered up by Robert De Niro’s enig­mat­ic, wealthy pup­pet mas­ter Louis Cyphre to shab­by pri­vate detec­tive Har­ry Angel (Mick­ey Rourke). Wrapped up in the weird­ness of this line is the key to direc­tor Alan Parker’s bizarre mar­riage of noir and hor­ror in his 1987 film Angel Heart.

Rarely have the words ​‘psy­cho­log­i­cal’, ​‘hor­ror’ and ​‘neo-noir’ slot­ted togeth­er so neat­ly, although admit­ted­ly it ini­tial­ly seems like a pret­ty hell­ish cock­tail. Yet hell­ish is the chief aes­thet­ic in a sto­ry of miss­ing per­sons and ancient cults with an under­cur­rent of blood­lust, all of which Rourke’s Angel finds him­self caught square­ly at the cen­tre of.

A pri­vate detec­tive by trade, Angel inhab­its a famil­iar noir set­ting – his desk lit­tered with ash trays and cov­ered in dossiers of the liv­ing and the dead; his suits drab and ill-fit­ting. He is some­one we imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fy with. A reg­u­lar Joe. A guy who drinks, smokes, is prone to mak­ing sar­cas­tic quips and, occa­sion­al­ly, snoop­ing around Brook­lyn ten­e­ments on the trail of né’er-do-wells.

But Angel’s every­man per­sona soon becomes dis­tort­ed as he is approached by De Niro’s Cyphre, a strange fig­ure who invites Angel to find an old blues barfly from before the war named John­ny Favourite. Already we’re firm­ly in Damon Run­y­on ter­ri­to­ry, a land of nick­names and croon­ers with ties to the mafia all along Broad­way. But Angel Heart has none of the wit or pomp of its ear­li­er antecedents and denies any com­fort in the crimes it foretells.

Angel reluc­tant­ly agrees to the case, but after find­ing his first lead, a mor­phine-addict­ed doc­tor named Albert Fowler, dead by a self-inflict­ed gun­shot wound to the head he tells Cyphre he’s done. Rourke’s wise-crack­ing per­for­mance is as com­pelling as it is con­vinc­ing, deeply root­ed as it is in the hard­boiled noir detec­tive trope.

It’s hard to blame him for want­i­ng out after a ​“stiff” shows up with­in days of his inves­ti­ga­tion, but Cyphre isn’t ready to loosen his stran­gle­hold on Angel after such a short dal­liance with death. He offers him $5000 and Angel agrees to car­ry on. What fol­lows is a nar­ra­tive of for­tune tellers, blues gui­tarists, cult sac­ri­fice and a schiz­o­phrenic dis­so­lu­tion of iden­ti­ty all glued togeth­er by a seem­ing­ly end­less sup­ply of blood.

Since its orig­i­nal release 30 years ago Angel Heart has found a loy­al cult fol­low­ing, and it’s not hard to see why – it is hard not to be drawn to a film that places the dev­il and the detec­tive in such close prox­im­i­ty. Rourke’s per­for­mance is large­ly respon­si­ble for the film’s endur­ing appeal, and while De Niro’s role is not one of his most mem­o­rable, Lisa Bonet enrich­es the film’s occult and spir­i­tu­al themes with a sen­su­ous and scary turn as Voodoo priest­ess Epiphany Proudfoot.

A cult film in every sense of the word, Angel Heart man­ages to take many of the well-worn tropes of film noir and imbue them with the con­cen­tric hor­ror of Dante’s Infer­no. It seemed implau­si­ble in 1987, and per­haps even more so now, that such a genre mash-up could be so grim­ly spell­bind­ing. Har­ry Angel’s dark jour­ney through the past evils of man is a case ready to be picked up again. A word of cau­tion though: you may well return from it a dif­fer­ent per­son altogether.