If the label cult writer was ever crafted for anyone, many would argue it fits Kenneth Anger with a striking precision. He carried a life in the shadows of cinema, a figure whose work remained largely outside the mainstream yet cast a long shadow across generations of filmmakers. Anger’s influence is visible in the audacious visions of John Waters and the dreamlike atmospheres of David Lynch. Two volumes of Hollywood Babylon, often described as a provocative compendium of cinema lore, emerged after a quiet stretch of years and helped anchor the idea of cinema’s most tantalizing secrets in the popular imagination. In recent years, these volumes have also informed contemporary filmmakers, including Damien Chazelle in his exploration of Hollywood’s mythic and mythologized past. The conversation around Anger’s legacy continues to resonate with a blend of reverence, controversy, and perennial curiosity [Citation: Film History Archive].
Kenneth Anger, born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer in the late 1920s on the sunny streets of Santa Monica, California, built a compact but influential filmography centered on short works. His most noted piece, Fireworks, appeared early in his career and marked a turning point that drew legal scrutiny and obscenity challenges, underscoring how provocative art can provoke national conversations about censorship, youth, and freedom of expression. Anger himself once reflected on youth and national symbols, noting how certain moments of adolescence and national holidays felt charged with meaning beyond their surface appearance. This tension between personal expression and public propriety became a through line in his career, shaping how audiences and peers perceived his provocative stance on art and sexuality [Citation: Film History Archive].
Across his body of work, themes of homoeroticism, fetishism, surrealism, and occult influences recur with a singular insistence. Anger drew inspiration from esoteric traditions and figures who explored the boundaries of ritual and symbol, all while crafting images that felt as if they were pulled from dream and nightmare alike. One title in particular, Scorpio Rising, became almost a shorthand for Anger’s aesthetic: a fusion of biker subculture with a mythic intensity that unsettled conventional expectations and invited audiences to read desire, rebellion, and ritual into the frames. Readings of his films often reveal multiple layers of meaning, from overt visual provocations to subtle references that invite a deeper, almost scholarly, immersion in the symbolism and atmosphere he cultivated [Citation: Film History Archive].
The publishing history of Hollywood Babylon began in France at the dawn of the late 1950s and found its way to American audiences a few years later, where it stirred significant controversy and, for a time, faced bans. The work was dismissed by some as sensational and unchecked by stringent standards of truth, yet its impact on the cultural imagination is hard to deny. It collated anecdotes and interpretations about Hollywood’s darker corridors, inviting readers to question the surface glamour and to consider how myth, rumor, and documented fact intersect in the story of cinema. The book’s reputation, mixed as it was, nevertheless influenced filmmakers who mined its spirit of rumor and revelation for their own explorations of Hollywood’s hidden histories. The conversations sparked by Hollywood Babylon intersected with the broader public’s fascination with how film history is shaped, contested, and remembered, a debate that remains live in critical circles today [Citation: Film History Archive].