I recently read about a German horror film titled Mark of the Devil directed by Michael Armstrong. It's in the third section of video nasties as of this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_nasty and it certainly caught my attention because the title made me think of Pulp. If this film did inspire at least the song's title (I haven't seen the film so I have no clue about its contents in relation to the lyrics) then Jarvis Cocker or a member of Pulp must've seen it.

Here's a forum in which people talk about Studio 5,6,7 (The Wicker, also known by many names) a Sheffield cinema which notoriously screened many X-rated films, and Jarvis Cocker certainly lived near in the early 1980s - in interviews he has talked about living close to a cinema that he recalls screening porno films. The post is interesting: https://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/topic/208-studio-567-cinema-sheffield/#comments

Apparently this cinema screened The Beast which Jarvis Cocker has watched, describing the experience in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFTmvpMdtQI), only suggesting that he attended this particular cinema because where else would you see this? If this cinema showed seedy films and even something like Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (which I haven't seen but sounds like it has the content of typical old video nasties) then surely it would've shown Mark of the Devil, while being section 3 wasn't a proper video nasty but very close. Perhaps Jarvis Cocker saw it and it inspired the song.

The interview about The Beast has some nudity and is age restricted, so if you don't want to watch it I'll quote it:

"It was a proper seedy x-rated cinema place. Seats all had suspect stains on 'em. It was The Beast. It was a very good start to the film; you hear all these kinds of animal noises and the screen's blank for a certain time, and then suddenly you see a horses phallus being inserted into a lady horse. It's set in this kind of country house and a bride has been found for this bloke who's kind of got something a bit wrong with him, and there's this legend of this beast that used to hang around the castle and stuff. I think it ends up that he is actually the kind of offspring of when the beast made love to the shepherdess which is kind of seen in a flashback. It was the first time I'd really had the chance to study a woman's breasts in motion, seeing how they react to gravity in real time," mind you he was 24 at this point but anyway, "you see that most of the budget of the film had gone on this penis that this beast had, which was very realistic."

-- Edited by MrOceanRain on Monday 9th of August 2021 03:20:19 AM