CINEMA: evil demiurges in Hollywood films at the threshold of the twenty-first century

In the last 30 years, Hollywood has released many works that incorporated themes and ideas most typically linked with ancient Gnosticism (Wilson 2006). In this chapter, I shall take a closer look at the rulers of the illusory worlds that were depicted in the following films: Dark City (1998), The Matrix trilogy (1998–2003), and The Truman Show (1998). All of them reflect basic characteristics of a malevolent and malign world-creator that was presented especially in Sethian (Schenke 1974) or classical Gnostic texts (Layton 1995; Brakke 2010).