The 1987 horror film Angel Heart takes viewers to post-World War II New Orleans, Louisiana and the swampy countryside around it where the culture of voodoo thrives.  The story features a New York City private detective who is hired by a mysterious eccentric named Louis Cyphre to investigate the disappearance of a crooner who owes him a debt. The detective Harry Angel, played by Mickey Rourke, must leave his familiar territory in the big city and travel south to find the elusive singer. While there, he encounters a culture that is very unfamiliar to him, and he also meets beautiful young woman who may hold some of the keys to the case. The story in Angel Heart, which was co-written by a New Yorker and a Brit, relies heavily on commonly held beliefs about Louisiana and its voodoo culture. 

As soon as he arrives in Louisiana, Harry Angel knows that he is out of his element. We find out quickly, through running joke in the film, that Harry has “a thing about chickens,” which are often running free around people’s yards. These creatures also come up when he is faced with a chicken foot in an altercation and when he see Epiphany Proudfoot killing one to drench herself in its blood during a ritual. Likewise, Harry seems clueless about the discretion involved in Southerners’ handling of open secrets, those things that everyone knows but no one discusses. He goes snooping around, asking questions, intimating minor facts that he knows, and generally pissing people off with his nosy antics. Granted, this is his job, but it doesn’t bode well in a region that is already known for its wary attitude toward outsiders. It even incites the attention of two swarthy police detectives who remark upon the fact that dead bodies seem to appear in Harry’s wake, something he tries to shrug off by choosing to believe that whoever he is looking for is the real killer.

More than a dozen years before American movie audiences saw the two-in-one-identity trope in 1999’s Fight Club then again in 2001’s Mulholland Drive, there was Harry Angel, a Brooklyn-based private detective whose connections to the man he is trying to find are not what he expects. Angel finds out the hard way that he isn’t actually looking for Johnny Favorite— he is Johnny Favorite. This trick ending garnered the film some measure of attention, but in its day, Angel Heart was perhaps most famous for a graphic sex scene that had then-Cosby Show daughter Lisa Bonet and bad-boy actor Mickey Rourke rolling naked in pools of bloody rain. The otherwise wholesome actress may well have been cast in the role because of her light skin; her character was the love child of Johnny Favorite, who was white, and a voodoo priestess, who was black. At its core, Angel Heart is either a horror movie or a thriller, and the seedy black-magic underbelly of mid-1950s New Orleans and its surrounding bayous provide the necessary locale.